NO. 1 WITH A BULLET
Cash wrote his quintessential American ‘outlaw’ song in Germany
“I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die”: it’s perhaps the most chilling line ever written in popular song. And the words are perhaps even more famous than the song from which they come, Folsom Prison Blues by Johnny Cash.
Cash explained to Rolling Stone magazine what inspired the line: “I sat … trying to think up the worst reason a person could have for killing another person, and that’s what came to mind.”
The track came to be regarded as one of the great American country music songs and one that perhaps defined Cash’s career. It combines two archetypes of country music — the train song and the prison song — as well as two characteristics of Cash himself: sin, and the search for redemption.
This quintessentially American song was actually written in what was then known as West Germany, while Cash served in the U.S. air force in the early 1950s. He wrote it after watching the film Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison, a drama about the jail near Sacramento, Calif.
He leaned heavily, however, on the melody of a song, Crescent City Blues, by U.S. composer Gordon Jenkins and even stole a few lines of its lyrics. Cash said he did so because he had no inkling of becoming a professional songwriter at the time, and was later badly advised about his right to borrow so freely. He redeemed matters by paying Jenkins a $75,000 settlement following a 1969 lawsuit — and by creating a much superior song.
He upped Jenkins’s slow, bluesy tempo to a chugging, train-like rhythm, somewhere between standard country and rock ’n’ roll — a combination that was to become his hallmark. His dark lyrics were related by the Reno killer. Languishing in Folsom Prison, he is tortured by regret and the sound of passing trains, their whistles, rattling wheels and passengers symbolizing his lost freedom. “I know I had it comin’/ I know I can’t be free/ But those people keep a-movin’/ And that’s what tortures me.”
Cash first recorded the song in 1955 for Sam Phillips’s Sun Records in Memphis. It reached No. 4 on the Billboard country chart and helped launch him to stardom. His second recording of it in 1968, however, was to be even more successful.
By then his career had nosedived as he became a prisoner to amphetamines and without a hit record for four years. But, having shed his addiction, he decided to record a live album at Folsom Prison. Cash was a lifelong champion of prisoners, and performed free concerts for them regularly throughout his career; in January 1968 he performed two shows at the prison, recordings of which were released as the classic album At Folsom Prison.
At the prison shows, he used for the first time what became his introductory catchphrase: “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.” Then he and his band launched into Folsom Prison Blues. This version, with the addition of drums, was more muscular than the original, and Cash’s rich-as-molasses baritone, in response to the setting and audience, carried an extra emotional punch. As a single, it hit No. 1 on the Billboard country chart, crossed over to the mainstream chart and won Cash a Grammy best country vocal award.
The song was covered by just about every male country star during the 1960s, including Charley Pride, Conway Twitty, Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard — the latter most appropriately. When Cash performed at San Quentin Prison, Calif., in 1959, Haggard was in the audience, serving time for burglary.
Bob Dylan and The Band recorded it as part of The Basement Tapes sessions, and Dylan often performed it on stage during the 1990s. Jerry Lee Lewis cut it twice, first in 1980 and again in 2014. Blood on the Saddle turned it into high-speed punk in 1987; the Beastie Boys sampled it on Hello Brooklyn two years later; and Keb’ Mo’ returned the song to its blues origin in 2002.
Cash, who would have been 88 this week, died in 2003 and two years later Joaquin Phoenix starred as the artist in the Cash biopic Walk the Line. The highlight of the film for many? Phoenix singing Folsom Prison Blues in the scene recreating that 1968 concert. The Financial Times Limited 2020. All rights reserved. FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Limited. Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.