Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison

On January thirteenth, nineteen sixty-eight, Johnny Cash walked into the dining hall of Folsom State Prison and played two sets for an audience of approximately two thousand inmates. Columbia Records had been resisting this project for two years. The label did not believe a prison album would sell. Cash had been trying to record at Folsom since nineteen sixty-six, and he had been advocating for prison reform for the better part of fifteen years before that.

He opened with 'Folsom Prison Blues,' a song he had written in nineteen fifty-three after watching a film called 'Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison.' The song begins with a man watching a train go by from a prison cell and thinking about all the places that train is going that he cannot. Cash wrote it at twenty-one. He recorded it live at the prison when he was thirty-five, in a room full of men who were living the premise of the song.

The album was recorded by Columbia under producer Bob Johnston. It reached number one on the country charts. It was eventually certified platinum. The most analyzed part of it, by musicians and historians alike, is not the music but the moments between songs, the remarks Cash made, unrehearsed, to an audience that had very little reason to trust anyone who came in from the outside. He talked to them like human beings, in a room where that was not the norm.

Cash followed the Folsom album with a second live recording at San Quentin a year later. Both albums sold. Prison conditions in California did not dramatically improve. Cash kept talking about them anyway, until he died in two thousand and three.

The dining hall where he performed is inside an active state prison. You cannot go in. But you are standing outside the wall that was there when he stood in there, on a January morning, and did the most important thing he ever did.