The legendary Johnny Cash album turns fifty-five in May of this year.
Isn’t the live album something of an oddity? It makes one yearn for that incomparable experience of being serenaded by the shattering acoustics of an artist (or artists) on stage and in the flesh. On a record, however, the loud cheers, the back-and-forth chatter between audience and band, and that lively dynamism become auxiliary to the rawness of the music—the listener fills the role of a remote participant, a secondary attendee intruding on a ghost concert whose moment has passed, but whose secondhand thrills are now eternalized on the grooves of a dusty vinyl. To this listener, the cheers and crashes are, at best, atmospheric and defining of the experience, and at worst, obtrusive in a way which makes one holler “I just want to listen to the damn music!”
This author’s opinion leans on the former, but one doubts that this is a common sentiment when live albums have been practically phased out of the music industry, and where the enthusiasm to hear favourites played again on a recording of a live concert has become as old as Deep Purple’s Made in Japan.
But revisiting Johnny Cash’s timeless At Folsom Prison returns one to a time when the live album could be an effortless chart topper capable of capturing the excitement and originality that a live dimension can give to a static performance of otherwise great songs. Paradoxically, At Folsom Prison harks to this uniqueness by being so distinct from any other live album. The title says it all: Johnny Cash, the Man in the Black, plays a concert for the inmates of California’s Folsom Prison. But it’s not a stage gimmick where the “exoticism” of the venue is just a cheap selling point to stick on the cover. The tempo and spirit of the performance are driven by the very experience of its sounds bouncing off the grim roofs and steel cages flanking the makeshift stage on which Cash animates his country ballads.
It opens with Cash’s warm voice welcoming the concertgoers, and by extension listeners, followed by the prisoner’s roaring cheers as he segues into track one. The first strum of the guitar seals the legend of the album immediately as the now iconic Folsom Prison Blues is sung out to an acoustic melody (though the song itself was written a decade before). As the concert goes on, its music sees a mercurial, yet harmonious alternation between a spectrum of moods: rough prison blues give way to soft-going comedic tunes, which lead further into loving ballads. The melancholic optimism of “Send a Picture to Mother” and “Greystone Chapel” (the latter of which was written by Glen Sherley, then an inmate of Folsom Prison and attendee at the concert, later a country musician himself), contrast with the softly devastating somberness of “Give My Love to Rose” and Cash’s chilling cover of “Long Black Veil.” It’s a brilliant musical suite which sings directly against the cliché belittling of country, parading the genre’s power to tell stories, to move one to tears, and to unite even in forums of great despair.
Quite significantly, however, the music is completed by an atmosphere that cements the album, unlike others. Threaded throughout it are reminders of the setting: at the end of some songs, serial numbers and names are rung out on the PA system to summon prisoners to reception, and the final track is bookended by instructions for a regimented return to cells. The playful nods and jokes by Cash towards the prisoners juxtapose those oppressive reminders by humanizing the attendees—those we’d normally see as dangerous felons laugh at the same cracks as we would, enjoy the same tunes we would, and meet the performance with as much excitement as we would. The setting and the crowd—more so than most other live albums—are really the pulse of Folsom.
For Cash, this was a redemptive concert, symbolically released in the same year which later found Elvis’ own comeback on a now famous television special. It was a second shot at glory following the highs of a successful musical career in the 1950s and early 60s, which brought with it the false highs and true lows of drug addiction. It not only sealed Johnny Cash’s legendary status among the greats but also inscribed the album into the annals of the American musical canon—remaining an ever-unique musical experience and testament to Cash’s lyrical brilliance and humanistic orientation.In May of this year, Folsom will officially turn fifty-five and continue its legacy march as one of the greatest live albums of all time. Like all great works, I find myself revisiting it regularly, and my familiarity with it has made me all the more eager to recommend it. It can be difficult to suggest country, though. It’s regularly made a punchline among music fans, and it remains difficult to find merit in a genre which — like the fallen titan of rock ‘n roll—is long past its golden age, and whose modern poverty has relegated to a gimmick if anything. But you don’t have to like country to like Johnny Cash, nor be a connoisseur of the genre’s old greats to connect with the music in Folsom. I hope that, given the chance, listeners would find that the album is not the cultural artifact which it may superficially appear to be. I don’t believe anyone wants to go to prison willingly, either—at least to be on the wrong side of the bars. I certainly don’t, but I’ve been to Folsom, and I wouldn’t mind going back.