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like with Frafra from Ghana, big country, it's, you know, beginning to get attention with Afro
beats and other music coming from Western Africa. But the Frafra language is spoken and
comprehended by a very small percentage. I believe it's two or three per cent of the people in

Ghana and most of the people in the north, which is a very different world, rural world, from the
city and urban life down in the capital and elsewhere.
And that's the divide that you find pretty much
everywhere in the world, whether it's America, whether
it's England, you know, it can be anywhere, is this divide
between the rural and urban life and in the countries
that are the most impoverished, it's even more severe.
So people that are in a country that might be known for
struggling economically, obviously there's a whole
range of experiences. There's the 1% there too. They're
the people that are maybe even benefiting from that
poverty to this day. Meanwhile, you have groups like
the Malawi Mouse Boys that we've worked with since
2011, who are really, really, really at the bottom of even
that equation. Living without running water and
without electricity and struggling to feed their families,
on-goingly, despite the fact of having some success internationally.

BiTS: Understood. Let's talk about what my purpose in calling you is, which is the visit that you
recently made to Parchman Farm in Mississippi and the fabulous, I think absolutely fabulous,
record that you have produced as a result of that. Tell me how you got interested in doing that.

IB: Well, you know, the incarceration rates globally are staggering. The United States now is
number one in the world. Mississippi is number two in the United States itself, the incarceration
rate, despite being a relatively small place population-wise and, you know, there's a horrific

history there. I mean, some people are aware of some of the musical history, but there's been a
history of abuses right up to the modern day
and a lot of those have now been corrected
Jay-Z
thanks to Rock Nation and Jay-Z advocating
and filing civil lawsuits on behalf of the
prisoners because the conditions were quite
bad. I mean, you know, rats running around
and infestations of fleas in beds and bed bugs
and food with maggots in it, that sort of thing,
broken toilets. And so it just seemed that
there must be voices there that would desire
to be heard and that need to be heard. And it
took three years of bureaucratic finagling,
largely because of COVID. But in that time, a new administration came in that was more
supportive of the idea because, at first, they were quite fearful because they'd had a lot of negative
press as of late. But the new administration ultimately welcomed it, thanks largely to the
chaplains. And I was able to go there last minute. I mean, I was in the United States. I don't live
in the United States anymore, and I was able to take two flights overnight and drive two hours

and go there for the Sunday morning service and not knowing what I would find and what
occurred, as it occurs in so many cases, was beyond any expectation just by taking the leap of
faith. The reward, you know, musically is almost always greater than I could even imagine.