"The Mistakes of Yesterday, the Hopes of Tomorrow: The Story of the Prisonaires” by John Dougan details how in 1953, five African-American men boarded a van to travel 200-miles from Nashville to Memphis for a daylong recording session at Sun Studios. The resulting “Just Walkin’ in the Rain” became Sun Records’ biggest pre-Elvis Presley song--and the group’s only hit.
John Dougan, author of "The Mistakes of Yesterday, the Hopes of Tomorrow."
John M. Dougan contends there needs to better understanding that creativity can exist anywhere and in anyone.
“We, as a culture, should be sensitive to that,” says the author of a new book on a vocal quintet who honed their skills while inmates at the Tennessee State Penitentiary. “Also, we should understand that meaning is a fluid rather than fixed concept and that life in prison can be a brutal, dehumanizing existence and that any art can emerge from that reality is remarkable.”
Dougan, a Westfield State College alumnus, is the author of “The Mistakes of Yesterday, the Hopes of Tomorrow: The Story of the Prisonaires” about a group of inmates in pre-civil rights Tennessee that created a hit recording.
It details how in 1953, five African American men boarded a van to travel 200-miles from Nashville to Memphis for a daylong recording session at Sun Studios. The resulting “Just Walkin’ in the Rain” became Sun Records’ biggest pre-Elvis Presley song--and the group’s only hit.
“With sophistication and nuance, Dougan demonstrates that the Prisonaires’ story is also the story of the American racial obsession, of the judicial system, of the architecture of the prison itself,” said Rachel Rubin, coeditor of “American Popular Music: New Approaches to the Twentieth Century.”
Dougan said he does not believe that songs always have a single, fixed meaning. “Popular music, irrespective of genre, is open to a multitude of interpretations that generally reflect the context in which the song was created and the ways that audiences reinterpret a song’s meaning based on their own particular lived experiences,” he said, adding that not all interpretations are sound and/or logical. “In the case of the Prisonaires, and more specifically the song ‘Just Walkin’ in the Rain,’ the song becomes expressive of the lives of these African American inmates (specifically the song’s co-writer and lead singer Johnny Bragg) and the reality that they were inmates and lived difficult, hardscrabble lives. It provides listeners with another analytical entry point that expands the song’s potential meanings.”
Rubin was familiar with an essay Dougan published on the group in the academic journal “American Music” in 2000 and thought it was a fit for the American Popular Music series. “Originally it was my master’s thesis and, even then, I thought it would make a good, albeit short, book, primarily because the story is so compelling,” Dougan said.
However, he put it aside for a couple of years to work on his other book, “The Who Sell Out” which was published in 2006.
University of Massachusetts Press published “The Mistakes of Yesterday, the Hopes of Tomorrow: The Story of the Prisonaires” in November.
Dougan was born in Worcester in 1954 and raised in Brookfield. He graduated from Tantasqua Regional High School in Fiskdale then earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Westfield State College. He earned a master’s and a doctorate in American Studies from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.
A former freelance concert reviewer for the Springfield Daily News (he thanks former Republican columnist Tom Shea for getting him started in professional journalism), Dougan worked behind the counter at Belmont Records in Springfield in the late ‘70s before moving to Boston in 1981 and then to Minneapolis in 1987. He established a freelance music writing career that led to writing for “Spin,” “Rolling Stone” and the All Music Guide series of books and website. He left music journalism for academia in the mid-‘90s and was hired at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro in 2001 where he is professor of music business and popular music studies in the department of recording industry.
"The Mistakes of Yesterday, the Hopes of Tomorrow" by John Dougan
“Nashville is the epicenter of the American musical universe,” he contended. “Clearly it’s still dominated by country music--helped along by the current nighttime soap ‘Nashville,’ but over the past decade, you’ve had rock performers like Jack White not just move here, but establish a business presence here with his Third Man Records label and store.”
Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney (the Black Keys) live there, and Auerbach has opened a studio; performers like Elvis Costello and Robert Plant are there regularly, Richard Thompson recorded his new LP there, and “we can claim numerous well-known singer-songwriters, a list that includes John Hiatt and John Prine,” Dougan said. “It’s a far more musically diverse city than most people realize, and I would argue--and I do in my book--that Nashville’s musical history has always been made up of a multitude of different musical genres that include jazz, R&B, string-band music and African American scared music.”
According to Dougan, the rock 'n' roll and pop music business can be an inhospitable, stressful place for artists, but in the digital era, they have more control over the music they make, market and sell. “The old record label production and distribution model is gone,” he said. “And although consumers are downloading music more than they are buying physical product, artists can do more direct-to-fan marketing via social media and, in the case of emerging artists, build a fan base that’s not wedded to the quick fix of singing/talent shows--which are not about establishing careers and becoming an artist as much as they are being a star for about 15 minutes.”
Dougan is optimistic about the future of the music business as artists have more autonomy in the making and marketing of music.
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“The Mistakes of Yesterday, the Hopes of Tomorrow: The Story of the Prisonaires,” by John Dougan sells for $22.95 in paperback with 136 pages.
For more information, visit www.umass.edu/umpress.