Johnny Cash's Masterpiece

Johnny Cash's At Folsom Prison turns forty this year, which has many journalists and historians writing about the album's legacy. This album is truly one of my favorites because it opened up the world of Cash's music to me. Historian Kirk Bane, in a recent article, wrote about the album's legacy.

Bane wrote:

"In a year of landmark musical statements (think, for example, of the Beatles’ White Album, the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and the Stones’ Beggars Banquet), Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison stands proud. Recorded on January 13, 1968, and released four months later, the album featured such unforgettable Cash tracks as “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Jackson,” “I Got Stripes,” “Orange Blossom Special,” “Cocaine Blues,” and “Greystone Chapel,” a religious number written by Folsom inmate Glen Sherley. Performing on a small stage in front of 2,000 enthusiastic California convicts, Cash was at the top of his game, ably supported by June Carter, the Statler Brothers, Carl Perkins, and the Tennessee Three (Luther Perkins, Marshall Grant, and Fluke Holland). Recalling this historic concert, Cash observed, “I gave them a stiff shot of realism, singing about the things they talked about, the outside, shooting, trials, families, escaping, girlfriends, and coming to the end. They knew it was for them.”"

"Cash championed society’s underdogs, the disenfranchised and downtrodden. He sincerely cared for the struggling, hard working laborer, the dispossessed Native American, and the lonely, forgotten inmate. Cash, who had himself “stewed in jail a few nights after alcohol and pill binges,” felt particular solidarity with those confined behind bars. As early as 1957, the singer, hoping to provide the incarcerated “a little relief,” played prison shows, initially visiting penitentiaries in Texas and California. By appearing in prisons, Cash declared, he was “letting inmates know that somewhere out there in the free world was somebody who cared for them as human beings.” He also preached a bold message of penal reform. Cash genuinely believed “that with human compassion many prisoners could find redemption. If all men were promised redemption by God—from drugs, from recklessness, from any sin—that meant prisoners too.”"

Read the entire article here.