James "Iron Head" Baker and Moses "Clear Rock" Platt
musical artist
James "Iron Head" Baker (March 18, 1884 – February 23, 1944) and Moses "Clear Rock" Platt (around 1867 – after 1939) were African American traditional folk singers imprisoned in the Central State Prison Farm in Sugar Land, Texas. The men made a number of field recordings of convict work songs, field hollers and other material with John Lomax for the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Music in the 1930s.
After Lomax was refused entry to the Huntsville Penitentiary, in July 1933, the pair would become the first two convicts in Texas that Lomax was permitted to record. Both men performed solo, but responded to and encouraged one another. This gave Lomax an overview of the idiom and a number of songs to seek out in future collecting. Over the years a number of their recordings have been released on 78 rpm, on LP and on CD by the Library of Congress and other record labels.
Singers
Iron Head
James Baker was his prison name. He was generally referred to by his nickname Iron Head. His real name may have been Reuben Avery Burrage. When first recorded by the Lomaxes in July 1933 he was forty-nine years old and in his sixth term in the penitentiary.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “James "Iron Head" Baker and Moses "Clear Rock" Platt” is musical artist. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through James, Iron and Head, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6127970. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1884, 1944, 1867 and 1939.
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This entry incorporates text from “James "Iron Head" Baker and Moses "Clear Rock" Platt” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.