Like country songs, blues songs never get any sadder than they do in prison. And there is no harder time done than that which is done at Angola State Penitentiary. It’s a musical sadness, however, that’s free from sentiment entirely, the straight depiction of hard reality that has always been the blues’ real purpose. These unlucky 13 songs were recorded at the prison itself by Dr. Harry Oster in 1960 (you can hear other inmates coughing in the background of some of these cuts), and while it doesn’t succeed quite as well as the legendary Alan Lomax field recordings, either as musical tradition or as cultural study, it certainly succeeds in training an eye on the unfortunate and/or brutal men who inhabit the facility.

Three names dominate these sessions: Hogman Maxey, Guitar Welch, and Otis Webster. Of the three, only Webster appears to have done any outside recording on his own, appearing on a Chicago compilation from 1980. Aside from that, these songs represent their only recorded output. It’s not exactly a crime that these country-blues songs haven’t been better appreciated by the general public; they’re fairly generic, both in composition and delivery. Worst of all, there are no songs from the lone genuine discovery of the Angola sessions, Robert Pete Williams.

That said, there’s plenty here for the plainspoken county-blues enthusiast. The tunes are as stark as the titles: Otis Webster alone delivers headlines like “Ball And Chain For Me” and “Standing At The Greyhound Bus Station.” Odd man out is the closer, the Cool Cats’ “Goin’ Home To My Old Used To Be,” which is a fully electric band performance of a rather limp R&B stroll. But what’s most amazing about these songs—and perhaps most worthwhile—is the lack of misery these men portray in their stories. To them, their fate seems neither surprising nor particularly unique, and for you, the listener, that fact may evoke the saddest emotions of all.