The Edge of Daybreak was a prison soul ensemble who recorded their first and only album in 1979 when they were incarcerated as young men. In this podcast series, the group’s surviving members try to mount their comeback. Soul Incarcerated tracks their struggles and triumphs along the way. It’s a It’s a story about the liberating power of music, the American justice system, and ultimately…second chances.

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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.

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The Powhatan Correctional Center was a hellish place: overcrowded, underfunded, and known for its rampant violence. So how were Neal, Jamal, and Cupcake able to create and perform such soulful, life-affirming music? As America’s prison population began to skyrocket in the late 1970s, the musicians explain how the prison band room gave them the will to make it through their sentences. This is where Edge of Daybreak is born.

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