February 11, 2025 • 42 mins
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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Speaker 1 (00:00):
In a and original podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
This episode contains descriptions of violence. Please listen with care.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
You shoot this straight.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
Out all the way on them all the week, unless.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I mean, if I'm gonna say go straight ahead, you see,
yeah straight yeah, Okay. In twenty nineteen, Jamal and I
made the drive from Richmond to Rono together. As it
often does with Jamal, the conversation made its way around
to one of his favorite topics, destiny. He was telling
me why he thought The Edge of Daybreak was predestined,
ordained to come together by some greater force.
Speaker 4 (00:42):
It's amazing that something that get occurred at such an
impressive patient, you know, But like I say, you know,
everything is predestined. Man.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Like I said anything, I.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Don't chock the band's formation or everything they accomplished up
to fate. That doesn't give them enough credit. To me,
the Edge of Daybreak is a testament to the band
member perseverance. That's why I prefer some of Jamal's other
takes on Destiny Tomorrow, like the one he sang about
(01:12):
on the album. Jamal believes in faith that song is
called your Destiny, but he also thinks you have to
work for what you want.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
You said that tomorrow is gonna be a better day.
What do you do to make true what you said?
Wishing and hoping is just not the way.
Speaker 4 (01:28):
Wishing and hoping they'll get you nothing unless you will
make an effort towards making that reality right. Look, how
many people pray, God help me get a job, God
help me paying my bills, get up off their knees,
and don't do nothing on their own to try to
make that reality.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
You might not expect such optimistic lyrics from a guy
who wrote them in prison. They're not sad or self pitying.
Much of the Edge of Daybreak songwriting defies expectations, and
that was a huge, huge part of their appeal.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
They would look for you to do a whole lot
of cran and a whole lot of tear jerking, and
a whole lot of bag and then complaining and pleading.
But none of our songs are like that. We change
people's attitudes and mentality through the music.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
I'm Jamie Petrice. When I was reporting this story, I
worked with Dorian Missic, a DJ and rare record collector,
to really understand why Edge of Daybreaks music resonates so much.
Speaker 4 (02:43):
So.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Dorian and I were talking one day about how the
band members created such exuberant music from such a dark place.
It made him think of something Tupac Shakor said in
nineteen ninety five after serving an eight month prison term.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
I just remember reading or Pack was saying that he
didn't write when he was in jail because he needed
to be free in order to write, and that was
like the first time I'd ever heard anybody say that.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
When Tupac was in prison, he said he'd written just
one song. After his release, he said he wrote a
dozen in a week.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
And like, one of the things too, that really dope
about them is that they sang about love and about
upliftment and things like that when you know, traditionally, if
I'm thinking like hip hop that could be made behind
the bars is going to be very angry, very much
anti establishment, not so much this aspirational stuff. So it's
(03:35):
like they dared to dream. And that's the beauty of
the brothers now, like when you even sit down with
them now, is that they dare to continue to dream.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Jamal and his bandmates were in for decades. That's what
I find so incredible and so difficult about this story.
When I talked to the band members about how they
ended up in prison. I didn't assume that their version
of events would line up with the prosecutors. Even today,
they all contend some amount of innocence. That's not totally unusual,
(04:06):
but regardless of their culpability, what I couldn't wrap my
mind around were their sentences. Ultimately, nobody was killed or
even physically harmed, really, and they were given twenty five
even fifty years behind bars. Why did they end up
with these harsh sentences and how did facing that time
affect their music. Jamal landed at Powatan on counts of
(04:36):
robbery and use of a firearm to commit a felony.
According to Roanoke prosecutors and the judgment issued against him,
Jamal robbed a convenience store with another man in December
nineteen seventy five. An article that ran in the Roanoke
World News states that the two men entered the convenience store,
one of them held the clerk up at gunpoint. They
(05:00):
walked out with five hundred dollars. Later, the clerk identified
twenty five year old Jamal is the one holding the gun.
The Rono County Circuit Court doesn't have transcripts of what
happened at Jamal's trial, but according to Jamal, the clerk
identified him from a mugshot the police provided. He says
(05:21):
another witness also identified his car, but not him at
the scene, Jamal says he wasn't even there. He says
that earlier that night, he was hanging out at his
mom's apartment complex and it lent out his car keys.
Speaker 4 (05:35):
Two guys that I knew they was leaving a house
party asked me could they use my vehicle to go
to the store and get some be and wine. That's
all I'm sure, but put some gas in the car
because it was on very low. I set that for
about two or three hours, at least two howls.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
When the guys came back with the keys, they told
Jamal the car had run out of gas and they
parked it outside a differ for an apartment building. Jamal
says when he went to look for his car the
next morning, it wasn't there.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
When I stepped into detective office, he tells me that
he got a want from me for banishing a foul
and committed to Robert. They killed his Margret's son the night.
I told him he must be out his mind, so
he tried to show the paper inside of my shirt.
Him and I had a little altercation. I stepped out
the door to also stand in the hallway beside my
(06:30):
sister and my son put the hand on the guns,
telling me I'm on the rest for Robert. So my
sister said, they said you robbed the store. I said,
that's what they told me.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Jamal pled not guilty, but was convicted a few months
later in February of nineteen seventy six. This wasn't Jamal's
first defense. When he was eighteen, he'd been convicted along
with some other teenagers, for playing a role in a
string of armed robberies. Jamal tells me today that he
merely knew about the robberies, but didn't actively participate. Investigators
(07:05):
and prosecutors thought otherwise. He ended up serving a year
and a half in prison for his second offense. The
judge didn't hold back. He gave Jamal thirty five years
in the state penitentiary. Jamal still remembers being hauled off
in a car by prison officers.
Speaker 4 (07:23):
To me, that was just like being in Twilight Zone.
You know, the further the cargo around the road. I'm
looking at the real Vera, and everything that I knew
was slowly disappearing, every mile, every mile, every mile. Then
I'm in the area that I know nothing about. Can
you imagine and then being thrown in a cage or oh,
(07:47):
you know, I put it like that. We put in
an arena, a glad of it orreana back in the day. Something.
You know, when you get put in that arena, everything
that's coming that you can kill. You see I'm coming from.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
It's like that.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Neil's case isn't too different from Jamal's. He says it
started with a knock at his door.
Speaker 5 (08:16):
I was at home one day and one early morning,
this boy they called him Keddie, the nickname, he banging
on my door.
Speaker 6 (08:24):
Neil, Neil, Neil, I need you to take me north,
get me out of town.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Neil obliged. He drove Cadi into Virginia.
Speaker 7 (08:32):
He says.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
They ran low on gas and didn't have any money,
so Cadai hatched a plan.
Speaker 5 (08:39):
He said, well, we can rob that motel right there.
I said, no, man, I ain't come up here for that.
Speaker 6 (08:45):
But anyway, where I messed up. I went in the
building with him.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
According to Neil, he followed him into the motel and cada,
I had a gun.
Speaker 6 (08:57):
He pulled a gun out to the people, ah motel horna.
He is a kind of heavily guiy to time.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
The manager was sixty two years old and lived at
the motel with his wife. According to court documents, he
said Neil was the one who went out to the
van and came back with a gun. The two made
off with ninety dollars in a wristwatch. Neil also already
had at least one prior armed robbery conviction, stemming from
two holdups of two separate convenience stores when Neil was
(09:28):
twenty one years old. He pled guilty to both and
says he served two years in prison. A few years
after he got out, he says he spent some time
on a chain gang too, for receiving stolen goods. The goods,
Neil says, were a box of eight track cassettes for
(09:49):
the motel case. Neil pled not guilty. Cat I did too,
But a jury found both of them guilty of robbery
and gave them identical sentences.
Speaker 5 (10:00):
Give us twenty five years a piece, Okay, I couldn't
comprehend it at all.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
In Virginia. Neil would come up for a parole review
after serving out a quarter of his sentence, but parole
was hardly guaranteed. If Neil and Jamal were lucky, they'd
get out in the eighties. If they were unlucky, they'd
spend much of their adult lives in prison. Cupcake ended
(10:30):
up with the longest sentence of them all, and she
didn't have any prior violent convictions. Cupcake was arrested on
a Sunday night in January nineteen seventy six. Police responded
to a call about a robbery in progress at a
nursing home in Richmond that.
Speaker 7 (10:46):
Was supposed to be to look out the guy was
messing with at that time. He was supposed to be
going up in and steal the Color TV.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
But when police arrived, Cupcake was inside too, right in
the thick of it. She and the other man were
arrested and charged with multiple counts of robbery. The nursing
home employees testified at Cupcake's trial. They said she was
the one who threatened them with a straight razor and
told them to empty their wallets. Prosecutors said she took
(11:16):
two dollars from a nurse thirty eight dollars from an orderly,
and that she tried to take money from another employee too.
Witnesses said Cupcake didn't cut anyone with the razor, but
she did scrape some hair off in orderly's chest, a
bizarre detail that made it into local newspaper coverage. Cupcake
denies that she robbed anyone and says she only pulled
(11:39):
the razor out when that orderly grabbed her and threatened her.
Speaker 4 (11:42):
He put his hands on me.
Speaker 7 (11:43):
He hadn't been just putting his hands on me. Allly
do was tell me, look, you go over there. I
had the police come and go over there and stand
up and wait for him.
Speaker 4 (11:49):
I have done that.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
At Cupcake's trial, there was also some specific testimony about race.
As one of the employees testified, Cupcake made a comment
about white people being quote against blacks. The head nurse
said the following. When I'm by myself and I see
black people two men together like that, I am frightened,
(12:14):
and I never was.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Before.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
The judge was incensed. He said he couldn't think of
anything much worse than robbing a nursing home or hospital
where people are ill and old. He concluded that Cupcake
was quote dangerous and had a very terrible hate for
white people. Then he announced his verdict. Cupcake was guilty
(12:38):
on two counts of robbery and one count of attempted robbery.
He gave her fifty years.
Speaker 7 (12:45):
I must say, damn, what the hell?
Speaker 4 (12:48):
Who are you kill?
Speaker 6 (12:49):
You don't nobody I was saying.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Cupcake did have a record, but it was for relatively
minor offenses. She served six months for a couple of
check kiding misdemeanors, and she was charged with a number
of other related offenses. But she'd never been accused of
anything violent, and since those earlier convictions, she was doing
well in many areas of her life, like at work.
(13:12):
She was a dishwasher at a local restaurant, and her
managers told court officials that Cupcake was a hard worker.
She got, along with the other employees, fifty years for
a first robbery offense. Cupcake has a few theories about
what could have contributed to that harsh sentencing.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
At the time.
Speaker 7 (13:34):
It won't Jim Crow, but it must have been Jack Crow.
I don't know who it was, but they put me
into trick Bay.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
She also told me her appearance might have swayed things.
Speaker 7 (13:45):
I was endured when I got a lot, though my
mother had to bring clothes me the way to court
early that morning to the courthouse.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Cupcake sentence is particularly shocked to me. It seemed like
the judge was making an example of her. But even so,
Jamal and Neil got twenty five and thirty five years.
Was everyone getting decades long sentences for armed robbery? I
looked into sentencing stats around that time and the short
answer is no. The average armed robbery sentence in Virginia
(14:22):
in nineteen seventy six was about twelve years. Cupcake sentence
was more than four times that. Sentences were issued by
judges or juries, depending on the case. But there were
no standard sentencing guidelines in Virginia. In city to city,
case to case, people were getting wildly different amounts of
(14:43):
time for identical charges. There was a lot of leeway
to be subjective, to be swayed by the emotional details
of a case or other factors. Nobody was keeping good
track of it then, but there were disparities in how
black and white offenders were being sentenced. And this all
came on the heels of federal tough on crime initiatives
(15:04):
from the sixties, when cities were given federal dollars to
put more police on the streets and make more arrests.
This meant more policing in black neighborhoods, more arrests of
black people, and a prison population that was about to skyrocket.
Between nineteen seventy and nineteen eighty five, the US prison
(15:25):
population more than doubled in size. Cupcake Nil and Jamal
were part of that influx. They were unwitting participants in
the prison boom, an ugly part of American history. Black
Americans paid an unfair burden for the unprecedented growth in
American prisons. They made up less than twelve percent of
the overall population, but nearly half the federal and state
(15:48):
prison population was black. Cupcake Nil and Jamal didn't know
each other before prison. It was those long sentences that
ultimate brought them together at the Powatan Correctional Center in
central Virginia. Powatan is about thirty miles west of Richmond.
The prison closed in twenty fourteen, but the razor wired
(16:12):
brick fortress is still there today. It's surrounded by farmland.
In Powatan's heyday, the whole compound was about twenty six
hundred acres. The main building had their cell blocks and dorms.
That's where everybody started, and then there were some buildings
where security was a little less intense. You could work
your way up to those. Altogether, the facility held about
(16:34):
fifteen hundred incarcerated people. It was one of two area
compounds known collectively as the State Farm.
Speaker 8 (16:41):
When you go across the bridge to the State from
it is this huge complex. I mean, it's just a
huge place. It's almost like looking at the Pentagon.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
Olivia Garland was an assistant warden at Powatan in the
late nineteen seventies.
Speaker 8 (16:57):
It was the maximum security prison. If you were sent
to Powtan, people knew that you had heavy time. The
reality was anyone who came to Powatan had really several
years anywhere from ten to forty to life. Now they
may not have had a violent charge, but the court
system at that time we're giving people heavy charges for
(17:21):
drug use drug distribution.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
The most severe drug sentence I found at Powatan involved
someone who got forty years for sale and possession of
less than nine ounces of pot. He was housed alongside
Neil Jamal and Cupcake, who were in for armed robbery
and they were housed alongside guys that were in for murder.
It all made for a volatile environment.
Speaker 4 (17:46):
You've been kidnapped, carried away, put into a world that
you know nothing about, and you got two childre live
with death.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
At Powatan, men worked out in the fields pig pens.
Powatan provided meat for other Virginia prisons, so incarcerated men
helped butcher animals in the slaughterhouse. Jamal remembers a guard
showing him the cows when he got there.
Speaker 4 (18:14):
You know what he told me? He said, you see
those cows on in that field. I said, yes, sir.
He said, you belong to the state news. He said,
you belong to us. He said you just like one
of them cows in that fee, you know, and they
had almost tags in the hell right, that's all.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
Hell No, he gonna compare me to a camp. You know.
You gotta tell me no one else of That's all
I mean to you.
Speaker 4 (18:40):
It's like laugh.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Stop.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
This was also a time when the entire state correctional
system was pushed well beyond capacity. Virginia's prisons were holding
at least seven hundred more people than they were equipped
to house. Prisons all over Virginia in the country for
that matter, scrambled to expand their Powatan started putting people
in trailers they'd bought from the federal government, and these
(19:05):
presented security problems of their own. A couple times a year,
guys would escape Powatan and put the local community on edge.
One frustrated local wrote to the governor that he was
tired of going around his yard with a pistol strapped
to his side. But really, at the end of the day,
it was the men inside the prison who were in
(19:27):
the most danger. The penitentiary just didn't have enough space
or staffing to house people safely. Neil told me the
threats to his safety began on day one. Do you
remember your first day walking into Powatan.
Speaker 6 (19:43):
Yeah, spooky.
Speaker 9 (19:44):
There's spooky because you had people looking at your eyeballing
you and saying things, you know, like you know, oh,
that's a good piece leak there, and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Neil had been assigned to the dorms everybody was when
they got there. They were giant rooms furnished with rows
of beds where people slept side by side. The dorms
off the main building held seventy five beds apiece.
Speaker 6 (20:11):
You know, there was no privacy. I'll put it like that.
Speaker 5 (20:14):
You know, I'm laying here, you laying in, the next
person laying in.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
In nineteen eighty, just a few years after the band
arrived at Powatan, the Richmond office of the ACLU said
it had gotten reports of fifty sexual assaults at the
prison over the past year alone, and those are just
the cases that were formally reported. Men who'd brought a
federal class action lawsuit against Powatan during that time period
(20:41):
had called the dorms places of terror.
Speaker 5 (20:46):
I remember one night I was sleeping in my bed
by two beds from me. Somebody hit a guy in
the head with a hammel, busted his head. White old
he making all that funny knowing, and it just make
you sick to your stomach, and it's scared you at
the same time, and it's just terrible.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
Man.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
The lawsuit over the dorms ended with a consent decree
in nineteen eighty one. The court ordered correction officials to
remove people with violent histories from the living space. That
didn't happen, or at least that's what a US district
judge said a year later before he fined prison officials
reported eighty five thousand dollars. People were murdered in the dorms,
(21:28):
in the woodshop, and out on the basketball court. Jamal
saw us stabbing his first week there. He says he
was watching Night of the Living Dead during one of
the prison's movie nights.
Speaker 4 (21:39):
We sitting in a hears somebody scream I'm looking a
dog as it could be. When the lake came on,
come to find Oh, can't help been stay out, you know,
I said, this is what I got to put up with.
You know, I got thirty five years and the first
week I'm in here, this is how that's gonna be.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Cupcake hadn't even been processed yet when she saw her
first fight. She looked out into the yard and saw
two guys bludgeoning and stabbing each other with homemade weapons.
Speaker 7 (22:08):
Baby, my heart dropped down to my feet. I was
so scared. I said, well, I think it's time to go.
Don't go out there, Cupcake, because it ain't for you.
Don't go out there. You too small to go out
there with your foods.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
The prison tried to put people on schedules and keep
them busy during the day. A typical schedule would be
filled up with some combination of work and classes. Neil
took a job in the slaughterhouse. Jamal worked in the
mess hall. He spent his other time in educational programs,
getting his ged and taking courses in small business management.
(22:45):
Cupcake took up barbering through one of the prison's vocational programs,
and some.
Speaker 7 (22:50):
Of the prettiest makeshift knaves up in there you ever
wanted to see. They had brass knuckles.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
In the late seventies, the overcrowded prison populations were fed up.
Correctional officers were focused on a very real possibility at
penitentiaries like Powatan prison riots. At the Virginia State Penitentiary
in downtown Richmond, whispers of an uprising had been spreading
among the population. They were sick of the deteriorating conditions.
(23:20):
They didn't feel like they had basic privacy and property rights.
In June of nineteen seventy seven, the prison's guards shook
down the cell blocks and found more than one hundred weapons, shears, shanks,
and homemade screwdrivers among them. Later that summer, hundreds of
men staged a nine hour work stoppage. At some point,
(23:41):
a group started to arm themselves with pipes, garden tools,
and broken furniture, but there was no violence. Cupcake was
actually there for that before she got to Powatan, and
she says it could have been much worse.
Speaker 7 (23:56):
They were going to be kidnapped Sue Kennedy and holding
the hostage, but the gap that I was going with
saved her. And he had heard somewhere else why the
riot was going on because they were going to hurt her.
Who was she Sue Kennedy, She was the assistant superintendent,
but oh, he saved her life and then they transferred
(24:17):
him to Powatan. That's one of the reasons why I
wanted to go to Powatan.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
But it wasn't long until Powatan had its own riot,
at least according to Olivia Garland, who had been a
counselor at the Downtown Richmond Penitentiary. She says that Powatan's
riot happened in late nineteen seventy eight or early nineteen
seventy nine, and that it concerned state prison officials enough
that they sent her there to investigate. She started talking
(24:46):
to the incarcerated men.
Speaker 10 (24:48):
What I was hearing from those guys had want to
do with Hey, we are men, we are a human.
We wanted to be treated with respect. We're going to
go back into a society. Let us do some things
that will help us develop in here so we can
take those skills out.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Olivia became Powatan's assistant warden. She and fellow administrators decided
to keep developing a program Virginia had in place since
the nineteen sixties, the Music Program. It allowed incarcerated men
to form bands and practice right in the prison. At Powatan.
(25:27):
This happened in a small basement room, As Neil says,
everyone called it the band rooms.
Speaker 6 (25:35):
Like three or four different bands.
Speaker 5 (25:37):
It Cultrust the band, you're the jazz band, and two
rhythm and blues band.
Speaker 6 (25:42):
And we each wanted us to be allotted a certain
day to go in that room to practice.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
Jamal and Neil started playing with a rhythm and blues group,
Cosmic Conception. A few of Cosmic Conception's members left the
prison at some point. The band changed their name to
the Edge of Daybreak. A keyboardist derived from the Virginia
State Penitentiary with a Fender Rhodes and some amps he
was allowed to bring with him. His name was James Carrington.
(26:13):
Jamal was singing lead. Neil played guitar and sang backup
in a band room veteran named McAvoy. Cellis Robinson played bass,
but they wanted another vocalist, someone who could add additional
texture to their harmonies. James, the new keyboardist, set up
an audition and one of the contenders was a falsetto
who derived at the prison not long after he did.
(26:34):
Her name was Cupcake.
Speaker 7 (26:37):
I was chosen out of all of Cupcake meat, the
only little queen on the fallow.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
Cupcake brought attitude in style.
Speaker 7 (26:44):
And I made it.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
I was that good.
Speaker 7 (26:48):
But I was flamboyant. I was old lord and missaid.
But when I got there, I had blonde hair. I
hate all kinds of makeup. Guards and bring anything if
you do foraples.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
Neil remembers the first time he met Cupcake.
Speaker 7 (27:05):
What'd you think of Cupcake?
Speaker 2 (27:06):
When you met him?
Speaker 6 (27:07):
I was sitting down and he come of sitting in
my lap. I said, what you doing? Oh?
Speaker 5 (27:17):
He's it all kind of comments, you know, complimentary comments,
And I said, no, I don't.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
Go that route.
Speaker 6 (27:23):
I ain't like that, you know, So you got to go.
You had to move.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
Cupcake still remembers how Jamal treated or the first time
they met with open arms.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
He was.
Speaker 7 (27:33):
He accepted me. All he wanted me to do was
if you can carry this note, That's all I'm worried about.
That was the way Jamal was. He was strictly business.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
The band members practiced together on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
They taped songs off the radio and try to play
them for themselves, everything from Patti LaBelle and Natalie Cole,
The Earth Wind and Fire, and the Isisley Brothers. Jamal
and Neil also wrote a few originals. This is ape
of Neil inside powett In playing one of the tracks
(28:03):
he wrote that didn't make it onto the albums to
the beat of hers.
Speaker 7 (28:10):
Jump in.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
The band was coming together and creating their own sound.
Cupcake tells me that right away she and Jamal realized
that when they sang together, they really had something just clicked.
Speaker 7 (28:26):
It just he caught my vocals the same way I
called he.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
Edge of Daybreak was greater than the sum of their parts,
and their chemistry was about to make them the most
sought after band in the State correctional system. Rehearsing and
(29:09):
performing in the band room gave the musicians a sense
of purpose, something that might be tough to find in
the midst of a potentially fifty year sentence.
Speaker 7 (29:19):
Was what we did independentantry to better ourselves, keep us
out of trouble.
Speaker 6 (29:27):
That's what keep me busy and not had to. We're about,
you know, stress out every day about these bad.
Speaker 5 (29:35):
People just gonna do me in one day, you know,
somebody get jealous or whatever, you know, because that does
have people take your life over nothing, you know.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
Obviously they couldn't spend all their time playing music, so
they took on other projects. Jamal says he aimed to
remake his entire self meant and physically.
Speaker 4 (30:02):
I set out to say, as my whole self, body, mind,
and soul, you know, and I did that, even restructed
my body.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
He took up meditation, which inspired him to change his
name from Henry Calloway Junior to Jamal Nuby. Jamal just
came to him Newby was inspired by the Nubians, the
ethnic group indigenous to what is now northern Sudan and
southern Egypt. He learned about them watching reruns of the
nineteen fifty six Charlton Heston movie The Ten Commandments.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
I changed everything about me, name everything.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
So I'm saying I'm no longer the person I was born,
I'm the person that I was born to be.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
Jamal started working out every day with Bill Crawley, the
band's sound guy, and they both got into a nineteen
sixties manifesto called Man's Higher Consciousness. This inspired a change
in diet that Neil got on board with.
Speaker 6 (30:58):
Too Uetarians not vegetarians.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
Fruitarianism, eating only what naturally falls from plants, goes back
hundreds of years as a spiritual and wellness practice. At Powatan,
this would have been especially radical. Remember this was a
prison surrounded by cattle. T Bone steaks were a frequent
item at the mess hall, and according to Bill, Neil
(31:24):
took the diet someplace truly.
Speaker 11 (31:26):
Epic and for the longest tag This man right here
didn't eat nothing but a box of oranges. This guy
that eat no meat, no vegetables, no nothing, nothing but oranges.
He would come out of the cafeteria. He had oynges.
He eats rings all day. I don't know what to
(31:47):
get there, I said this push.
Speaker 6 (31:50):
I was either man. I was eating forty six day
of a date. We had fruits, foots, foots, foots, foots, foots, foods, foods.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
Poop outside of his fruit diet, Neil tried to blend in.
Speaker 7 (32:02):
Caid was not very sociable. Caid stayed in his area
the whole time he was there. The only time he
would come out would be for to go to the
bed room, because I never saw him anywhere else. I
didn't even see him in a dining room. He wouldn't
even penitentiary for give me up and stay farm food.
So he was kind of he was a strange burier.
Speaker 6 (32:22):
I stayed to myself because I figured that if I
stayed to myself, won't nothing happen?
Speaker 3 (32:28):
And it didn't.
Speaker 6 (32:29):
I just made a good choice, stuck with it.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Cupcake didn't exactly fly below the radar. She became known
among men incarcerated at Powertown as a source for marijuana.
Speaker 7 (32:43):
Sometimes I would bring up to visiting room for the
fellows and they had to give me a quarter of.
Speaker 3 (32:46):
Whatever I brought out.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
Well, how did you get it in Powertown?
Speaker 6 (32:51):
Suitcase?
Speaker 4 (32:51):
Baby?
Speaker 2 (32:52):
From where?
Speaker 4 (32:53):
Though?
Speaker 7 (32:53):
Who brought it to here?
Speaker 1 (32:54):
Whoever?
Speaker 7 (32:54):
Had to be footed.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
When that didn't work, she had somebody bring the delivery
to her through some type of opening in a floorboard.
Speaker 7 (33:05):
I had a little person that used to come through
the bottom of it of him building. I felt like
one of the mafia boys and tell so and so
and so to send me such and such and such
to the next day I had it.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Cupcake also volunteered for prison events and eventually worked in
the counselor's office in the wood shop. Staying busy with
sanctioned programs helped her stay away from other situations.
Speaker 7 (33:29):
You know, when you went in here to correct your
bad decisions, that's what you went in there to do.
So why would you go in there and pick up
the same mantle that you had out on the street.
Speaker 6 (33:43):
That's stupid.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
The band room was the one place where the musicians
shaped their own identities, where they got to be performers.
For one night a week, on Friday night, the prison
opened the bandroom up to spectators.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
We were like their band at a night clothing, especially
on pay day.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
Jamal describes clouds of cigarette smoke and cups of the
homemade moonshine that they all called mash.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
We played. They smoking cigarettes, drinking sodas.
Speaker 4 (34:16):
Mash, you know, whatever they want to do, and we played.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
You know, this was the edge of Daybreak in their prime,
playing their cover songs but sneaking a few originals into
the set to see how those went over too.
Speaker 4 (34:31):
It was a party type of atmosphere and they look
forward to That was a release for them.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
According to Olivia Garland, even the guards were clamoring to
get a good look.
Speaker 8 (34:41):
Some of the guards love music like that assignment like
monitoring band, because they know these guys could play, and
they didn't want to be around them.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
Edge of Daybreak's popularity made for some unlikely alliances. They
became friends with the country rock band, whereas Cupcake called
them the white boy band. But Cupcake told me something
once when we were chatting outside her apartment complex that
I just couldn't believe. She said that when the country
rock band needed a vocalist to fill in, they called
(35:17):
on Cupcake.
Speaker 7 (35:18):
I did Lennon Skinner's Freebird, No way, I did the
one that cocaine. That's how I did that, and their
white folks will wow.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
There are few performances I would have liked to have
seen more than Cupcake in her signature hotpants singing Freebird
to a bunch of bikers. Neil says the music they
were playing added some bit of joy to their day,
to the extent that even can exist in prison.
Speaker 5 (35:48):
It was a fun time, you know people, man, And
I tell you they just enjoyed us, and I enjoyed them.
Speaker 4 (35:55):
We had upnost respect from inmates and the correstional we
were protecting.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
Man. They looked forward to us entertaining them, and they
weren't gonna let nothing interfere with us or anybody in
that band to keep them from having their little party
three nights a week.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
Again. The administration knew how much the men at Powertan
loved the edge of daybreak cupcakes, says prison officials started
to show them off.
Speaker 7 (36:21):
They used to take us sometimes and make us practice
on the yard between the two buildings so that the
receiving unit could hear some of what we were doing.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Prison brass even asked them to play prison banquets attended
by outside guests. These were really Cupcakes moments to shine.
Speaker 7 (36:40):
Everybody came to see Cupcake perfoll. Everybody came to see
Cupcake for fall. Because I always had something up my sleep.
I had a top that a guy made me made
out of silk. I would at a dance for time.
Oh wait, we get that time from the penitents was sewing.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
Hung, an extravagant vocalist costumed in silk by her friends
in the penitentiary sewing shop. When I first heard these stories,
I thought maybe Cupcake was being a little hyperbolic, But
Olivia Garland said she wasn't. So Cupcake was not exaggerating
(37:26):
about that make.
Speaker 8 (37:27):
Make up, the whole bit, the dresses, the girls blouses,
you remember that.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Oh yeah, tailor made in the in the in the penitentiary. Yeah,
that really happened. Yes, the band's performances didn't end at banquets.
They even started playing other Virginia prisons.
Speaker 7 (37:45):
Everything they needed a bayan for. They came and got us,
and they would take us like was, oh, this is
Aura and we're gonna.
Speaker 6 (37:52):
Show him off.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
The Cupcake and her bandmates insist corrections. Officials did this
for strategic reasons, to passify people angry about their terrible conditions.
Speaker 7 (38:03):
They used us to keep a calm level at the
Virginia State Penitentiary. Because of that, they came and got us.
They didn't go and get a real band off the street.
They came and got us.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
I ran this by Olivia Garland was the administration deliberately
using edge of daybreak to pacify prison riots.
Speaker 8 (38:25):
Well, that was their process. We wanted to actually encourage uh.
We wanted to show inmates and other facilities that there
were positive things that could happen. We didn't see a
band as a way of keeping down a riot.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
I can tell you that's.
Speaker 6 (38:42):
Not the way we talk.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
Regardless of official intentions. Jamal knows what he saw and felt.
Speaker 4 (38:49):
I tell I, swell on a stack of bibles, aran
or whatever we say that man, because it was a
whole lot of stabbing going on, a whole lot of
killing going on. But whatever time, three lasts a week,
every time we rehearsed, wasn't no murdles. Let so music
at soon the Savage Beasts you see that back in
the day.
Speaker 3 (39:08):
If you ever noticed the Indian gab.
Speaker 4 (39:09):
With the fluit and Cobra Covid night, as long as
he stopped playing. When he stopped playing, Cobra had to
do something. You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
People to say, wait, it's no wonder the band's music
spoke to the prison population. At your daybreak was born
behind bars. But the music that came from Neil, Jamal
and Cupcake was a lifetime in the making. When I
started digging further into their lives outside of prison, I
(39:40):
on earthed more than I ever anticipated put it away.
Speaker 4 (39:43):
I was wanted it fast as girls.
Speaker 5 (39:45):
I had heard Curtis Mayfield had left the group Impressions,
and I said, well, maybe I can get to sing lead.
Speaker 4 (39:51):
Can you imagine your father running you down the street
swinging a axe at you.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
The band turned all that ambition and struggle into one
incredible album, but now that it was out in the world,
Eyes of Love was out of their hands.
Speaker 6 (40:07):
He never told me anything about selling my music nothing.
Speaker 7 (40:11):
He needed this behind our effects.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
And what the band saw is their greatest betrayal would
actually set the stage for a potential comeback.
Speaker 7 (40:19):
Just like I said, I did it in drag, I
did it in jail. I'm ready to sing, so everybody here,
can you imagine putting sepedinarians out there to beat Grammy.
Speaker 4 (40:29):
One of us?
Speaker 2 (40:31):
That's coming up on Soul Incarcerated.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
If you want to hear more of Edged day breaks
and music. Their new EP, New Horizon, is available on
all digital platforms.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
Sole Incarcerated was written and hosted by me Jamie Petris
co hosted and produced by Dorian Missing, story edited by
Yasmini and sound designed by Bill Moss and Isaac Lee.
Executive producers are Mcamie, Lynn, Jesse Katz, and Warren Ostergard.
Special thanks to everyone who helped us research this story.
(41:12):
To Marv him, Bill Crawley and Sanethia Lewis. To the author,
Dale Broomfield, Attorneys David Baugh and Mara Meltzer Cohen. To
doctor Heather Thompson and Lisha McCarney for lending insights on
American car Sero history. Thanks to the entire staff of
the Library of Virginia and to Ben Himmelfarb from the
Henrico County Public Library. To the vocal coaches k J.
(41:36):
Rose and Elise tunyak A and Ese Jennifer and Sonia,
Michael Greenwald and Elaine Fontaine Bryant. Thanks to the team
at silver Lining Entertainment, One Story Up Productions, the Numeral Group,
the crew at Sunset Sound and In Your Ear Studios,
Alex Lambert, Lucas Banking, Will Bethel, and Marty Keith. Thanks
(41:57):
to all of the band's friends, family members, and so
sees who took the time to talk to me for
this story, and most of all to the edge of daybreak,
Harry Coleman, Jamal Newby and Neil Cade for sharing it
with me.
In a and original podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
This episode contains descriptions of violence. Please listen with care.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
You shoot this straight.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
Out all the way on them all the week, unless.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I mean, if I'm gonna say go straight ahead, you see,
yeah straight yeah, Okay. In twenty nineteen, Jamal and I
made the drive from Richmond to Rono together. As it
often does with Jamal, the conversation made its way around
to one of his favorite topics, destiny. He was telling
me why he thought The Edge of Daybreak was predestined,
ordained to come together by some greater force.
Speaker 4 (00:42):
It's amazing that something that get occurred at such an
impressive patient, you know, But like I say, you know,
everything is predestined. Man.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Like I said anything, I.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Don't chock the band's formation or everything they accomplished up
to fate. That doesn't give them enough credit. To me,
the Edge of Daybreak is a testament to the band
member perseverance. That's why I prefer some of Jamal's other
takes on Destiny Tomorrow, like the one he sang about
(01:12):
on the album. Jamal believes in faith that song is
called your Destiny, but he also thinks you have to
work for what you want.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
You said that tomorrow is gonna be a better day.
What do you do to make true what you said?
Wishing and hoping is just not the way.
Speaker 4 (01:28):
Wishing and hoping they'll get you nothing unless you will
make an effort towards making that reality right. Look, how
many people pray, God help me get a job, God
help me paying my bills, get up off their knees,
and don't do nothing on their own to try to
make that reality.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
You might not expect such optimistic lyrics from a guy
who wrote them in prison. They're not sad or self pitying.
Much of the Edge of Daybreak songwriting defies expectations, and
that was a huge, huge part of their appeal.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
They would look for you to do a whole lot
of cran and a whole lot of tear jerking, and
a whole lot of bag and then complaining and pleading.
But none of our songs are like that. We change
people's attitudes and mentality through the music.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
I'm Jamie Petrice. When I was reporting this story, I
worked with Dorian Missic, a DJ and rare record collector,
to really understand why Edge of Daybreaks music resonates so much.
Speaker 4 (02:43):
So.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Dorian and I were talking one day about how the
band members created such exuberant music from such a dark place.
It made him think of something Tupac Shakor said in
nineteen ninety five after serving an eight month prison term.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
I just remember reading or Pack was saying that he
didn't write when he was in jail because he needed
to be free in order to write, and that was
like the first time I'd ever heard anybody say that.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
When Tupac was in prison, he said he'd written just
one song. After his release, he said he wrote a
dozen in a week.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
And like, one of the things too, that really dope
about them is that they sang about love and about
upliftment and things like that when you know, traditionally, if
I'm thinking like hip hop that could be made behind
the bars is going to be very angry, very much
anti establishment, not so much this aspirational stuff. So it's
(03:35):
like they dared to dream. And that's the beauty of
the brothers now, like when you even sit down with
them now, is that they dare to continue to dream.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Jamal and his bandmates were in for decades. That's what
I find so incredible and so difficult about this story.
When I talked to the band members about how they
ended up in prison. I didn't assume that their version
of events would line up with the prosecutors. Even today,
they all contend some amount of innocence. That's not totally unusual,
(04:06):
but regardless of their culpability, what I couldn't wrap my
mind around were their sentences. Ultimately, nobody was killed or
even physically harmed, really, and they were given twenty five
even fifty years behind bars. Why did they end up
with these harsh sentences and how did facing that time
affect their music. Jamal landed at Powatan on counts of
(04:36):
robbery and use of a firearm to commit a felony.
According to Roanoke prosecutors and the judgment issued against him,
Jamal robbed a convenience store with another man in December
nineteen seventy five. An article that ran in the Roanoke
World News states that the two men entered the convenience store,
one of them held the clerk up at gunpoint. They
(05:00):
walked out with five hundred dollars. Later, the clerk identified
twenty five year old Jamal is the one holding the gun.
The Rono County Circuit Court doesn't have transcripts of what
happened at Jamal's trial, but according to Jamal, the clerk
identified him from a mugshot the police provided. He says
(05:21):
another witness also identified his car, but not him at
the scene, Jamal says he wasn't even there. He says
that earlier that night, he was hanging out at his
mom's apartment complex and it lent out his car keys.
Speaker 4 (05:35):
Two guys that I knew they was leaving a house
party asked me could they use my vehicle to go
to the store and get some be and wine. That's
all I'm sure, but put some gas in the car
because it was on very low. I set that for
about two or three hours, at least two howls.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
When the guys came back with the keys, they told
Jamal the car had run out of gas and they
parked it outside a differ for an apartment building. Jamal
says when he went to look for his car the
next morning, it wasn't there.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
When I stepped into detective office, he tells me that
he got a want from me for banishing a foul
and committed to Robert. They killed his Margret's son the night.
I told him he must be out his mind, so
he tried to show the paper inside of my shirt.
Him and I had a little altercation. I stepped out
the door to also stand in the hallway beside my
(06:30):
sister and my son put the hand on the guns,
telling me I'm on the rest for Robert. So my
sister said, they said you robbed the store. I said,
that's what they told me.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Jamal pled not guilty, but was convicted a few months
later in February of nineteen seventy six. This wasn't Jamal's
first defense. When he was eighteen, he'd been convicted along
with some other teenagers, for playing a role in a
string of armed robberies. Jamal tells me today that he
merely knew about the robberies, but didn't actively participate. Investigators
(07:05):
and prosecutors thought otherwise. He ended up serving a year
and a half in prison for his second offense. The
judge didn't hold back. He gave Jamal thirty five years
in the state penitentiary. Jamal still remembers being hauled off
in a car by prison officers.
Speaker 4 (07:23):
To me, that was just like being in Twilight Zone.
You know, the further the cargo around the road. I'm
looking at the real Vera, and everything that I knew
was slowly disappearing, every mile, every mile, every mile. Then
I'm in the area that I know nothing about. Can
you imagine and then being thrown in a cage or oh,
(07:47):
you know, I put it like that. We put in
an arena, a glad of it orreana back in the day. Something.
You know, when you get put in that arena, everything
that's coming that you can kill. You see I'm coming from.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
It's like that.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Neil's case isn't too different from Jamal's. He says it
started with a knock at his door.
Speaker 5 (08:16):
I was at home one day and one early morning,
this boy they called him Keddie, the nickname, he banging
on my door.
Speaker 6 (08:24):
Neil, Neil, Neil, I need you to take me north,
get me out of town.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Neil obliged. He drove Cadi into Virginia.
Speaker 7 (08:32):
He says.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
They ran low on gas and didn't have any money,
so Cadai hatched a plan.
Speaker 5 (08:39):
He said, well, we can rob that motel right there.
I said, no, man, I ain't come up here for that.
Speaker 6 (08:45):
But anyway, where I messed up. I went in the
building with him.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
According to Neil, he followed him into the motel and cada,
I had a gun.
Speaker 6 (08:57):
He pulled a gun out to the people, ah motel horna.
He is a kind of heavily guiy to time.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
The manager was sixty two years old and lived at
the motel with his wife. According to court documents, he
said Neil was the one who went out to the
van and came back with a gun. The two made
off with ninety dollars in a wristwatch. Neil also already
had at least one prior armed robbery conviction, stemming from
two holdups of two separate convenience stores when Neil was
(09:28):
twenty one years old. He pled guilty to both and
says he served two years in prison. A few years
after he got out, he says he spent some time
on a chain gang too, for receiving stolen goods. The goods,
Neil says, were a box of eight track cassettes for
(09:49):
the motel case. Neil pled not guilty. Cat I did too,
But a jury found both of them guilty of robbery
and gave them identical sentences.
Speaker 5 (10:00):
Give us twenty five years a piece, Okay, I couldn't
comprehend it at all.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
In Virginia. Neil would come up for a parole review
after serving out a quarter of his sentence, but parole
was hardly guaranteed. If Neil and Jamal were lucky, they'd
get out in the eighties. If they were unlucky, they'd
spend much of their adult lives in prison. Cupcake ended
(10:30):
up with the longest sentence of them all, and she
didn't have any prior violent convictions. Cupcake was arrested on
a Sunday night in January nineteen seventy six. Police responded
to a call about a robbery in progress at a
nursing home in Richmond that.
Speaker 7 (10:46):
Was supposed to be to look out the guy was
messing with at that time. He was supposed to be
going up in and steal the Color TV.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
But when police arrived, Cupcake was inside too, right in
the thick of it. She and the other man were
arrested and charged with multiple counts of robbery. The nursing
home employees testified at Cupcake's trial. They said she was
the one who threatened them with a straight razor and
told them to empty their wallets. Prosecutors said she took
(11:16):
two dollars from a nurse thirty eight dollars from an orderly,
and that she tried to take money from another employee too.
Witnesses said Cupcake didn't cut anyone with the razor, but
she did scrape some hair off in orderly's chest, a
bizarre detail that made it into local newspaper coverage. Cupcake
denies that she robbed anyone and says she only pulled
(11:39):
the razor out when that orderly grabbed her and threatened her.
Speaker 4 (11:42):
He put his hands on me.
Speaker 7 (11:43):
He hadn't been just putting his hands on me. Allly
do was tell me, look, you go over there. I
had the police come and go over there and stand
up and wait for him.
Speaker 4 (11:49):
I have done that.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
At Cupcake's trial, there was also some specific testimony about race.
As one of the employees testified, Cupcake made a comment
about white people being quote against blacks. The head nurse
said the following. When I'm by myself and I see
black people two men together like that, I am frightened,
(12:14):
and I never was.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Before.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
The judge was incensed. He said he couldn't think of
anything much worse than robbing a nursing home or hospital
where people are ill and old. He concluded that Cupcake
was quote dangerous and had a very terrible hate for
white people. Then he announced his verdict. Cupcake was guilty
(12:38):
on two counts of robbery and one count of attempted robbery.
He gave her fifty years.
Speaker 7 (12:45):
I must say, damn, what the hell?
Speaker 4 (12:48):
Who are you kill?
Speaker 6 (12:49):
You don't nobody I was saying.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Cupcake did have a record, but it was for relatively
minor offenses. She served six months for a couple of
check kiding misdemeanors, and she was charged with a number
of other related offenses. But she'd never been accused of
anything violent, and since those earlier convictions, she was doing
well in many areas of her life, like at work.
(13:12):
She was a dishwasher at a local restaurant, and her
managers told court officials that Cupcake was a hard worker.
She got, along with the other employees, fifty years for
a first robbery offense. Cupcake has a few theories about
what could have contributed to that harsh sentencing.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
At the time.
Speaker 7 (13:34):
It won't Jim Crow, but it must have been Jack Crow.
I don't know who it was, but they put me
into trick Bay.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
She also told me her appearance might have swayed things.
Speaker 7 (13:45):
I was endured when I got a lot, though my
mother had to bring clothes me the way to court
early that morning to the courthouse.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Cupcake sentence is particularly shocked to me. It seemed like
the judge was making an example of her. But even so,
Jamal and Neil got twenty five and thirty five years.
Was everyone getting decades long sentences for armed robbery? I
looked into sentencing stats around that time and the short
answer is no. The average armed robbery sentence in Virginia
(14:22):
in nineteen seventy six was about twelve years. Cupcake sentence
was more than four times that. Sentences were issued by
judges or juries, depending on the case. But there were
no standard sentencing guidelines in Virginia. In city to city,
case to case, people were getting wildly different amounts of
(14:43):
time for identical charges. There was a lot of leeway
to be subjective, to be swayed by the emotional details
of a case or other factors. Nobody was keeping good
track of it then, but there were disparities in how
black and white offenders were being sentenced. And this all
came on the heels of federal tough on crime initiatives
(15:04):
from the sixties, when cities were given federal dollars to
put more police on the streets and make more arrests.
This meant more policing in black neighborhoods, more arrests of
black people, and a prison population that was about to skyrocket.
Between nineteen seventy and nineteen eighty five, the US prison
(15:25):
population more than doubled in size. Cupcake Nil and Jamal
were part of that influx. They were unwitting participants in
the prison boom, an ugly part of American history. Black
Americans paid an unfair burden for the unprecedented growth in
American prisons. They made up less than twelve percent of
the overall population, but nearly half the federal and state
(15:48):
prison population was black. Cupcake Nil and Jamal didn't know
each other before prison. It was those long sentences that
ultimate brought them together at the Powatan Correctional Center in
central Virginia. Powatan is about thirty miles west of Richmond.
The prison closed in twenty fourteen, but the razor wired
(16:12):
brick fortress is still there today. It's surrounded by farmland.
In Powatan's heyday, the whole compound was about twenty six
hundred acres. The main building had their cell blocks and dorms.
That's where everybody started, and then there were some buildings
where security was a little less intense. You could work
your way up to those. Altogether, the facility held about
(16:34):
fifteen hundred incarcerated people. It was one of two area
compounds known collectively as the State Farm.
Speaker 8 (16:41):
When you go across the bridge to the State from
it is this huge complex. I mean, it's just a
huge place. It's almost like looking at the Pentagon.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
Olivia Garland was an assistant warden at Powatan in the
late nineteen seventies.
Speaker 8 (16:57):
It was the maximum security prison. If you were sent
to Powtan, people knew that you had heavy time. The
reality was anyone who came to Powatan had really several
years anywhere from ten to forty to life. Now they
may not have had a violent charge, but the court
system at that time we're giving people heavy charges for
(17:21):
drug use drug distribution.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
The most severe drug sentence I found at Powatan involved
someone who got forty years for sale and possession of
less than nine ounces of pot. He was housed alongside
Neil Jamal and Cupcake, who were in for armed robbery
and they were housed alongside guys that were in for murder.
It all made for a volatile environment.
Speaker 4 (17:46):
You've been kidnapped, carried away, put into a world that
you know nothing about, and you got two childre live
with death.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
At Powatan, men worked out in the fields pig pens.
Powatan provided meat for other Virginia prisons, so incarcerated men
helped butcher animals in the slaughterhouse. Jamal remembers a guard
showing him the cows when he got there.
Speaker 4 (18:14):
You know what he told me? He said, you see
those cows on in that field. I said, yes, sir.
He said, you belong to the state news. He said,
you belong to us. He said you just like one
of them cows in that fee, you know, and they
had almost tags in the hell right, that's all.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
Hell No, he gonna compare me to a camp. You know.
You gotta tell me no one else of That's all
I mean to you.
Speaker 4 (18:40):
It's like laugh.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Stop.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
This was also a time when the entire state correctional
system was pushed well beyond capacity. Virginia's prisons were holding
at least seven hundred more people than they were equipped
to house. Prisons all over Virginia in the country for
that matter, scrambled to expand their Powatan started putting people
in trailers they'd bought from the federal government, and these
(19:05):
presented security problems of their own. A couple times a year,
guys would escape Powatan and put the local community on edge.
One frustrated local wrote to the governor that he was
tired of going around his yard with a pistol strapped
to his side. But really, at the end of the day,
it was the men inside the prison who were in
(19:27):
the most danger. The penitentiary just didn't have enough space
or staffing to house people safely. Neil told me the
threats to his safety began on day one. Do you
remember your first day walking into Powatan.
Speaker 6 (19:43):
Yeah, spooky.
Speaker 9 (19:44):
There's spooky because you had people looking at your eyeballing
you and saying things, you know, like you know, oh,
that's a good piece leak there, and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Neil had been assigned to the dorms everybody was when
they got there. They were giant rooms furnished with rows
of beds where people slept side by side. The dorms
off the main building held seventy five beds apiece.
Speaker 6 (20:11):
You know, there was no privacy. I'll put it like that.
Speaker 5 (20:14):
You know, I'm laying here, you laying in, the next
person laying in.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
In nineteen eighty, just a few years after the band
arrived at Powatan, the Richmond office of the ACLU said
it had gotten reports of fifty sexual assaults at the
prison over the past year alone, and those are just
the cases that were formally reported. Men who'd brought a
federal class action lawsuit against Powatan during that time period
(20:41):
had called the dorms places of terror.
Speaker 5 (20:46):
I remember one night I was sleeping in my bed
by two beds from me. Somebody hit a guy in
the head with a hammel, busted his head. White old
he making all that funny knowing, and it just make
you sick to your stomach, and it's scared you at
the same time, and it's just terrible.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
Man.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
The lawsuit over the dorms ended with a consent decree
in nineteen eighty one. The court ordered correction officials to
remove people with violent histories from the living space. That
didn't happen, or at least that's what a US district
judge said a year later before he fined prison officials
reported eighty five thousand dollars. People were murdered in the dorms,
(21:28):
in the woodshop, and out on the basketball court. Jamal
saw us stabbing his first week there. He says he
was watching Night of the Living Dead during one of
the prison's movie nights.
Speaker 4 (21:39):
We sitting in a hears somebody scream I'm looking a
dog as it could be. When the lake came on,
come to find Oh, can't help been stay out, you know,
I said, this is what I got to put up with.
You know, I got thirty five years and the first
week I'm in here, this is how that's gonna be.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Cupcake hadn't even been processed yet when she saw her
first fight. She looked out into the yard and saw
two guys bludgeoning and stabbing each other with homemade weapons.
Speaker 7 (22:08):
Baby, my heart dropped down to my feet. I was
so scared. I said, well, I think it's time to go.
Don't go out there, Cupcake, because it ain't for you.
Don't go out there. You too small to go out
there with your foods.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
The prison tried to put people on schedules and keep
them busy during the day. A typical schedule would be
filled up with some combination of work and classes. Neil
took a job in the slaughterhouse. Jamal worked in the
mess hall. He spent his other time in educational programs,
getting his ged and taking courses in small business management.
(22:45):
Cupcake took up barbering through one of the prison's vocational programs,
and some.
Speaker 7 (22:50):
Of the prettiest makeshift knaves up in there you ever
wanted to see. They had brass knuckles.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
In the late seventies, the overcrowded prison populations were fed up.
Correctional officers were focused on a very real possibility at
penitentiaries like Powatan prison riots. At the Virginia State Penitentiary
in downtown Richmond, whispers of an uprising had been spreading
among the population. They were sick of the deteriorating conditions.
(23:20):
They didn't feel like they had basic privacy and property rights.
In June of nineteen seventy seven, the prison's guards shook
down the cell blocks and found more than one hundred weapons, shears, shanks,
and homemade screwdrivers among them. Later that summer, hundreds of
men staged a nine hour work stoppage. At some point,
(23:41):
a group started to arm themselves with pipes, garden tools,
and broken furniture, but there was no violence. Cupcake was
actually there for that before she got to Powatan, and
she says it could have been much worse.
Speaker 7 (23:56):
They were going to be kidnapped Sue Kennedy and holding
the hostage, but the gap that I was going with
saved her. And he had heard somewhere else why the
riot was going on because they were going to hurt her.
Who was she Sue Kennedy, She was the assistant superintendent,
but oh, he saved her life and then they transferred
(24:17):
him to Powatan. That's one of the reasons why I
wanted to go to Powatan.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
But it wasn't long until Powatan had its own riot,
at least according to Olivia Garland, who had been a
counselor at the Downtown Richmond Penitentiary. She says that Powatan's
riot happened in late nineteen seventy eight or early nineteen
seventy nine, and that it concerned state prison officials enough
that they sent her there to investigate. She started talking
(24:46):
to the incarcerated men.
Speaker 10 (24:48):
What I was hearing from those guys had want to
do with Hey, we are men, we are a human.
We wanted to be treated with respect. We're going to
go back into a society. Let us do some things
that will help us develop in here so we can
take those skills out.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Olivia became Powatan's assistant warden. She and fellow administrators decided
to keep developing a program Virginia had in place since
the nineteen sixties, the Music Program. It allowed incarcerated men
to form bands and practice right in the prison. At Powatan.
(25:27):
This happened in a small basement room, As Neil says,
everyone called it the band rooms.
Speaker 6 (25:35):
Like three or four different bands.
Speaker 5 (25:37):
It Cultrust the band, you're the jazz band, and two
rhythm and blues band.
Speaker 6 (25:42):
And we each wanted us to be allotted a certain
day to go in that room to practice.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
Jamal and Neil started playing with a rhythm and blues group,
Cosmic Conception. A few of Cosmic Conception's members left the
prison at some point. The band changed their name to
the Edge of Daybreak. A keyboardist derived from the Virginia
State Penitentiary with a Fender Rhodes and some amps he
was allowed to bring with him. His name was James Carrington.
(26:13):
Jamal was singing lead. Neil played guitar and sang backup
in a band room veteran named McAvoy. Cellis Robinson played bass,
but they wanted another vocalist, someone who could add additional
texture to their harmonies. James, the new keyboardist, set up
an audition and one of the contenders was a falsetto
who derived at the prison not long after he did.
(26:34):
Her name was Cupcake.
Speaker 7 (26:37):
I was chosen out of all of Cupcake meat, the
only little queen on the fallow.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
Cupcake brought attitude in style.
Speaker 7 (26:44):
And I made it.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
I was that good.
Speaker 7 (26:48):
But I was flamboyant. I was old lord and missaid.
But when I got there, I had blonde hair. I
hate all kinds of makeup. Guards and bring anything if
you do foraples.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
Neil remembers the first time he met Cupcake.
Speaker 7 (27:05):
What'd you think of Cupcake?
Speaker 2 (27:06):
When you met him?
Speaker 6 (27:07):
I was sitting down and he come of sitting in
my lap. I said, what you doing? Oh?
Speaker 5 (27:17):
He's it all kind of comments, you know, complimentary comments,
And I said, no, I don't.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
Go that route.
Speaker 6 (27:23):
I ain't like that, you know, So you got to go.
You had to move.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
Cupcake still remembers how Jamal treated or the first time
they met with open arms.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
He was.
Speaker 7 (27:33):
He accepted me. All he wanted me to do was
if you can carry this note, That's all I'm worried about.
That was the way Jamal was. He was strictly business.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
The band members practiced together on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
They taped songs off the radio and try to play
them for themselves, everything from Patti LaBelle and Natalie Cole,
The Earth Wind and Fire, and the Isisley Brothers. Jamal
and Neil also wrote a few originals. This is ape
of Neil inside powett In playing one of the tracks
(28:03):
he wrote that didn't make it onto the albums to
the beat of hers.
Speaker 7 (28:10):
Jump in.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
The band was coming together and creating their own sound.
Cupcake tells me that right away she and Jamal realized
that when they sang together, they really had something just clicked.
Speaker 7 (28:26):
It just he caught my vocals the same way I
called he.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
Edge of Daybreak was greater than the sum of their parts,
and their chemistry was about to make them the most
sought after band in the State correctional system. Rehearsing and
(29:09):
performing in the band room gave the musicians a sense
of purpose, something that might be tough to find in
the midst of a potentially fifty year sentence.
Speaker 7 (29:19):
Was what we did independentantry to better ourselves, keep us
out of trouble.
Speaker 6 (29:27):
That's what keep me busy and not had to. We're about,
you know, stress out every day about these bad.
Speaker 5 (29:35):
People just gonna do me in one day, you know,
somebody get jealous or whatever, you know, because that does
have people take your life over nothing, you know.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
Obviously they couldn't spend all their time playing music, so
they took on other projects. Jamal says he aimed to
remake his entire self meant and physically.
Speaker 4 (30:02):
I set out to say, as my whole self, body, mind,
and soul, you know, and I did that, even restructed
my body.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
He took up meditation, which inspired him to change his
name from Henry Calloway Junior to Jamal Nuby. Jamal just
came to him Newby was inspired by the Nubians, the
ethnic group indigenous to what is now northern Sudan and
southern Egypt. He learned about them watching reruns of the
nineteen fifty six Charlton Heston movie The Ten Commandments.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
I changed everything about me, name everything.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
So I'm saying I'm no longer the person I was born,
I'm the person that I was born to be.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
Jamal started working out every day with Bill Crawley, the
band's sound guy, and they both got into a nineteen
sixties manifesto called Man's Higher Consciousness. This inspired a change
in diet that Neil got on board with.
Speaker 6 (30:58):
Too Uetarians not vegetarians.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
Fruitarianism, eating only what naturally falls from plants, goes back
hundreds of years as a spiritual and wellness practice. At Powatan,
this would have been especially radical. Remember this was a
prison surrounded by cattle. T Bone steaks were a frequent
item at the mess hall, and according to Bill, Neil
(31:24):
took the diet someplace truly.
Speaker 11 (31:26):
Epic and for the longest tag This man right here
didn't eat nothing but a box of oranges. This guy
that eat no meat, no vegetables, no nothing, nothing but oranges.
He would come out of the cafeteria. He had oynges.
He eats rings all day. I don't know what to
(31:47):
get there, I said this push.
Speaker 6 (31:50):
I was either man. I was eating forty six day
of a date. We had fruits, foots, foots, foots, foots, foots, foods, foods.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
Poop outside of his fruit diet, Neil tried to blend in.
Speaker 7 (32:02):
Caid was not very sociable. Caid stayed in his area
the whole time he was there. The only time he
would come out would be for to go to the
bed room, because I never saw him anywhere else. I
didn't even see him in a dining room. He wouldn't
even penitentiary for give me up and stay farm food.
So he was kind of he was a strange burier.
Speaker 6 (32:22):
I stayed to myself because I figured that if I
stayed to myself, won't nothing happen?
Speaker 3 (32:28):
And it didn't.
Speaker 6 (32:29):
I just made a good choice, stuck with it.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Cupcake didn't exactly fly below the radar. She became known
among men incarcerated at Powertown as a source for marijuana.
Speaker 7 (32:43):
Sometimes I would bring up to visiting room for the
fellows and they had to give me a quarter of.
Speaker 3 (32:46):
Whatever I brought out.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
Well, how did you get it in Powertown?
Speaker 6 (32:51):
Suitcase?
Speaker 4 (32:51):
Baby?
Speaker 2 (32:52):
From where?
Speaker 4 (32:53):
Though?
Speaker 7 (32:53):
Who brought it to here?
Speaker 1 (32:54):
Whoever?
Speaker 7 (32:54):
Had to be footed.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
When that didn't work, she had somebody bring the delivery
to her through some type of opening in a floorboard.
Speaker 7 (33:05):
I had a little person that used to come through
the bottom of it of him building. I felt like
one of the mafia boys and tell so and so
and so to send me such and such and such
to the next day I had it.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Cupcake also volunteered for prison events and eventually worked in
the counselor's office in the wood shop. Staying busy with
sanctioned programs helped her stay away from other situations.
Speaker 7 (33:29):
You know, when you went in here to correct your
bad decisions, that's what you went in there to do.
So why would you go in there and pick up
the same mantle that you had out on the street.
Speaker 6 (33:43):
That's stupid.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
The band room was the one place where the musicians
shaped their own identities, where they got to be performers.
For one night a week, on Friday night, the prison
opened the bandroom up to spectators.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
We were like their band at a night clothing, especially
on pay day.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
Jamal describes clouds of cigarette smoke and cups of the
homemade moonshine that they all called mash.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
We played. They smoking cigarettes, drinking sodas.
Speaker 4 (34:16):
Mash, you know, whatever they want to do, and we played.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
You know, this was the edge of Daybreak in their prime,
playing their cover songs but sneaking a few originals into
the set to see how those went over too.
Speaker 4 (34:31):
It was a party type of atmosphere and they look
forward to That was a release for them.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
According to Olivia Garland, even the guards were clamoring to
get a good look.
Speaker 8 (34:41):
Some of the guards love music like that assignment like
monitoring band, because they know these guys could play, and
they didn't want to be around them.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
Edge of Daybreak's popularity made for some unlikely alliances. They
became friends with the country rock band, whereas Cupcake called
them the white boy band. But Cupcake told me something
once when we were chatting outside her apartment complex that
I just couldn't believe. She said that when the country
rock band needed a vocalist to fill in, they called
(35:17):
on Cupcake.
Speaker 7 (35:18):
I did Lennon Skinner's Freebird, No way, I did the
one that cocaine. That's how I did that, and their
white folks will wow.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
There are few performances I would have liked to have
seen more than Cupcake in her signature hotpants singing Freebird
to a bunch of bikers. Neil says the music they
were playing added some bit of joy to their day,
to the extent that even can exist in prison.
Speaker 5 (35:48):
It was a fun time, you know people, man, And
I tell you they just enjoyed us, and I enjoyed them.
Speaker 4 (35:55):
We had upnost respect from inmates and the correstional we
were protecting.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
Man. They looked forward to us entertaining them, and they
weren't gonna let nothing interfere with us or anybody in
that band to keep them from having their little party
three nights a week.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
Again. The administration knew how much the men at Powertan
loved the edge of daybreak cupcakes, says prison officials started
to show them off.
Speaker 7 (36:21):
They used to take us sometimes and make us practice
on the yard between the two buildings so that the
receiving unit could hear some of what we were doing.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Prison brass even asked them to play prison banquets attended
by outside guests. These were really Cupcakes moments to shine.
Speaker 7 (36:40):
Everybody came to see Cupcake perfoll. Everybody came to see
Cupcake for fall. Because I always had something up my sleep.
I had a top that a guy made me made
out of silk. I would at a dance for time.
Oh wait, we get that time from the penitents was sewing.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
Hung, an extravagant vocalist costumed in silk by her friends
in the penitentiary sewing shop. When I first heard these stories,
I thought maybe Cupcake was being a little hyperbolic, But
Olivia Garland said she wasn't. So Cupcake was not exaggerating
(37:26):
about that make.
Speaker 8 (37:27):
Make up, the whole bit, the dresses, the girls blouses,
you remember that.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Oh yeah, tailor made in the in the in the penitentiary. Yeah,
that really happened. Yes, the band's performances didn't end at banquets.
They even started playing other Virginia prisons.
Speaker 7 (37:45):
Everything they needed a bayan for. They came and got us,
and they would take us like was, oh, this is
Aura and we're gonna.
Speaker 6 (37:52):
Show him off.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
The Cupcake and her bandmates insist corrections. Officials did this
for strategic reasons, to passify people angry about their terrible conditions.
Speaker 7 (38:03):
They used us to keep a calm level at the
Virginia State Penitentiary. Because of that, they came and got us.
They didn't go and get a real band off the street.
They came and got us.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
I ran this by Olivia Garland was the administration deliberately
using edge of daybreak to pacify prison riots.
Speaker 8 (38:25):
Well, that was their process. We wanted to actually encourage uh.
We wanted to show inmates and other facilities that there
were positive things that could happen. We didn't see a
band as a way of keeping down a riot.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
I can tell you that's.
Speaker 6 (38:42):
Not the way we talk.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
Regardless of official intentions. Jamal knows what he saw and felt.
Speaker 4 (38:49):
I tell I, swell on a stack of bibles, aran
or whatever we say that man, because it was a
whole lot of stabbing going on, a whole lot of
killing going on. But whatever time, three lasts a week,
every time we rehearsed, wasn't no murdles. Let so music
at soon the Savage Beasts you see that back in
the day.
Speaker 3 (39:08):
If you ever noticed the Indian gab.
Speaker 4 (39:09):
With the fluit and Cobra Covid night, as long as
he stopped playing. When he stopped playing, Cobra had to
do something. You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
People to say, wait, it's no wonder the band's music
spoke to the prison population. At your daybreak was born
behind bars. But the music that came from Neil, Jamal
and Cupcake was a lifetime in the making. When I
started digging further into their lives outside of prison, I
(39:40):
on earthed more than I ever anticipated put it away.
Speaker 4 (39:43):
I was wanted it fast as girls.
Speaker 5 (39:45):
I had heard Curtis Mayfield had left the group Impressions,
and I said, well, maybe I can get to sing lead.
Speaker 4 (39:51):
Can you imagine your father running you down the street
swinging a axe at you.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
The band turned all that ambition and struggle into one
incredible album, but now that it was out in the world,
Eyes of Love was out of their hands.
Speaker 6 (40:07):
He never told me anything about selling my music nothing.
Speaker 7 (40:11):
He needed this behind our effects.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
And what the band saw is their greatest betrayal would
actually set the stage for a potential comeback.
Speaker 7 (40:19):
Just like I said, I did it in drag, I
did it in jail. I'm ready to sing, so everybody here,
can you imagine putting sepedinarians out there to beat Grammy.
Speaker 4 (40:29):
One of us?
Speaker 2 (40:31):
That's coming up on Soul Incarcerated.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
If you want to hear more of Edged day breaks
and music. Their new EP, New Horizon, is available on
all digital platforms.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
Sole Incarcerated was written and hosted by me Jamie Petris
co hosted and produced by Dorian Missing, story edited by
Yasmini and sound designed by Bill Moss and Isaac Lee.
Executive producers are Mcamie, Lynn, Jesse Katz, and Warren Ostergard.
Special thanks to everyone who helped us research this story.
(41:12):
To Marv him, Bill Crawley and Sanethia Lewis. To the author,
Dale Broomfield, Attorneys David Baugh and Mara Meltzer Cohen. To
doctor Heather Thompson and Lisha McCarney for lending insights on
American car Sero history. Thanks to the entire staff of
the Library of Virginia and to Ben Himmelfarb from the
Henrico County Public Library. To the vocal coaches k J.
(41:36):
Rose and Elise tunyak A and Ese Jennifer and Sonia,
Michael Greenwald and Elaine Fontaine Bryant. Thanks to the team
at silver Lining Entertainment, One Story Up Productions, the Numeral Group,
the crew at Sunset Sound and In Your Ear Studios,
Alex Lambert, Lucas Banking, Will Bethel, and Marty Keith. Thanks
(41:57):
to all of the band's friends, family members, and so
sees who took the time to talk to me for
this story, and most of all to the edge of daybreak,
Harry Coleman, Jamal Newby and Neil Cade for sharing it
with me.
Host
Jamie Pietras
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