About this episode
Harry “Cupcake” Coleman was 29 years old and staring down a 50-year sentence at the Powhatan Correctional Center, the Virginia penitentiary farm just 30 miles west of Richmond. Cupcake was a star vocalist in the prison’s soul ensemble, Edge of Daybreak. On Sept. 14, 1979, she and her bandmates rose to an incredible challenge: they recorded an eight-song LP called Eyes of Love, live from the prison visiting room, in only five hours. Decades later, music and culture writer Jamie Pietras tracks down Cupcake and her former bandmates, the guitarist Neal Cade and drummer Jamal Jaha Nubi, to find out how they recorded one of the most coveted soul albums of their era under such extraordinary circumstances. Out of prison and in their seventies, the former bandmates feel like they still have something to prove - and they want Jamie’s help. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.