Soul Incarcerated – Details, episodes & analysis

The Edge of Daybreak was a prison soul ensemble who recorded their first and only album in 1979 when they were incarcerated as young men. In this podcast series, the group’s surviving members try to mount their comeback. Soul Incarcerated tracks their struggles and triumphs along the way. It’s a It’s a story about the liberating power of music, the American justice system, and ultimately…second chances.  

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Harry “Cupcake” Coleman was 29 years old and staring down a 50-year sentence at the
Powhatan Correctional Center, the Virginia penitentiary farm just 30 miles west of Richmond. Cupcake was a star vocalist in the prison’s soul ensemble, Edge of Daybreak. On Sept. 14, 1979, she and her bandmates rose to an incredible challenge: they recorded an eight-song LP called Eyes of Love, live from the prison visiting room, in only five hours.

Decades later, music and culture writer Jamie Pietras tracks down Cupcake and her former bandmates, the guitarist Neal Cade and drummer Jamal Jaha Nubi, to find out how they recorded one of the most coveted soul albums of their era under such extraordinary circumstances. Out of prison and in their seventies, the former bandmates feel like they still have something to prove - and they want Jamie’s help.

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The Powhatan Correctional Center was a hellish place: overcrowded, underfunded, and known for its rampant violence. So how were Neal, Jamal, and Cupcake able to create and perform such soulful, life-affirming music? As America’s prison population began to skyrocket in the late 1970s, the musicians explain how the prison band room gave them the will to make it through their sentences. This is where Edge of Daybreak is born.

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A legendary LA music producer offers to help the band record their comeback album - but do they still have what it takes, now that they’re being given the chance? The band heads to LA and quickly learns that working with the biggest hit-makers of today feels a whole lot different than when they were just writing for themselves in prison. Creative differences make for an uncertain outcome.

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Life after prison was a mixed bag for the artists who each went their separate way, but Eyes of Love began taking on a life of its own, garnering a mythical status among collectors completely unbeknownst to the band. But that would change when, in 2015, a former bandmate cut a deal to re-release the album, which eventually landed one of their songs in the Oscar-winning film Moonlight. Jamie tracks them down and helps parlay their story into a second crack at the fame that has eluded them for forty years.

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Before they were wards of the state, Neal, Jamal, and Cupcake were twenty-somethings criss-crossing the south in traveling cover bands. That was before felony convictions for armed robbery landed them at Powhatan on extraordinarily long sentences. Having grown up under segregation, they now found themselves in a disproportionately Black national prison population–one that would double in size before the last of them got out.
The prison music program gave them incentive to start writing songs of their own. But where, under such dark circumstances, did they draw inspiration to start putting pen to paper? Jamal reveals some painful family secrets, Neal talks about love lost to prison, and Cupcake talks about love found behind bars.

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Getting together after so many years isn’t without its bumps. After working through a few
personality clashes, the band hits another obstacle–a big one. eeling from a recent breakup and a death in her family, Cupcake finds herself unable to sing lead vocals.
The band manages to knock out their new songs, but none feature the show-stopping vocalist at the forefront. Is this really an Edge of Daybreak album without her?

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The band members get settled back in Virginia and eagerly await the finished new album.
Cupcake, however, isn’t feeling great about how things turned out and asks for another shot in the studio But a week before her scheduled recording, shesuffers another momentous loss. Can Cupcake push through more heartbreak to find her voice at this pivotal moment? And will Edge of Daybreak finally fulfill that elusive thing they’ve been singing about since they were first incarcerated - their destiny?

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