‘Johnny Cash’s career was on the slide – and then a concert at Folsom Prison changed everything’

The Telegraph’s music critic Neil Mccormick on the legendary singer/songwriter, who died 17 years ago today

‘Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.’ When you hear those words, in that unmistakable shaky voice of gravel and dust, you know you are in safe hands. Even in a maximum-security prison, surrounded by hardened felons stomping and howling like there’s a riot going on.

On 13 January, 1968, dressed in his trademark black suit and white shirt, Johnny Cash stood on a makeshift stage in a cavernous cafeteria at Folsom Prison in California, where he had been invited to perform, and launched into his song, Folsom Prison Blues. The country singer had written it in 1953, while serving as a radio operator in the US Air Force in Germany, dreaming of a music career. Backed by his taut and rattling band, The Tennessee Three, Cash leaned into his microphone to deliver the song’s most famous line: ‘I shot a man in Reno… just to watch him die!’ The prisoners yelled their approval. Cash was a man who knew his audience. But the longing and despair of the next line must have landed even harder. ‘When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and cry.’

Cash was in bad shape when he took his act to Folsom. He was 35 years old, in the middle of a bitter divorce, separated from his children, and ravaged by drug addiction. He hadn’t had a hit in 10 years. He’d been dreaming of recording this live album almost as long.

Even when he was a young stablemate of Elvis Presley at Sun Records, Cash had never looked cut out for pop stardom. He had a voice as ancient as the spring from which his folk and country heritage sprang, and the looks to go with it. His hands were bony and rough-skinned, testament to a childhood spent picking cotton and picking fights. His face was whip-thin and dust blown, brow furrowed with deep grooves, eyes sunken and haunted. ‘I always thought somebody was trailing me,’ he once said of that younger self. It may have been the ghost of his beloved older brother Jack, who died, aged 12, in a horrific chainsaw accident. ‘I probably never did get over it,’ he once said.

In the build up to the concert, Cash wrote songs that would speak to his captive crowd. He may not have been the hardened outlaw of his image, but he had been arrested many times for drink and drug misdemeanours, and knew what it was like to spend the night in a cell, to be paraded before loved ones in handcuffs. He knew the pain of loss, had felt the torment of addiction, the temporary release of whisky and amphetamines, the guilt and shame that inevitably followed. Every song was chosen to express empathy for some of the least regarded people on the planet. He ended with Greystone Chapel, a spiritual song about God’s mercy, written by a Folsom inmate, Glen Sherley, seated in the audience, serving five years for armed robbery.

It was only the second time he’d played in a prison, but it gave him a hit single and put him back on the map. Released in May, 1968, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison was a US country number one, earning two Grammy awards and praise from counterculture critics. It reminded the world what a giant of a talent Cash really was, revitalising the career of ‘the man in black’.

Across six decade, Cash wrestled with big themes: love, hate, crime, punishment, forgiveness, redemption, mortality and salvation. ‘I have a feeling for human nature in difficult situations,’ Cash told me just a year before his death on 12 September, 2003, aged 71. ‘Truth is what ties it all together.’