JOHNNY CASH
Clang! The Man In Black’s prison LPs were high-risk gambits that exemplified his compassion for the underdog – but had a tragic epilogue.
’s prison albums –
At Folsom Prison and At San Quentin
– defined the singer’s rebel spirit and compassion for society’s overlooked. With a new documentary pivoting on these key recordings, MOJO returns to 1968/69 and the shows that saved the Man In Black’s career. “John knew what was at stake,” discovers .
“He was on a mission.”
JOHNNY CASH STOOD ON THE MAKESHIFT STAGE at Folsom Prison, set up in the cafeteria behind death row. Almost a hundred men had been executed in this maximum security facility, one of the first in the country, and there he was, singing 25 Minutes To Go, Shel Silverstein’s grimly comic countdown sung by a prisoner awaiting his own hanging.
“The sheriff said, ‘Boy, I’m gonna watch you die’ – got 19 minutes to go…” Cash intoned. “So I laughed in his face and I spit in his eye – got 18 minutes to go…”
Two weeks earlier, some of the Folsom convicts had held a guard at knifepoint, and Cash’s captive audience had been warned that the show would be stopped if anyone so much as left his seat. Armed guards were obser ving from ramps overhead. But they didn’t bother Cash – at least not so his band could notice.
“Folsom was just another show,” says W.S. ‘Fluke’ Holland, Cash’s drummer from 1960 until the singer retired from touring in 1997, and the man behind the trap set on January 13, 1968.
“People think it was scary, but that didn’t happen – everybody was nice, there were no problems. John didn’t say any more about that show than if we were playing [US war veterans association] the VFW!”
Cash had, however, carefully worked out his setlist for this concert, and the emotions and experiences he very deliberately expressed that day would make the subsequent Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison album a landmark, not just in country music, but in American culture and beyond.
HESE SONGS ARE TALKING ABOUT THE PAIN AND the hurt, and the human spirit that overcomes,” said Johnny Cash. “And all of us have gone through the hard times and know what we speak of when we speak of these things.”
It was August 2002 and your correspondent was sitting across a simple kitchen table from the Man In Black. We were in the “Cash Cabin”, the singer’s retreat/recording studio deep in the woods adjoining Hickory Lake on the edge of Hendersonville, Tennes
see.We were talking about the soon-tobe-released American IV: The Man Comes Around, the latest instalment in the American Recordings series spearheaded by Rick Rubin, and the final music that would be issued during his lifetime. It included his version of Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt that would serve (along with its harrowing, unforgettable music video) as his stunning epitaph.
But, nearing the end of his life, Cash’s description of his new music also summarised the compassion that drove him throughout his career. His sympathy with and understanding of the underdog, and his use of his platform to give a voice to the voiceless, led not by dogma but by simple human decency, was defining, and no better exemplified than by his prison shows – notably those recorded at Folsom Prison, outside Sacramento, California, in January 1968, and San Quentin on the San Francisco Bay in February 1969. In Thom Zimny’s recent documentary The Gift: The Journey Of Johnny Cash, the Folsom performance is a recurring motif, the moment that both crystallises and reshapes his life’s work.
“Folsom was a turning point in his career,” says Cash scholar Michael Streissguth, author of Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison: The Making Of A Masterpiece. “It established the guy known as the Man In Black. And it’s taken on more importance as we see less discussion of social issues in country music, or even in folk or rock. As empty or tenuous as it actually was, people put a lot of faith in music’s ability to effect change. Folsom is an example of music that could at least effect discussion and debate.”
Not that Cash himself always presented his choices in such serious terms to those around him. “John liked to play prisons – it was just something he liked to do,” says Holland, who played both the Folsom and San Quentin shows. “One time, somebody asked him why he liked it, and he said, ‘I like it because the audience is really great, and if I happen to do or say something that somebody don’t like, they can’t leave!’”
OHNNY CASH’S INTEREST IN THE population behind bars dated back at least as far as his time in the United States Air Force. In 1953, while he was stationed in Landsberg, Germany, he saw a noir crime movie titled Inside The Walls Of Folsom Prison, directed by Crane Wilbur (who had also recently screenwritten red scare B-flick I Was A Communist For The FBI).
“That movie just really got to me,” Cash once said. “I thought of that movie half of the night, and then I got up and started writing.” Elsewhere, he said, “I could relate my life in the Air Force to the lives of those prisoners.”
The melody and many of the words of the song he came up with were actually pilfered from Crescent City Blues by Gordon Jenkins; later, after the release of the At Folsom Prison album, Jenkins brought a lawsuit that saw Cash pay a settlement of roughly $75,000. But Folsom Prison Blues – first released on the flip of So Doggone Lonesome in 1955 – became a classic, with the line “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die” setting the tone for anti-hero movies and gangsta rappers to come.
After his early success with Sam Phillips’ Sun Records, including his first Number 1 country hit with
I Walk The Line in 1956, Cash soon started playing for prisoners, with little media attention. His first performance behind bars was at Huntsville State Prison in 1957, and he performed at San Quentin as early as 1958. The most notable aspect of his prison concerts – apart from the simple fact he was playing them – was the respect he showed for the incarcerated. Merle Haggard, who was in the audience for one of the early San Quentin shows while he was locked up after an arrest for robbery, clearly remembered Cash’s on-stage attitude.
“What stood out, even more than his music, was his demeanour,” Haggard later told MOJO’s Sylvie Simmons. “He was a bit cocky and a bit arrogant… it seemed like it didn’t matter [to him] whether he was able to sing [well] or not.” The Country Music Hall of Famer recalled the concert as something that “may have been the first ray of daylight I had seen in my entire life.”
But after that initial burst of popularity and a jump to Columbia Records in 1960, Cash’s career slowed down. He focused on a series of concept albums exploring different aspects of American history, from the railroads to the plight of Native Americans. These projects were challenging creatively, but commercially limited.
In addition, Cash was in the grip of an addiction to pills that was affecting his work and his reputation. He was arrested seven times between 1959 and 1968 for various infractions, and while he never spent more than a night in jail, this era secured his image as a man who had done time – while also strengthening the bonds he felt with the men and women who’d been locked up. “So many people think John really was in prison,” Fluke Holland tells MOJO today. “One day I told him that everywhere I go, somebody talks about him being in prison. I would always try to tell them, ‘No, he wasn’t’ – but I said, ‘I’m going to just start telling them yes, he’s a mean dude, almost got put in the electric chair,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, you do that!’”
As his sales slipped, Cash sensed that recording at a prison would bring out the best in both him and the audience, and – desperate for usable new material – Columbia agreed to record a 1965 show at Kansas State Reformatory. As the date came closer, though, Cash was in such bad shape that the show was cancelled, and after that the label wasn’t willing to risk setting up a live recording of any kind. Cash’s prison album idea was, it seemed, on its own death row.
TAGNATION IN CASH’S CAREER WAS matched by turmoil in his private life: divorce from his first wife, Vivian Liberto, accompanied a crisis point in his addiction to uppers. Determined to get clean for the new love of his life, singer June Carter of country’s Carter
Family, he went through a detox under the supervision of Dr Nat Winston, who was the Tennessee Commissioner of Mental Health and would later run for governor. But according to Cash, Winston told him, “I don’t think there is much chance for you. I’ve never known of anyone as far gone as you are to really whip it.”
Meanwhile, there had been changes to the executive team at Columbia Records, and in 1967, Bob Johnston, the producer of Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde and destined to helm more key albums by Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Simon & Garfunkel, among others, was put in charge of Cash’s recordings. Cash re-pitched the idea of recording a prison concert. Johnston pounced on the idea, picking up the phone and calling San Quentin. When he couldn’t get through, he called Folsom Prison, unaware that Cash had played there as recently as 1966.
The warden, Walter E. Craven, was enthusiastic, and two performances were scheduled for January 13, 1968. Still, not everyone was convinced about the commercial viability of the project. “I said to Bob Johnston, There’s no use recording this show – it won’t pay for the tape!” recalls Fluke Holland.
The performers rehearsed until nearly midnight on the eve of the shows, allowing extra time to learn a new song, Greystone Chapel, a spiritual written by Folsom inmate Glen Sherley, who was doing five years to life for armed robbery. Cash arrived at Folsom early in the morning; the first show in the prison cafeteria was set for 9.40am. Cash was already tense – and he had downed a bunch of pills before leaving his motel. Still wary after the aborted Kansas concert, Columbia hadn’t invited any reporters to the Folsom appearances, but aspiring journalist Robert Hilburn (later, Cash’s biographer) was tipped off to the shows by a local country music DJ, and covered the event for the Los Angeles Times.
“John was extremely nervous because he knew what was at stake,” says Hilburn. “He was on a mission. Before going on stage, he leaned against a wall and studied the prisoners, trying to pick up on their mood to help better reach them. Once he stepped on that stage, he was in full command.”
Out of this tension came one of the most storied performances in music history. His signature introduction – “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash” – was followed not by the usual whoops and screams, but by a dramatic silence from the audience of 1,000 who had been put on notice to behave and to “welcome him” only after he had spoken.
He opened, inevitably, with Folsom Prison Blues. The 18 songs that followed covered a remarkable, perfectly attuned emotional range – multiple songs focusing on prison life (The Wall; Green, Green Grass Of Home), but also songs of despair (Dark As A Dungeon; Long Black Veil) and of low comedy (Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog; Flushed From The Bathroom Of Your Heart). “Folsom was connected to the most important things in his life,” says Rosanne Cash in The Gift documentary: “both loss and salvation.”
Cash played up his outlaw side. “I just wanna tell ya that this show is being recorded for an album release on Columbia
Records and you can’t say ‘hell’ or ‘shit’ or anything like that,” he smirked at one point. He ended the show with Greystone Chapel, to the delight of the audience. “Hope we do your song justice, Glen,” he said to Sherley, who was seated in the front row.
“When he introduces Glen Sherley, that’s when he was truly in communion with his audience,” says Michael Streissguth. “That’s the moment when he was actually doing what ever ybody said he did with that show.”
ASH’S FOLSOM SHOWS WERE MORE THAN A strategic move, more than a marketing stunt, more than even just a show of support for a constituency Cash had long supported (although they were all of those, too). These performances were also a shot at redemption.
“I’m not sure any other concert I’ve seen over the years matched it for sheer emotional fervour,” says Hilburn. “The thing I remember, most of all, was Cash’s blazing artistry. I realised he wasn’t just a guy who wanted to have hits; he had a deeper purpose. He wanted to inspire and uplift that audience – to reach out to them and say, all is not lost. The moment was electric.”
The promotion of the album also emphasised Cash’s dark side. “He looked menacing, the linernotes suggested that he had done hard time, it fed the darkness,” says Streissguth. “They reinforced the myth of Cash the outlaw – which was the source, for some, of the interest in him.”
But the truth is that when At Folsom Prison was released in May, Columbia didn’t put much effort into supporting the album. The label was riding high as two albums by Simon & Garfunkel, Bookends and the soundtrack to The Graduate, were battling it out at the top of the charts. But the live version of Folsom Prison Blues started getting country and pop airplay – with one interesting modification from the original tapes.
In an unforgettable moment, when Cash sings, “I shot a man in Reno/Just to watch him die,” the audience of prisoners lets out a wild cheer. This reaction was actually spliced into the recording by Johnston for effect, since the Folsom Prison inmates were under strict orders to stay under control – but it made a haunting, indelible impression.
The song went through yet another edit when, 11 days after it charted, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. The recording was withdrawn, the “shot a man in Reno” line was removed (over Cash’s objections), and then it was sent back out to radio. This didn’t slow the single’s momentum; it reached Number 1 on the country charts and hit the pop Top 40.
The At Folsom Prison album continued building steam, also hitting Number 1 on the country chart and climbing all the way to Number 13 on the pop side. It remained on the country charts for 92 weeks, and in the Billboard Top 200 for 124 weeks. The album was certified gold in autumn 1968.
The success was certainly gratifying for Cash, but even before the Folsom album came out, he had other things on his mind. In the few months between the prison concert and the album release, he and June Carter got engaged – and married. For their honeymoon, they travelled to Israel; Cash recorded their observations during the trip, and the words of their Israeli tour guide, on a portable tape recorder, and linked these spoken word snippets to a set of new gospel songs. The Holy Land did surprisingly solid business, reaching
the country Top 10 and Number 54 pop, and included the joyful, old-timey hit single Daddy Sang Bass, which spent six weeks at the top of the country chart.
UT THE RESPONSE TO AT FOLSOM Prison practically demanded a follow-up. Cash went back behind bars to record another live album in February 1969, this time at San Quentin, the first place Johnston had called. It was his fourth performance at the penitentiary, which might help explain the looser, wilder feel of the recording. Throughout the 21-song set (which Cash said “might have been the first” drug-free performance he gave in many years), he can be heard laughing, joking, yelling. Compared with the tense Folsom show, there’s much more of an us-against-them feel, exemplified by San Quentin, the song he wrote specifically for the event and sang twice.
According to the eyewitness account by music journalist Ralph J. Gleason, when Cash sang the line “San Quentin, may you rot and burn in hell,” the reaction was electric. “The cons screamed back,” Gleason wrote. “A tall young guard spun around, smacked one fist into the other palm and said, ‘He’s right!’… What he did was right on the edge. If he had screwed it up one notch tighter, the joint would have exploded.” (“During the second rendition,” Cash later said, “all I would have had to do was say ‘Break!’ and they were gone, man.”)
The folklore around the San Quentin show is embodied in Jim Marshall’s famous image of Cash flipping off the camera, a photo that still shows up on T-shirts and posters, one of rock’n’roll’s most iconic expressions of rebel spirit. In the linernotes for the 2000 reissue of At San Quentin, Cash explained that he was frustrated because the crew from England’s Granada Films was blocking his view of the audience. When the shooters ignored his request to “clear the stage”, out came the middle finger.
“The San Quentin concert was more scripted,” says Streissguth. “This time, he knows what he’s going to be able to accomplish. There were no expectations around Folsom, but now there’s a film crew, he trots out a song an inmate had written – it’s not as authentic a moment.”
But At San Quentin matched the multi-million sales of At Folsom Prison. The material (the halfbaked Bob Dylan co-write Wanted Man, the gospel classic Peace In The Valley) fell short of the finely attuned selections at Folsom. But one unexpected performance, of a new shaggy-dog poem written by Shel Silverstein, would become the biggest hit of Cash’s career.
“We couldn’t hear too good at San Quentin,” says Fluke Holland. “We didn’t really have monitors and the audience was so loud. When John played A Boy Named Sue, I had never heard it before. Before that song, you can hear paper rattling, and that’s him getting out the poem that Shel had sent him. Carl Perkins was up next to John’s mike, so he could hear it a little bit – he kicked the guitar off and we started playing to that. Stuff like that happened in Johnny Cash’s band. Other bands had to practise, but we never did.”
The San Quentin version of A Boy Named Sue became a phenomenon. It won a Grammy award for Best Male Country Vocal Performance (At San Quentin was nominated for Album Of The Year). It topped the country and adult contemporary charts, and spent three weeks at Number 2 on the pop charts, held off only by The Rolling Stones’ Honky Tonk Women.
OON, WITH THE LAUNCH OF THE Johnny Cash Show on the ABC network in June 1969, Cash became an even bigger celebrity. But his involvement with the incarcerated didn’t stop after At San Quentin, and his concern went beyond just showing up for musical performances. In 1972, he testified at a US Senate judiciary subcommittee hearing on prison reform, offering his support for proposals to keep minors out of jail and to focus on rehabilitating inmates.
In 1973, Albert Nussbaum – once on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list for bank robbery – wrote an account of Cash’s appearance at Leavenworth for Charleston, West Virginia’s Sunday Gazette Mail. He focused mostly on the effect that Cash had simply by acknowledging the humanity of those behind bars. “We came because we care,” Nussbaum quoted Cash telling the crowd. “We care. We really do. If there’s ever anything I can do for you all, let me know somehow, and I’ll do it.”
This promise, though, proved traumatic in terms of Cash’s relationship with Glen Sherley. Cash maintained an interest in the jailed singersongwriter after recording Greystone Chapel at
BILLY BRAGG played his first prison gig in the mid-1980s – it was notorious Victorian “big hoose” Barlinnie, in Glasgow. “It wasn’t on quite the same scale as Johnny Cash,” he tells MOJO. “We played in the chapel to about a 100 inmates. It was an amazing place to visit. After the show there were tea and cakes – an opportunity to socialise. That was an insight.”
Bragg has played plenty of shows ‘inside’ since then, and since 2007 he has spearheaded Jail Guitar Doors, an organisation providing guitars to prisons as an aid to rehabilitation. In the past 12 years, they’ve donated over 500 instruments to around 70 prisons. A US franchise, headed by MC5’s Wayne Kramer, does similarly sterling work. In its intent to reach out and make an emotional connection with the incarcerated, Bragg sees the project’s common cause with Johnny Cash’s prison albums.
What was your first experience of the Johnny Cash prison records?
I remember when A Boy Named Sue was in the charts. We didn’t have a record player at my house but my Uncle Dave had At San Quentin. I liked the rowdiness, and I think A Boy Named Sue has a bleeped word: “son-of-a-bitch”. That was exciting.
When you started playing in prisons yourself, were you apprehensive?
Not really. You have to remember you’re going to see them, they’re not coming to see you. A lot of the guys I meet doing Jail Guitar Doors are much too young to know who I am. But there’s a way around that: Bob Marley. A bit of Redemption Song always breaks the ice. Another thing is you should never ask people what they’re in for. They’ve already been judged, they don’t need to be judged by you as well. And don’t be playing lots of prison songs – they know they’re in prison, also, you’re not Johnny
Cash. You’re a break in their boring routine, so try to make the most of that. Try to make a real connection.
What songs do you find go down well?
The Drugs Don’t Work by The Verve always seems to resonate. Of my own songs, I Keep Faith, which reflects the reason the guitars are being donated and allows me to talk about that. I often ask if there’s anyone who wants to play a song and it’s really interesting what they sing about. I took part in a week of songwriting activity at Walton prison in Liverpool, with a gig at the end, and the inmates mostly wanted to write songs about their mums. And these are pretty hard-looking geezers. But these were the songs that most moved the audience.
It’s not just the people who are in jail, it’s their creativity. Like Glen Sherley in Folsom Prison… Playing a musical instrument allows you to momentarily transcend your surroundings. Me and my mates in our band [Riff Raff] in the ’70s were trying to step out of our schoolboy lives and become the Faces. And that’s even more important in an environment like a prison. Then there’s the therapeutic aspect. Doing Jail Guitar Doors since 2007, the point of entry has moved from the chapel staff to education and now it’s health. One of the prisons we supply guitars to gets people to busk on the landings during the changeovers, because that’s when there are most confrontations. They find having someone there singing a few songs helps take some of the heat out of the moment.
What’s the latest news re: Jail Guitar Doors? This year we’ve got guitars into four more prisons – maybe one more before Christmas. On an average year we manage to get them into another half a dozen new prisons. Most recently, we sent some nylon-string guitars to HMP Send. They specifically wanted nylon strings because they’re dealing with people with self-harm issues. We ran into some problems a couple of years ago when there was a blanket ban on steel-string guitars. But with the help of Kevin Brennan MP, we went into the Home Office and got that overturned.
It’s now transatlantic, with Wayne Kramer…
I did something with Wayne around South By South West and we got into a county jail in Austin. That was slightly different from a British prison. There were men and women. When the women came in they sat at the back and the men weren’t allowed to turn around and look at them. And when the alarm went off, you had to lie flat on the ground, because all the prison officers are armed, and a sign on the way in said NO WARNING SHOTS.
As a performer, how different are prison shows? In my experience, prison audiences have a different perspective on a gig. They laugh at things other people wouldn’t laugh at. You’re going into their space – don’t be surprised if they react differently to another audience. But it’s very fulfilling. And very fulfilling to get a letter, as I recently did, from an inmate telling me how the guitars had helped, particularly how they’d helped him stay in touch with his daughter on the outside. The power that music has in the everyday is kind of supercharged in prison. It becomes a really important vehicle for empathy. And there isn’t a lot of empathy in prison.
There was a guy in Ford Open Prison who got one of our guitars, and he was a really good songwriter. He was writing songs for other inmates to send to their girlfriends – a great gig! A couple of years later I was in HMP Isle Of Wight and saw another guy who’d been in Ford at the same time. I said, What happened to the songwriter? And he said, “Oh he’s out now, he’s running gymnasiums.” And I asked, Is he still writing songs? And he said, “Nah, he only did that to get him through his time.” I see that. The guitar gave him a raft to hold onto when he was in that difficult situation. But now he’s out he doesn’t need it, and that’s great too.
Folsom and Sherley’s fortunes improved; he recorded an album while still behind bars and one of his songs, Portrait Of My Woman, was cut by Eddy Arnold. When Sherley was released from prison in 1971, Cash met him at the gates. The singer also brought Glen Sherley with him to Congress.
Sherley began performing with Cash as part of the latter’s touring party, but he displayed emotional troubles and threatened members of the cast. Eventually Cash cut off their friendship, and Sherley committed suicide in 1978; Cash paid for the funeral, but he never even mentions Sherley’s name in his 1997 autobiography.
“That was crushing,” Rosanne Cash has said of the effect of Sherley’s death on her father. “The burden of thinking that you were responsible for turning people’s lives around – he realised he couldn’t do it, and then he just stopped all of it. He certainly helped people for the rest of his life, but this idea that he could save some people, that went away.”
While Cash found there were limits to his abilities to transform the lives of the lost, the spirit of the Folsom and San Quentin albums endured, helping resurrect the singer’s sales and redefine him as an outlaw with a conscience. In 1971, he built on it with a song, and an album, that would prove one of the most durable props in his self-mythology: Man In Black.
Though Cash had often explained that he wore black clothes on-stage out of superstition, or for their simplicity, or just because they could go longer without washing, now the colour took on symbolic meaning as a protest against poverty, prisons, ageism and the ongoing war in Vietnam. He would wear it, from then on, as a gesture of support for all “the ones who are held back.”
HERE WAS PLENTY OF SHOWBIZ IN CASH’S PRISON albums, but the singer’s empathy for his audience and his belief in the possibility of their redemption were not for show. “Dad appealed to so many people in so many ways in so many different places,” said his son, John Carter Cash, “because he truly was a champion for every man, he honestly cared. He could put himself in a place of humility, to know what it felt like to be a prisoner. Whether that was a fantasy or an illusion, those people knew it, and you could not tell them otherwise.”
When I spoke to Johnny Cash in his cabin in the Tennessee woods, he was still thinking of his relationship with his fans. Though his days were numbered and he would only make it to a stage a few more times, he continued to reinforce his dedication to the people who had been listening to him for almost 50 years, whether in concert halls or prison yards. “I make that commitment to ever y crowd, to every audience. I don’t leave my audience no matter what the problems are.
“I won’t leave you,” he said, “if you won’t leave me.”
Alan Light is the author of Johnny Cash: The Life And Legacy Of The Man In Black (Smithsonian Books). Michael Streissguth’s updated Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison: The Making Of A Masterpiece (University Press Of Mississippi) is out now.