Colin Asher: The Midnight Special (Conversation and Vinyl Session)

Colin Asher will be at First Light Books on Saturday, August 22, for an evening centered on his book The Midnight Special. The night is split into two parts: a conversation between Asher and journalist Maurice Chammah, followed by a vinyl listening session.

The Midnight Special looks at how policing and prisons have shaped American music from the blues to hip-hop, and it starts with the story of Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter. If you're not familiar, Lead Belly was the Texas-born bluesman who spent years in prison, and his life and music are a good entry point for the broader history Asher traces through the decades.

Asher is joined for the conversation by Maurice Chammah, a journalist with The Marshall Project who won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2021. Chammah is also the author of Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty, so the two should have plenty of common ground when it comes to the intersection of the legal system and the people caught in it. After the talk, the night shifts to a vinyl listening session, which lets you hear some of the music the book discusses.

Asher was born in Morgantown, West Virginia, and raised in Brooklyn. This is his second book; his first was Never a Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren. The event is at First Light Books, 4300 Speedway, Austin, TX 78751, starting at 6:30 PM on Saturday, August 22.