This innovative history explores the rich tradition of music behind bars and shows how policing and prisons have shaped our musical culture from blues to hip-hop.

In American popular music, we often glorify rebellious artists and “outlaws.” But in The Midnight Special, Colin Asher tells a deeper story about the criminal justice system’s impact on our musicians, explored through compelling portraits of five artists whose careers span the twentieth century.

Opening with folk and blues artist Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, who was made to perform wearing prison clothes, Asher traces the intertwined histories of music and incarceration, from Southern prison farms of the Jim Crow era, through the heroin-driven mid-century drug wars that villainized a generation of jazz artists, and to our present era of mass incarceration.

Asher shows how the suggestion of criminality has often benefited white artists, while prosecutions often hurt Black musicians. Comparing the divergent trajectories of jazz pianist Elmo Hope with country singer Johnny Cash, Asher examines how violent and discriminatory policing stifled Hope’s career and led to the creation of his album Sounds from Rikers Island (1963), while forgiveness and lenience brought us Cash’s masterpiece At San Quentin (1969).

With keen musical analysis and sociological insight, The Midnight Special examines key themes in culture and criminal justice, from the movement for prison reform that allowed soul musician Ike White to stage thrilling concerts while locked up and record his album Changin’ Times (1977), to the crushing cultural weight of mass incarceration a generation later. Closing with Tupac Shakur’s Me Against the World (1995) and stories of music in prisons today, The Midnight Special recounts how prisons occasionally incubate talent but more often shorten careers and distort the public’s perception of musicians and their value to society.

An urgent book about the ways music can affirm an individual’s sense of humanity in dehumanizing circumstances, The Midnight Special writes the history of prisons into American music―a story as important as it is overlooked.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 30, 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 336 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1324051396

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1324051398

• Author: Colin Asher 

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by The New York Times

“Daylight Come takes us to places no biography in recent memory has . . . This book fills the heart and mind, and is essential reading for our times.” —Hilton Als

A vibrant, revealing portrait of the "King of Calypso," whose extraordinary performing career and activism helped remake America through the civil rights era and beyond

Even three years after his death, Harry Belafonte is everywhere. You can’t go to a wedding, or to a sports arena, without hearing “Day-O,” “Jump in the Line,” or “Jamaica Farewell.” The Harlem-born son of Caribbean immigrants, Belafonte turned the folk music of the islands into American pop—and shaped the fantasy of Caribbean life that endures as an ideal and as a multibillion-dollar tourist industry. Belafonte released the first million-selling LP in history. He was America’s first Black movie star, the first Black person to produce a prime-time special on network TV, and the first to win an Emmy Award. He was once the highest-paid Black performer of all time, beloved by Black and white fans alike, even under segregation. His artistic career helped create the pop culture of the twentieth century—and his political activism reshaped the course of American history.

In this sparkling new biography, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro brings Belafonte’s personality and music vibrantly to life, following him from rags to riches and from Harlem to Jamaica to the March on Washington. Jelly-Schapiro takes us inside Belafonte’s lifelong brotherhood with Sidney Poitier, his friendship with Fidel Castro, his collaboration with Nelson Mandela, and the sometimes shocking therapeutic relationships his difficult upbringing necessitated. At the heart of the story is Belafonte’s bond with Martin Luther King Jr., whose cause Belafonte would champion for the rest of his life. That commitment to the greater good would sustain him and benefit untold numbers—and would come at a cost.

The indelible story of an American icon—and a provocative study of authenticity, fame, and conviction—Daylight Come is, like Harry Belafonte himself, brimming with style and consequence.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Press

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 4, 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 384 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593652703

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593652701

• Author:  Joshua Jelly-Schapiro