Redemption songs A year in the life of a community prison choir

Andy Douglas

Book - 2019

"Redemption Songs" takes the reader inside the walls of a medium-security prison and offers a glimpse at how music and the arts are offering second chances to the incarcerated. For six years, the author volunteered with the Oakdale Community Choir, a performing chorus composed of volunteers and inmates, based in a men's correctional facility in Coralville, Iowa. As the gates clang shut behind choir volunteers each week, and we walk the long halls to the rehearsal room, the reader encounters the rewards and challenges of creating music in this environment, a place usually defined by trauma, danger, and control. But it's also, as we learn, a place where healing, atonement and growth can occur.--