I wish anybody had mentioned this about this album before I bought it, so I'm telling you: this edition has been post-processed with a reverb that surely wasn't there when Lomax recorded it. Sometimes it's not especially intrusive, but sometimes it's aggressively metallic and artifical. Serves me right for trying to cheap out, and failing to listen to the clips. If this bugs you as it does me, do yourself what I'm going to do next time, buy the Rounder edition of "Prison Songs (Historical Recordings From Parchman Farm 1947-48)".

This is an excellent recording with almost no context. The liner notes (all of two paragraphs) don't say anything about when the songs were recorded of how Lomax got access to the prisoners. The sound is excellent.