Angola Bound

Versione cantata dai Neville Brothers
(Aaron Neville, Charles Neville) - 1991

ANGOLA BOUND - Traditional prison song.
Note di Azizi Powell.

Here are my notes/explanations about some words in the song "Angola Bound": 

"Oh so many mornings by the ding dong ding" = "ding dong ding" imitates the sound a ticking clock makes [which doesn't mean he has a clock there, He remembers that sound; "ding dong day" is or was a commonly said phrase.]

"Oh I go to the mess hall, buddy, I get the same old thing" = The mess hall means the place where people eat, the cafeteria. Soldiers also call where they eat the mess hall. He's saying that it's always the same food.

"Boss Charlie" and "Captain" are general referents for the prison guards.
 
"Oh Lord, I’m comin with the plow get gone
So many years without water it just rollin hard"
= If this transcription is correct, I believe it means that he's coming as soon as he can get the plow to move, but the ground is so hard because of the lack or water, that it's hard to move the plow.

"Give my woman so many more dollars she broke an apron string" = When he wasn't in prison he gave his woman so much money which she'd put in a pocket of her apron that it broke her  apron strings.

 "Christmas for last she never sent me a doggone thing" = Last Christmas she didn't give him anything at all

"People on this little bitty mountain hollerin “Gee wah gee” = Some of the prisoners were singing "Gee Wah Gee" [Those lyrics remind me of "Do Wah Ditty" or some other happy song.]

"All these drivers down on these boulders tryin to kill poor me" = "The drivers" is probably another name for the guards. This might refer to a division in which some prisoners on the small mountains had it better than the prisoners like him who were down in the boulders. My interpretation is that the prisoners down on the boulders were worked harder.

"Molly and Sally lay sittin in the shade...
Wonderin how many days I’ve made" .
Molly and Sally are two female names. One of them could have been his woman. The two women are sitting outside and wondering how much time he has been in prison.

"Oh well I come to Angola and I hit that big long line"= The new prisoners were lined up before they were taken to their cells. 

   "You got one year ,son, I got A.B.C." = A.B.C. =Angola Bound Convict

Note segnalate da Azizi Powell da un commento al video dei "Neville Brothers "

Here's a comment about Angola prison from the discussion thread of this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAnaznZG6W0
josephledux8598, 2022


Well now, I'm an ex-convict and veteran of ten years spent in maximum-security Louisiana prisons and let me tell you, this song is as real as it gets.
 
A few minor details:
 
"You been a long time coming but you're welcome home...."  
This is the Louisiana traditional gut-punch greeting old convicts give to the new guys who just got off the bus:  "Welcome home."  Believe me, the first time you hear that, it crushes you.
 
"Eat my breakfast by the light of the moon." 
When you're on a field crew, whether picking cotton or hoeing rows of purple-hull peas or cutting sugar cane, your long, exhausting day begins at around four thirty AM and yes, even by the time you've finished breakfast it's still dark outside.  Oddly similar to Army basic training in that respect.  If Army basic lasted twenty or thirty years.
 
"Got a mighty long time, lord knows I'll never be free."
and
"...my boys they got a hundred, I got ninety-nine." 
Louisiana has the longest, harshest sentences for crimes of any state in the nation.  Specifically, this sentence refers to armed robbery, which carries up to ninety-nine years.  If it's a first offense.  (Much) longer for subsequent offenses.  And a life sentence means exactly that, natural life.  Meaning the only way you get out is in a coffin.  Parole?  Not in this life.  Maybe in the next.
 
"Angola bound..." 
Angola is the largest, by land area, maximum-security prison in the country.  For many years it was the only maximum-security prison in the state though now there are some others.  Three quarters of the inmates at Angola are serving natural life sentences and will die there.  In my experience inmates usually refer to it as "the River" or "on the River" as it is adjacent to the Mississippi.  It was a slave plantation in history, and it's still very much a plantation in modern times with the same backbreaking labor.  The only real difference is that the guards and crew pushers wear uniforms now and carry modern semiautomatic rifles, and the slaves are a mix of black and white people now.  Aside from those differences it would be difficult to tell a black and white picture of a modern Angola field crew from a picture taken in 1859.
 
"Shaggy hounds...." 
If you run, sooner or later that sound you hear will be the baying of a team of bloodhounds.  They don't just sniff and howl.  When they catch you they're going to eat your ass up.  The irony is that the ones handling the dogs will be inmates, just like you.  Followed by guards with rifles on horseback.  The only officials in Louisiana that can legally shoot an unarmed felon to prevent escape are prison guards and believe me, they have no reluctance to opening up on you.  The only thing in your favor is that most of them can't shoot worth shit so if they hit you it will probably be by accident.   An inmate escaped from a compound where I was locked up, actually made it over the fence but got hung up dangling by his skin and clothes from the razor wire.  The guard in the tower emptied an entire thirty-round magazine from a Ruger Mini-14 at him from less than forty yards and literally shot the windows out of every employee car in the parking lot.  The inmate was completely untouched.
 
Speaking of Angola, the plantation is so huge that even if you break away from a field crew or a secure compound you could run for a flat hour or two in any direction and never make it off the grounds.  Rather than a single prison it should be looked at as multiple prisons all sharing the same reservation.  That I'm aware of there has never been a successful escape from Angola, meaning one in which the inmate made it for more than a few hours before getting picked up again.  Or killed.  Or dying from exposure in the swamp in the ghastly heat.
 
No, despite this song having first come out on an Aaron Neville solo album, Aaron never did time in Angola.  But his brother Charles did.  He spent five years at Angola for the heinous offense of simple drug possession.  Which is every bit as unfair and outrageous as it sounds.  This was and still is typical for Louisiana.  If he'd been white and could afford a real lawyer he'd almost certainly have gotten probation.  "Angola Bound" is actually an elaboration of a traditional prison song Charles learned at Angola while he was there, and Charles is almost certainly the source of all the genuine details spelled out so casually in the lyrics of the song.  Not to imply there's anything inauthentic about Aaron singing the song.  He did do some time in the Orleans Parish Prison.  Despite Angola being known in those days as "Bloody Angola," the most dangerous prison in the country, Orleans Parish Prison --  roughly analogous to a county jail in other states  --  was even more deadly."

*****

The comment about "shaggy hounds" corrects the wrong transcription that I've found in two lyric transcriptions of that video's version of that song : "If it wasn't for the captain, oh Lord, I'm shaggin' house" ( Azizi Powell )