I suppose that I should start with one simple truth: country music is a difficult genre for me to appreciate. This isn’t to say that I can’t understand it on a fundamental level, just that the type of music that gets praised in 2020 is often the type that feels a bit… tacky. Sure, you occasionally get someone like Kacey Musgraves who has something more to say but driving around with people who are more into the genre than I has only revealed how much of Top 40 country is no different from pop or rap. It’s about embracing a tackiness, where you do day drinking, parking lot parties, vandalize cars before he cheats, and (in some quasi-rape fantasy) use tequila to make her clothes come off.
I’m sure there’s a style in it that people enjoy, but I don’t know that the sound is appealing to me. They all have the same pitch in their voice, trying to make a catfish dinner sound sexy. I suppose what I miss is what makes folk music vaguely appealing to me: the art of the story. To me, country music has benefited for decades from these ballads. They’re more than these generic songs that cover the same bases of love that we’ve heard since the 1980s. I want stories of sacrifice, of honest to God pain as they go through hell just to write this song. There has to be a heart.
That may be why Johnny Cash has always been appealing to me. It’s in large part because the best songs of his have felt like audible journeys into everything from American mythology to his own broken heart. No matter what he strums a guitar to, he’s presenting some part of himself that is honest. Even the more straightforward songs like “I Walk the Line” have something more seductive underneath. He was a bad boy with heart, and boy did it shine through on songs such as the excellent Shel Silverstein-penned song “A Boy Named Sue.” I may have not heard every song he did (far from it), but you feel like you’re in safe hands whenever he comes on the radio.
That may be why “At Folsom Prison” has been one of my favorite albums for years now. Every note on that live album feels perfect, and none of the cheap humor has ever lost its welcome. Whenever Cash begins laughing during an instrumental interlude, there is something exciting about it. He’s interacting with the environment: Folsom Prison. While we don’t get a lot of spatial awareness on the recording, it is clear that he’s having fun. The whole thing, in spite of its dark themes, has this strange level of empathy. It’s the epitome of what his early career was striving for. It’s a concept album that manages to entertain on the surface while commenting on the souls of his audience. The audience at home comes away feeling like they’ve spent nights on those cots, being called by the guards for questioning. Rarely has a live recording felt as lived in as “At Folsom Prison,” and I love how sharp it is.
It even has one of the greatest opening, most memorable lines on any album. I don’t entirely understand what it is, but the way he says “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash” before breaking into “Folsom Prison Blues” has this forthrightness that forces you to pay attention. As the audience begins kicking in, you’re presented with a rockabilly guitar singing a song about being hauled away to, where else, but Folsom Prison. How could this not be seen as a show catering to his audience when the whole song is about them from the first minute?
It even has one of the most prescient lines in Cash’s whole career, followed by one of the most entertaining responses imaginable:
When I was just a baby, my mama told me, sonAlways be a good boy, don't ever play with gunsBut I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die
It creates a concrete picture of these Folsom prisoners so perfectly that you almost don’t need the rest of the song to appreciate this. Just let the guitar riff play and imagine the crowd bouncing along. By the final line, they’re cheering Cash on. Still, it helps to create a complex portrait, reflective of childhood misbehavior that grows into disaffected adulthood. We don’t need to know who this man in Reno, NV is to get the gist. It’s just second nature, and evidence of how connected these characters are. Sure, not everyone in here is probably a murderer, but the general idea of criminal behavior is familiar to them, and the remorse that Cash builds by the end, wishing to be “far from Folsom Prison” is a cry for redemption that he’ll continue to explore throughout the rest of the show.
The thing that makes this great is that the whole album is just as enjoyable for the songs as it is the interludes, where Cash is warming up for the next song. Something feels comical about his audience laughing, or how he complains about water being given to him in a tin cup. He’s as much of a livewire as those clapping along. When he announces that he’s recording it towards the end of “Dark As the Dungeon,” there is an excitement following a bit where he tells them that he can’t say words like shit. Depending on which version you heard, it’s bleeped out. Still, it works as this form of bonding that in some ways Cash is imprisoned on his record to certain actions himself.
The story from here is one that feels extremely versatile, where even the covers feel designed to create a portrait of any one inmate. “I Still Miss Someone” comes three songs in and has this somber tone, reflecting a vulnerable side of the masculinity that will be explored more in the second half. For now, it’s a testament to the fact that these men are loved somewhere, that they fantasize at night about being with someone who means the world to them. It’s a melancholic tale of how “I never got over those blue eyes.” If nothing else, it may be one of the most compassionate songs on the whole record, and that’s including the penultimate song “The Green, Green Grass of Home.”
There are even points where a song ends and the voice heard next isn’t from Cash. It’s from an overhead speaker, asking the guards to send various prisoners to different wards. Considering that the whole thing ends with a similar message that leads to prisoners booing the name of a significant guard, it paints a rare form of bonding. The reason that Cash can get away with all of this is not that he is a genuine bad boy, but because he knows that without empathy, this whole thing just feels like a bad joke.
Which isn’t to say that there aren't some awesome songs on here about reckless behavior and tales of being arrested. “Cocaine Blues” is, quite simply, the most fun song on the record. Shooting a man in Reno was only the start. This song gets into the heart of a drug-fueled rage that ends with him in jail, preaching his own regret for this decision. There’s even some caution in his lyrics, desiring for others to not become addicts who waste their life behind bars. Still, with that clinging guitar, he manages to rattle the nerves and make the whole thing sound sweaty, drawing in the crowd. Following it with “25 Minutes to Go” (another Silverstein number) is quite brilliant because it feels like a rocket into hell.
Even the final notes where he fades out have this winking gallows humor. The narrator is dead by the end of the song. The crowd cheers triumphantly, having spent the past three minutes going through an escalating fear of dying, where nobody would pardon him at the last minute. In a show where he interrupts songs by joking with the audience for laughing and clapping at inappropriate times, it’s somehow funnier to hear them just get into a song. This may be the only chance that they get to be unruly, getting to embrace their wild side. Cash plays into it, and even when singing about their death sentence, it somehow comes off as a cute joke.
Even then, the show eventually shifts from this rousing show rife with comic moments into something more truthful. The ideas have been planted, and the second half finds him singing songs written by inmates (“Send a Picture to Mother,” “Greystone Chapel”). Even from their words, there is something authentic that speaks to Cash’s voice. Very little actually changes and you’d think that he wrote them himself.
Still, there is something brutal about “The Wall” that finds the gallows humor falling away as a story of a prisoner trying to escape over a wall evolves into something brutal. Why did he climb it? Some could say freedom, but Cash claims that it was suicide, informed by the loneliness that has informed every last song he’s done up to this point. More than anything, this is a record that has a tonal consistency, laughing to keep from crying. He finds the tragedy of masculinity and allows these men to self-reflect first through comedy and then through deep thought, with the slow songs giving a deep, meditative moment in the show.
Sure, this is split up by songs like “Dirty Old Egg-Suckin’ Dog” that feature Cash wanting to murder man’s best friend, but even then you can get an underlying sense of depression in this morbid joke. Everyone has been so mad that they need to take some aggression out on someone. A dog is somehow the least problematic way this could be phrased, if just because it feels straight-up Looney Tunes that your dog would ruin your life. Given that the middle third ends with the symbolic break-up song “Flushed From the Bathroom of Your Heart,” it’s interesting to see what follows as redemption.
The energy picks back up. Cash’s singing of a proverbial “someone” morphs into the form of June Carter Cash. It may just be the tempo, but their first song “Jackson” feels much more alive, full of this optimism of a Bonnie & Clyde-style relationship where they “got married in a fever” and gave into youthful indulgence. June has a guttural quality that somehow works, serving as the cool girl that can handle your rowdy buddies. This duet is so full of life that you can feel their passion through the headphones. It continues with “Give My Love to Rose,” finding another message trying to reach the outside.
By the end, the album gets one last twist where Cash is reunited with his father Ray. It’s clear that there’s some affection for everything because he has always been part of this community. The reason he sounds convincing is that he believes in every word. As everyone leaves, there’s something meta about things, as if their moment of freedom is over. A return to the doldrums is in order.
In any other live album, hearing someone ask the audience to leave would seem hacky. Here it feels like a necessary tool to the bigger message. What Cash has done was more than a novelty. It was a record that sought to humanize a population that was often ignored. Sure there’s some sadistic theatrics at play that may make them seem unpleasant, but it’s wrapped up in these tales of empathy, of woe, and realizing that they have the same emotions we all do. They miss people, suffer depression, and find joy in young and stupid love.
I love this album in large part because every song is an incredible journey. Together, it’s one of the most immersive experiences imaginable for a record that doesn’t rely on over-produced concepts. This feels real because it actually happened. These people were really hanging on every word of Cash’s, and it somehow feeds into the audience’s enjoyment of “At Folsom Prison.” This is a masterpiece, plain and simple. It’s evidence of what makes Cash timeless and why he never felt pigeonholed by his genre. He was in some ways above it, a natural-born storyteller whose heart was in the right place, even as he shot men in Reno. It all made sense in the end, and the world was better for having him here. The fact that I get excitement from him just saying his name should prove how great at his job he was. He didn’t have to do much to win you over. All you had to do was stop and listen.
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