Eight to sixteen years—it didn’t seem real to me. So I tried to make the best of things, to make some kind of life. It was like my life outside prison had never existed. Honey and them had moved to New York. Aunt Minnie wrote to me from Augusta a few times, and my father came to see me once, but other than that, nobody ever came to visit me. Come Sundays, it seemed like I was the only boy in the place without some kind of visitor—family, girlfriends, running buddies, somebody. Maybe that’s why some of the people like Captain Avery and Mr. Matthews were so good to me.
I also think they were good to me because I was different. I was good and always had a smile. No matter what happened, I never got mad at the people who ran the place. I wasn’t going to be wrong and mad, too. You do something wrong, why you going to be mad at somebody when you’re already wrong? That’s stupid. I was good and I maintained my integrity. That’s what got me through—that and music.
I hadn’t been there but a couple of months before I formed a gospel quartet with Johnny Terry, a fellow called Shag, and another called Hucklebuck. Singing gospel is a way to help your soul and be content. Gospel gives you a form of contentment. I’m glad I’m in tune with God because that’s the only thing that can bail out the Afro-American or any minority that doesn’t have an education. The man has him tricked in everything else, and he cannot get out of that.
I sang a lot of gospel in prison. Gospel is contentment because it’s spirit, and you feel that spirit when you sing it. It’s the same spirit I feel when I’m on stage today. I feel it when I sing. Period. I make people happy, and they feel it.
Singing gospel’s a good way to learn about music in general. There’s a format for gospel; you learn the different parts, and then you start putting them together: first tenor, second tenor, baritone, bass. Instrumental music’s put together the same way. That’s how I knew the chords before I ever got to the piano. I had sung so much gospel with Big Junior and them in Augusta that all I had to do was to go to the piano and pick out the chords.
The other fellas in prison didn’t really know too much about music, but after I taught them how to do all the parts, we got real good. We got so good that one day a guard took us to sing for the free people in the hospital. We started singing and we sang so pretty that the people started crying. I was singing “Our Father.” And then the tears started running down my cheeks.
Meantime, the guard wandered away, and we didn’t see him anymore. I was still pretty new at the prison then, and they didn’t know if I’d run away or not. We kept singing, kept crying. As time went by, the guard forgot about us and went off duty. Mr. Matthews started wondering where we were. Nobody knew—none of the guards and none of the staff. Finally, one of the fellas told him we were singing at the hospital. He ran over and charged down the hall, yelling, “Where are they? Where are they?” He stumbled into a roomful of people, some of ’em singing, some of ’em listening, and all of ’em crying. He took a minute to get himself together, then he said, real low and gruff, “Come on.” He turned and walked out of there real fast, us marching behind him. He was mad, but he was glad, too, that we hadn’t run away. I wouldn’t have let anybody run, and if anybody had run, I probably would have run and caught him. After that he trusted me completely.
I wasn’t satisfied just singing, though. I wanted to have a band like the Cremona Trio. The only problem was we didn’t have any instruments. I remembered the homemade instruments the jug and washboard bands had in the minstrel shows, and I didn’t see why we couldn’t make some. We started with a comb and some paper—Hucklebuck played that—then I got some empty fifty-pound lard cans from the kitchen and made a drum set from them. A washtub and a broomstick made a washtub bass, and I made sort of a mandolin out of a wooden box. I taught myself to play the bass, and in different keys, too. Somehow I knew where they were. You might think we would have sounded terrible with those knocked-together instruments, but when you do it right and you sing your parts correctly, it sounds real good. The jug bands on the minstrel shows sounded fine, otherwise they wouldn’t have been on there.
There was a piano in the gym, and I was all the time asking to play it; after about six months they gave in. I don’t know if they thought I couldn’t play it or what; anyway, I walked over to it and ripped into “Caldonia.” In about a second everybody was jumping up and dancing. Talk about jailhouse rock—those cats were boogying. Whenever we played basketball after that, during halftime I played the piano and sang. At night my little band entertained in the dormitory, and we still sang a lot of gospel, too.
Before too long the other fellas started calling me Music Box. Sooner or later most everybody got a nickname that stuck. You got so used to calling people by their nicknames that you forgot their real names. Hucklebuck’s real name was Davis, I think, but I can’t remember Shag’s at all. They were good boys, though. But it’s funny, as good as I knew them, I don’t know their names. And they’re both dead now.
Shag was killed in the state prison at Reidsville. They killed that boy for nothing. He was originally sent to Rome because of something that happened in Atlanta. He was in a place playing a record on a jukebox when a white fella came up and pulled the plug for no reason. They got into a fight, and Shag wound up getting sent to GJTI. While he was there, a guard got down on him for some reason or another. So one night the guard came into the dormitory to teach him a lesson—he beat the boy with a chain. Then he went back to the warden and lied, saying the boy had beat him up. So Shag got sent to the state prison. And a guard down there was beating him one day, and Shag held up his hands to protect himself and they shot him dead for holding up his hands. At Reidsville Penitentiary, Tattnall County, in the state of Georgia.
Sometime in 1951, after I had been at Rome for about two years, they moved the prison to a place near Toccoa, Georgia. Mr. Matthews and most of the guards went, too. Toccoa was a little bitty town clear on the other side of the state, right near the South Carolina border in the Appalachian foothills. An old paratrooper camp had been turned into a prison. The Flying Tigers, who jumped in China, had trained there, but now the place had twelve or thirteen dilapidated cement block buildings. Except for the fact that the buildings were so run-down and that they had changed the name to Boys Industrial Institute, it was pretty much like Rome. We slept in the old barracks, and there were fences with barbed wire on top to keep us in.
Toccoa was a little more exciting at first because we were constantly finding old grenades buried on the old practice ranges. We did everything we could to make ’em explode. Never succeeded. We found a lot of ammunition, too, rounds that hadn’t been fired.
As soon as we found the bullets, we started making zip guns. You made them with lead pipes. You had to find a pipe that the bullet would fit in but that the casing wouldn’t. As soon as you found that, you had a gun. You’d make a hammer out of a spoon or something and then make a wooden handle with a socket for it. You put the spoon handle down in there and attach it to a nail for it to revolve on. You wind rubber around it, put the rubber around the nail and pull it tight. You pull the hammer back and turn it loose, and it fires.
I made two, a singlebarrel and a doublebarrel. I fired ’em a thousand times. Never shot anybody, though, not like some of the cats did. I was just having fun—and making sure they worked just in case I did need ’em. The guards never did catch me; I guess they thought somebody had firecrackers or something.
At Toccoa I wound up being a trusty. I even helped bring back escapees. When boys ran away, me and Johnny Terry and one or two other boys would go out with the guards to look for them. There were only a few routes an escapee could take—a couple of roads and the railroad tracks—or he could hide in the woods. Lots of nights I stayed out in the woods all night waiting for the boy to come by. When he did I talked to him and got him to come back with me. By that time he’d usually had enough of wandering around in the woods, and he was ready to go back anyway. See, something would get in a person’s mind when he’d run away. Most of them didn’t have anywhere to run to, and even when they did, it didn’t take any time for them to be picked up in their hometowns, and then they’d be in worse trouble.
At Toccoa I still played all the sports I could and kept on playing music. A lot of times, we’d go into town and play the high school in whatever sport was in season. We were all muscular and strong from the work we did, and we really beat ’em playing football. One time we beat ’em so bad that their coaches played the next time. We almost beat ’em again, except they had help from the referees.
Once, after we’d played ’em in basketball, I sat down and played the piano in their gym. When I got through, one of the town boys said, “We got a boy here who’s always been the best around on keyboards, but he better look out now.”
“Where is he?” I said.
“He’s gone to Atlanta with the glee club.”
“What’s his name?” I said.
“Name’s Bobby Byrd.”
“Well, you tell him what you heard tonight.”
Sometimes the town kids came out to the prison and hung around the fence to gawk at us jailbirds. It was just a friendly curiosity, and we went over to the fence and talked to ’em if we could. One day one of the fellas told me there were some cats out by the fence talking about music. I went over to check it out. One of ’em was a tall, thin cat, said he had a gospel group. I said I did, too. We talked about gospel, rhythm and blues, and pop. He had a lot of good things to say, and I liked him right off. When he told me he played keyboards, I said, “Say, what’s your name?”
“Byrd,” he said.
“I’ve heard about you,” I said.
“You the one they call Music Box?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Then I’ve heard about you, too.”
It was a long time before I saw him again. We were playing the Toccoa city team in baseball at the Toccoa Recreation Center. First time up I singled. On the next pitch I took off to steal second. When I slid in, I knocked the second baseman flat. It was Byrd.
“Hey, it’s you,” he said. He was laughing. “They gonna keep you locked up forever?”
“It looks like it,” I said. I was laughing, too. Then for some reason I got serious, maybe because I knew I was talking to another musician. “Byrd, I’m going to get out,” I said, “some kind of way.”
I had just turned nineteen and had been thinking that all the years I should have been in high school I had spent in prison instead, and I had a lot more years to go. It just didn’t make any sense to me to be in there any longer, so one night, late, I wrote a letter to the parole board. I told them that I was like any other person, all I wanted was a chance. I explained that I was poor and didn’t have anybody to help me get out and that I got in there in the first place trying to get clothes for school. I wrote: I know 1 don’t have any education but I can sing, and I want to get out and sing for the Lord.
I didn’t know if the letter would do any good, but I sent it off anyway. Then one day a man from the parole board came out to talk to me. “You want to get out?” he said.
“Yessir,” I said.
“What do you think you’re going to do on the outside?”
“Sing gospel,” I said.
I tried to explain to him about the music. He was real polite, listening to everything I had to say, but I could see he didn’t think singing would be enough to get me by. By the time he left, I was more discouraged than ever.
The next day one of the guards told me Mr. Matthews wanted to see me in a big way. When I went in I could see he looked happy but he looked worried too. He told me he’d seen my letter and was impressed with it, and so was the parole board. “Music Box,” he said, “you can walk out of here tomorrow if you can get a job.”
I couldn’t believe it. In my mind I was already telling the fellas, already saying good-bye to ’em.
“I can get a job,” I said. “All I did in Augusta was work. A lot of people there would hire me.”
He looked downhearted. He didn’t want to tell me what was coming next.
“Music Box,” he said, “you can’t go back to Augusta.”
“Sir?”
“I’ve been on the phone with Solicitor Haines. He’ll agree to your parole only on condition that you not be allowed to enter Richmond County.”
“But that’s where my father is,” I said. “And my Aunt Minnie.”
“I’m sorry, Music Box,” he said. “It’s not up to me.”
“Yessir.”
“You’ve got to get a job in Toccoa.”
“Yessir.”
When I left his office I was happy and sad at the same time.
At least there was a chance I’d get out, but I couldn’t go back home, even to visit, and I sure didn’t know where I was going to get a job in Toccoa, or how.
The next Saturday I was out in a field somewhere loading rocks on a truck, and a man who owned a Toccoa automobile dealership saw me working. I don’t even know why he was out there that day. He watched me working hard for a while, then came over and said, “Boy, what would it take to get you out of prison?”
“All I need is a job, sir,” I said.
“Well, I’ll give you a job,” he said.
Mr. Matthews let me out that day—June 14, 1952. It was exactly three years and one day since I’d been convicted. I walked to town.