Johnny Cash—At Folsom Prison (1968)

Johnny Cash, the Man in Black.

FUN FACTS

• At Folsom Prison (1968) is an album by American singer-songwriter Johnny Cash. He’d done many concerts in prison before. But this was the one at Folsom at 1958 was the first one recorded for an album release. It was released through Columbia Records in May 1968.
• As a project, the Folsom prison concert happened at a time when Johnny Cash was trying to turn his life around. He had overcome some of the worst and longest periods of substance addiction, and he wanted to release music that would help reinvigorate his career. With At Folsom Prison (1968) he got his wish. The album was received with overwhelming praise by critics and was certified gold in two months.

• June Carter accompanied Johnny Cash and his band and sang Jackson with him on stage.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

If you have to listen to one album and one album only from our 60s list, let it be Johnny Cash’s live album, At Folsom Prison (1968). If you’re not into country music as a genre, that’s fine. The scope of this album goes beyond genre. The story, the music, the performance that Johnny Cash delivered at Folsom Prison in 1968 cut across tastes and across time. At the heart of the album are themes that resonate with us to this day. Rage. Mercy. Redemption. Freedom.

I’m not the first person to write about falling in love with Johnny Cash, nor will I be the last. And there’s a lot to be fascinated with.

Johnny Cash was born poor. He experienced a lot of pain and trauma growing up; he lost his brother in a violent accident and he had a difficult relationship with his dad. Throughout his life, he battled addiction and substance abuse. But there were also moments of lightness and solace. His music. His relationship with June Carter. He lived in a very conservative part of the United States, and he had this innate ability to see the world as an outsider. Outcast. Outlaw. Never quite fitting the mould. He was known as the Man in Black, the proverbial black sheep in any given room. But the irony was, he inhabited a lot of grey area as a person and an artist. And he brought that depth into his music. There’s no greater example of this than his prison concerts.

He had been performing concerts in prison for free since his first gig at Huntsville State Prison, Alabama in 1957. He was brought to that space by a song he had written while serving in the Air Force Germany—Folsom Prison Blues, which samples Gordon Jenkins’ Crescent City Blues. Even though the song barely made waves with the general public, it earned Cash a following within prisons across the country. Inmates would write him letters and he would write back. Until, eventually, it wasn’t just his letters or his songs crossing the barbed wire fence.

Johnny Cash himself had never done prison time. He stayed no more than a night to a few days in jail for various misdemeanors. But that helped cultivate a public persona of being country music’s bad boy. Whether or not he thought of himself that way, the outsider perspective shaped the kind of singer-songwriter he became.

The prison correspondence left a deep and lasting impression on him about the damage prison can cause people, and it gave him the range to perform the way the songs he did on this album: with a kind of authority that was neither pretentious nor patronizing. He addressed things from the point of view of someone who was conscious of life on the margins, of prisoners and criminals, Native Americans and migrants, anybody shut out by larger society.

Some of the songs he performed were songs he wrote, like Folsom Prison Blues, I Still Miss Someone, Send a Picture of Mother, Give My Love To Rose, and I Got Stripes. Others were standards in the genre, all of them written from the perspective of lawbreakers and outlaws, fugitives and convicts. In his performances, Johnny Cash didn’t make a spectacle of his audience. He cultivated empathy, reminding people that you didn’t have to be a criminal to feel like prisoner in some way.

He continued to do all that offstage. He was a lifelong activist for prison reform and even testified at a Senate hearing in 1972. He supported Glen Sherley after he was released from prison.

Cash performed Sherley’s poem, Greystone Chapel, at the end of his concert, turning Sherley’s words into a Southern gospel choir hymn:

Now there’s greystone chapel here at Folsom
Stands a hundred years old made of granite rock
It takes a ring of keys to move here at Folsom
But the door to the House of God is never locked

Greystone Chapel

At Folsom Prison (1968) extends Cash‘s legacy beyond the scope of his career as a singer-songwriter and performer. His immortalized performances shed light on something that we often forget about people in prison: they’re still people. Their incarceration mirrors a larger prison that we all inhabit, a society that, too, longs to be free from the demons and injustices of its own circumstance. Cash‘s music creates the opportunity to reflect on the world as it is and the world as it could be. In activist Fannie Lou Hamer‘s famous words, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”

FURTHER DIVE

I want to do good by Johnny Cash and his music and bring attention to important people who I think can broaden our minds when it comes to understanding the idea of prison abolition and how we might as a world rethink our concept of justice, harm reduction, and our responsibilities to our own communities.

Famous prison abolition activists include Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Personally, I started exploring the theories and reading up on community strategies because of Mariame Kaba. Her blog below not only documents her process, thoughts and work fighting in contemporary times, but she also gushes about Johnny Cash many times.

Closer to home, I follow Maria Sol Taule, an activist and human rights lawyer who works with local organization Karapatan. They’re constantly in the political and legal ring, representing activists and fighting to free political prisoners.

FOR YOU

What did you think of Johnny Cash? Send your thoughts to mxaboha@gmail.com!

1. How do you define justice? How do you practice that in your everyday life?
2. Have you heard of prison abolition or prison reform before? Do you think there are other ways that we can reduce harm in society without having prisons?
3. Have you ever been in a dark place in your life and needed someone to just sit and be with you? Have you ever been that someone for someone else?

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At Folsom Prison (1968) Lyrics and Cover Art belong to Johnny Cash and Columbia Records.