Pennsylvania's Eastern State Penitentiary is old enough to be remembered with horror by Dickens in his American Notes (1842). It was known then, as now, as the Cherry Hill prison. One night last week, over Philadelphia's KYW, the inmates of 110-year-old Cherry Hill staged their Christmas musicale. Sixteen pent-up voices serenaded The Little Man Who Wasn't There; assorted whistlers, fiddlers, ladybug plunkers whanged away at heart strings beyond the walls. But the tune that dampened the eyes of Warden Herbert ("Cap") Smith and beefy Deputy Tom Meikrantz was a Chinese prisoner's song, written and sung in quavery, North China dialect by...
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