Johnny Cash opened the newspaper on the morning of July 18, 1986 to read that after 28 years, 57 albums and 13 number one hits, his days with Columbia Records were over. The 54-year-old Cash — the iconic Man in Black, whose cavernous baritone, plainspoken narratives and signature boom-chicka-boom rhythm revolutionized American music — was one of Columbia’s biggest stars during the 1960s and early 1970s, even headlining his own network television show. But his career cratered during the 1980s, and he hadn’t charted a Top 10 single since “The Baron” back in 1981. Cash desperately needed to move on from Columbia to rejuvenate his creative and commercial momentum, per biographer Graeme Thomson: “He needed a jolt, a change of scene, a new perspective.” And he got them — but not until 1993, when he signed to producer Rick Rubin’s American Recordings and created some of the most acclaimed and impassioned music of his career. This is the story of the period between Cash’s embarrassing exit from Columbia and his rebirth at American, when he landed at Mercury Records to cut six erratic, little-noticed LPs culminating in a collection of re-recorded versions of his best-known hits, including the career-defining “Folsom Prison Blues.”
Cash was born in Kingsland, Ark. on Feb. 26, 1932 and raised four hours southwest in Dyess Colony, a New Deal-era resettlement project promising impoverished families the opportunity to work farmland they could later purchase. A devoted fan of WSM Radio’s live Grand Ole Opry broadcast — in particular the music of country music legends Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams, Roy Acuff and the Carter Family — Cash began writing songs and poems as a child, and sometimes performed them on local radio. After graduating high school, he relocated to Pontiac, Mich. to work in an auto body plant, a job that lasted less than a month, and in 1950 he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force, serving as a Morse code operator in Landesburg, Germany (home to Landesburg Prison, where Adolf Hitler served 264 days on treason charges in the aftermath of 1924’s failed Beer Hall Putsch).
Cash was still stationed in Landesburg in 1953 when he wrote the first version of “Folsom Prison Blues,” a hard-boiled tale of crime and punishment inspired by a viewing of Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison, a 1951 film noir set within California’s infamous Folsom State Prison, one of the nation’s first maximum security facilities. “Folsom Prison Blues” adapted elements from two popular folk traditions, the train song and the prison ballad, and borrowed liberally from the words and music of Gordon Jenkins’ 1953 recording “Crescent City Blues,” but its pulpiest flourish — the immortal lyric “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die” — could have come from nowhere else but Cash’s own fevered imagination: “I sat with my pen in my hand, trying to think up the worst reason a person could have for killing another person, and that’s what came to mind,” he later explained. (Photographer Jim Marshall once asked Cash why the song’s protagonist served time in California for a homicide committed in Nevada, to which Cash replied “That’s called poetic license.”)
Cash and his first wife Vivian settled in Memphis, Tenn. in 1954; by day he sold appliances and studied radio announcing, and at night he played music with the Tennessee Two, guitarist Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant. Cash cut his first single, “Hey Porter,” in mid-1955 for Sam Phillips’ legendary Sun Records label, and on July 30, Cash and the Tennessee Two returned to Sun Studio to document “Folsom Prison Blues.” Recorded with no drummer — Cash instead mimicked a snare drum sound by inserting a piece of paper under his guitar strings and strumming the song’s chugging, locomotive-like rhythm — “Folsom Prison Blues” paints an uncompromisingly lean and mean portrait of life behind bars, and its knife-edged sound and outlaw spirit defined Cash for the remainder of his life and career. “His stance was pure punk,” Chicago Sun-Times pop music critic Jim DeRogatis wrote upon Cash’s death. “He always remained an outsider, walking a line that was truly his own.”
Sun issued “Folsom Prison Blues” as a single on Dec. 15, 1955, backed by another Cash original, “So Doggone Lonesome.” Both sides reached number four on the Billboard C&W Best Sellers chart, and a year later, Cash topped the chart for the first time with the landmark “I Walk the Line,” also a Top 20 pop hit. He grew increasingly frustrated by Sun’s financial limitations, however, and in 1958 signed a lucrative deal with Columbia, scoring another number one record with “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town,” the first single from his major-label debut The Fabulous Johnny Cash. Classics like “Ring of Fire,” “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” (from 1964’s Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian, a concept album exploring the savage treatment of North America’s indigenous peoples at the hands of European settlers) and “Orange Blossom Special” made Cash a superstar, but even as his songbook expanded, “Folsom Prison Blues” remained a constant in his live repertoire; for decades he opened concerts with the song, always after greeting the audience with his trademark growl, “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.”
But Cash’s professional achievements belied his mounting personal struggles. He began drinking heavily after signing with Columbia, and later grew addicted to amphetamines and barbiturates, resulting in multiple run-ins with law enforcement. Long-suffering Vivian, the mother of his four daughters (including oldest child Rosanne, a gifted performer and songwriter in her own right), finally filed for divorce in 1966, citing not only Cash’s substance abuse issues but also his affairs with other women and, last but certainly not least, his intimate relationship with singer June Carter, daughter of the Carter Family’s Mother Maybelle, one of his earliest and most enduring musical influences. Cash toured with the Carter Family in the early 1960s, and in 1967 he and June recorded “Jackson,” a smoldering duet that won them a Grammy. That autumn, Cash was arrested in Walker County, Ga. for prowling, public intoxication and a variety of drug charges; when he attempted to bribe a local deputy, he ended up spending the night in jail. Sheriff Ralph Jones released Cash after a long sermon warning him about the consequences of his actions, an experience Cash often credited with turning around his life. June Carter and her parents moved into Cash’s mansion to help him kick his addictions, and during a Feb. 22, 1968 concert in London, Ontario, Canada, he asked her to be his wife. June accepted, and the couple married a week later in Franklin, Ky.
Cash showed his appreciation for Sheriff Jones’ words of wisdom by returning to Walker County in 1970 to play a benefit concert; the event attracted 12,000 people (to a county only 8,500 called home), and raised $75,000 for the local high school. Cash regularly played these types of benefit gigs: back in 1957, he performed for inmates at Alabama’s Huntsville State Prison, and continued playing penitentiaries in the decade to follow, even appearing at Folsom State Prison in November 1966. When Columbia installed Bob Johnston (the celebrated producer of Bob Dylan’s classic Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde) to lead its country division, Cash seized the opportunity to pitch a long-simmering idea: a live album recorded inside a prison’s walls, before a truly captive audience. Johnston immediately agreed and contacted both Folsom and San Quentin State Prison to gauge their interest in playing host. Folsom was the first to respond, and on Jan. 10, 1968, Cash and June Carter checked into Sacramento’s El Rancho Motel alongside a retinue including Johnston, the Tennessee Three (Perkins, Grant and drummer W.S. Holland), Carl Perkins (Cash’s label mate during Sun Records’ heyday), the Statler Brothers, Johnny’s father Ray Cash and Reverend Floyd Gressett, pastor of the Avenue Community Church in nearby Ventura, Calif. Following two days of rehearsal, the group traveled to Folsom on Jan. 13 to play two shows: one at 9:40 am and the other at 12:40 pm, in case the first performance proved unsatisfactory.
At Folsom Prison captures a singular moment in space and time — arguably no other live record draws so much energy directly from its physical environment and the audience inhabiting it. The live version of “Folsom Prison Blues” that opens the album is faster and rougher-edged than the original Sun single, twitchy with anticipation and adrenaline; the crowd cheers the line “I shot a man in Reno/Just to watch him die” (a response amplified in post-production) but stifles its reactions to Cash’s onstage cracks about Folsom State Prison itself, fearing reprisal from guards. But even when the inmates are at their most restrained, their presence is still palpable. “Listen closely to this album and you’ll hear in the background the clanging of the doors, the shrill of the whistle, the shout of the men — even laughter from men who had forgotten how to laugh,” Cash’s handwritten liner notes reveal. “But mostly you’ll feel the electricity and hear the single pulsation of two thousand heartbeats in men who have had their hearts torn out, as well as their minds, their nervous systems and their souls. Hear the sounds of the men, the convicts — all brothers of mine — with the Folsom Prison Blues.”
Columbia released At Folsom Prison on May 6, 1968, and the live “Folsom Prison Blues” charted on the Billboard Hot 100 on May 25, reaching the country charts a week later. But when Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, radio stations pulled the song over the “Reno” lyric; Columbia demanded Johnston remix the single with the line removed, overriding Cash’s protests. This edited version topped the country charts and crossed over to the pop Top 40, and its success lifted At Folsom Prison to number one on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart and number 13 on the pop albums countdown. The project’s success inspired a direct sequel, At San Quentin, recorded and released in 1969; like its predecessor, it contains a performance of “Folsom Prison Blues,” albeit tucked at the end of the album this time around. At San Quentin, Cash’s first album to reach number one on the pop chart, also produced the smash single “A Boy Named Sue,” and its crossover appeal inspired ABC television to offer Cash his own weekly variety series, The Johnny Cash Show, which aired from June 1969 to March 1971.
The Johnny Cash Show cemented Cash’s public persona as the Man in Black: throughout his career, he shunned the rhinestone suits and cowboy hats favored by most popular country artists in favor of taking the stage in all-black suits and a knee-length black coat, explaining in 1997’s Cash: The Autobiography that his image was inspired by the poor and hungry, the “prisoner who has long paid for his crime” and anyone betrayed by age or drugs. “With the Vietnam War as painful in my mind as it was in most other Americans, I wore it ‘in mourning’ for the lives that could have been,” Cash added. “Apart from the Vietnam War being over, I don’t see much reason to change my position… The old are still neglected, the poor are still poor, the young are still dying before their time, and we’re not making many moves to make things right. There’s still plenty of darkness to carry off.” Cash’s previous autobiography, Man in Black, was published in 1975 and sold 1.3 million copies, but his massive popularity fell off as the decade unfolded: in 1976, he earned his final number one country hit with the novelty “One Piece at a Time,” and a 1979 cover of the venerable cowboy song “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky” soared to number two, signaling his final return to the upper rungs of the charts.
Cash’s long-deteriorating relationship with Columbia Records reached a point of no return with the 1984 release of “The Chicken in Black,” a deeply ill-conceived oddity about transplanting Cash’s brain into the body of a chicken. He was initially enthusiastic about the single, performing it in concert and even filming a music video, but when longtime friend Waylon Jennings (like Cash, later a member of the country music supergroup the Highwaymen) said the video made him look “like a buffoon,” Cash demanded that Columbia withdraw the clip from broadcast and recall the single from stores. “The nadir was ‘Chicken in Black,’ where he was kind of mocking and dismantling his own legacy,” Rosanne Cash told Graeme Thomson for his 2011 book The Resurrection of Johnny Cash: Hurt, Redemption and American Recordings. “There was an undercurrent of desperation in it. It was painful. Everybody [realized it was a big mistake], but that was it — pretty much the end of [his tenure with] Columbia.” The label had by this time given up on reigniting Cash’s commercial appeal after years of increasingly indifferent recordings and dramatic changes in listener sensibilities: “Let’s say I take out big, big ads in all the trade magazines. OK. What else?” said Rick Blackburn, at that time the head of Columbia-Epic-CBS Nashville. “When I go to a 28-year-old music radio director in Houston linked into two dance clubs, doing remote broadcasts, who’s a big deal, and when he asks ‘What have you got new that’s doing boot-scootin’ boogie, buddy,’ what do you say? Johnny Cash?”
Accounts differ on whether Cash jumped from Columbia or if he was pushed. Blackburn told Thomson that Cash’s contract with the label was up and that Columbia did not feel it could match the sum offered by Mercury Records, although Dick Asher, then president and CEO of Mercury parent Polygram Records, called Cash’s proposed agreement with the company “relatively modest,” adding “He wanted a deal with us. He somehow didn’t like the way he was treated [at Columbia]. Maybe that was to do with the negotiations, that he felt they were insulting in view of what they had done in the past.” Blackburn agreed that Cash and his camp could publicly announce the move from Columbia to Mercury, but before the news could be made official, the Nashville Tennessean’s Bob Oermann reported that Columbia had dropped Cash from its roster, a bombshell headline picked up for national coverage by USA Today. Reaction inside the country music world was swift and decisive: “You’re the son of a bitch that sat at that desk over there and fired Johnny Cash,” an enraged Merle Haggard (who as a San Quentin inmate witnessed no fewer than three life-changing Cash shows within its confines) told Blackburn. “Let it go down in history that you’re the dumbest son of a bitch I’ve ever met.”
Cash recorded six albums for Mercury during his five-year stint with the label, reaching the country Top 40 only once, with 1988’s “That Old Wheel,” a collaboration with Hank Williams Jr. The self-produced Classic Cash: Hall of Fame Series, cut at Nashville’s Gospel Country Network Studio in late 1987, consists entirely of re-recordings of songs from his Sun and Columbia glory days, updated with modern production techniques, including synthesizers. The version of “Folsom Prison Blues” featured here in KORD hails from the Classic Cash sessions, and while it’s intrinsically sad to hear Cash return to a song he’s already definitively recorded twice — once for Sam fucking Phillips and Sun Records, no less, then again to kick off one of the greatest live LPs ever released — at least he eschews the overproduction missteps that torpedo some of the album’s other remakes. Still, the additions of Jack Hale’s harmonica and Earl P. Ball’s piano can’t make up for what this recording of “Folsom Prison Blues” lacks: namely, the hunger and humanity of the 1955 original.
While Cash’s Mercury tenure went largely unnoticed, a new generation of performers was rediscovering and championing his classic recordings. Avowed fans Marc Riley (formerly of the Fall) and Jon Langford (the Welsh-born Chicago alt-country institution celebrated for the Mekons, the Waco Brothers and countless other projects) assembled 1988’s ‘Til Things Are Brighter, a tribute album featuring interpretations of Cash’s songs performed by college-radio cult heroes, and in 1993, he sang “The Wanderer,” the closing track on U2’s Zooropa. Rick Rubin, the acclaimed producer behind hitmakers from Beastie Boys to Red Hot Chili Peppers, offered Cash a deal with his American Recordings label after seeing him perform at Bob Dylan’s 30th anniversary concert in late 1992; Cash was skeptical, but Rubin promised the singer creative carte blanche, resulting in 1994’s American Recordings, recorded in Cash’s living room with no musical accompaniment other than his Martin Dreadnought guitar. The album was a runaway success, winning a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album and inaugurating a partnership with Rubin that continued through 2002’s American IV: The Man Comes Around, highlighted by Cash’s harrowing cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt.” June Carter Cash died May 15, 2003 at the age of 73; Johnny Cash followed her in death less than four months later, on Sept. 12 succumbing to complications from diabetes. He was 71.
Cash’s legacy as a musician speaks for itself. He is enshrined in five major music halls of fame: the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame (1977), the Country Music Hall of Fame (1980), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1992), GMA’s Gospel Music Hall of Fame (2010) and the Memphis Music Hall of Fame (2013). But his legacy as a reformer also continues to grow. After the Folsom shows, he became increasingly outspoken about the need for systematic prison reform, and in 1972 testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on national penitentiaries. During that same trip to Washington D.C., Cash also met with President Richard M. Nixon in the Oval Office, again to beat the prison reform drum. A 2008 documentary titled Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, directed by Bestor Cram, showcases not only the legendary 1968 Folsom performance but also Cash’s lifelong connection to the humans serving hard time for their transgressions — people not much different from the narrator of “Folsom Prison Blues,” the song that set it all in motion.
“He was desperate to change his own relationship to his audience, to find himself amongst all the demons he was fighting on a very personal level,” Cram told The Washington Post in 2018. “Even today, when we listen to Johnny Cash, we know him as a friend of the prisoner. He continues to move the needle as we question how our society continues to lock people up.”
Folsom Prison Blues (KORD-0030)
