The group was discovered by the radio producer Joe Calloway, who heard them singing while preparing a news broadcast from the prison.
The group's legacy was confirmed when "Just Walkin' in the Rain", written by Bragg, was recorded by Johnnie Ray, whose version sold over eight times that of the Prisonaires.
[1] When Bragg's sentence was commuted in 1956, he formed a new group including Hal Hebb, Willy Wilson, Al Brooks and Henry "Dishrag" Jones, who were known as the Sunbeams.
Chapter 2 of this section of the novel features Dylan Ebdus, the novel's main protagonist and a rock critic, pitching a dramatic film based on the story of the Prisonaires to an executive at Dreamworks Studios.
The executive initially seems excited by the idea of the film until he learns from Ebdus that Johnny Bragg is (in 1999) still alive, creating potential problems in optioning the rights to the story.