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album rating: ★★★★☆
a) Genre
Country / Country blues / Outlaw country. At Folsom Prison is a live album recorded at a maximum-security prison and one of the defining documents in the history of American popular music. Its genre is hard to contain: the performance ranges from Cash's own distinctive country-blues ('Folsom Prison Blues', 'I Got Stripes', 'Green Green Grass of Home') through prison ballads and work songs, gospel ('The Old Account'), comedy ('Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart', 'Dirty Old Egg Suckin' Dog'), and tender love songs ('Give My Love to Rose', 'The Long Black Veil'), all performed for a captive audience whose energy, approval, and suffering saturates the recording. Cash's sound — built on the spare boom-chicka-boom of the Tennessee Three — represents the antithesis of the ornate Nashville Sound dominant at the time.
b) Release
Original US release: Columbia Records (6 May 1968; catalogue CS 9639 stereo / CL 2726 mono), phonographic copyright Columbia Records. Cash had been signed to Columbia since 1958. The album consisted of 15 tracks drawn from the first concert and 2 tracks from the second. A subsequent album from the same prison series, Johnny Cash at San Quentin (Columbia, 1969), was also a major success. The album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2018. It was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress National Recording Registry in 2003. A 2008 Legacy Edition (Columbia/Legacy, 2CD+DVD) presented both complete, uncut concerts in full for the first time — including seven previously unreleased tracks from the first show and 24 from the second, with expletives intact, restored from tapes that had been edited for the 1968 release — alongside a documentary DVD featuring interviews with Merle Haggard, Rosanne Cash, Marty Stuart, and former inmates. The 2008 edition was praised by Pitchfork and Rolling Stone.
c) Production
Produced by Bob Johnston. Robert Arthur Johnston (born 14 May 1932, Hillsboro, Texas, USA — died 14 August 2015) was a Texas-born record producer known for his unconventional, artist-first approach and willingness to fight with label executives on behalf of his artists. He had produced Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited (1965), Blonde on Blonde (1966), John Wesley Harding (1967), and Nashville Skyline (1969), and Simon & Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence (1966) and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme (1966). His appointment as Columbia's country division producer replaced the more traditional team of Frank Jones and Don Law. Cash had first proposed a prison recording album in 1958 (the year he joined Columbia); both Jones and Law had repeatedly vetoed the idea. Johnston immediately agreed. He was the first to call both San Quentin and Folsom; Folsom responded first. Johnston arranged logistics, supported Cash's preparations, and was present throughout. The performing ensemble: Johnny Cash (vocals, rhythm guitar), Luther Perkins (lead guitar), Marshall Grant (bass), W.S. 'Fluke' Holland (drums) — constituting the Tennessee Three — augmented by Carl Perkins (guitar), The Carter Family (including June Carter, two months before her marriage to Cash, backing vocals), and the Statler Brothers (backing vocals). The album was recorded at the prison's dining hall, where approximately 1,000 inmates attended each of the two performances.
d) Recording
Recorded live at Folsom State Prison, East Natoma Street, Represa (near Sacramento), El Dorado County, California, USA, on 13 January 1968. Two complete concerts were performed that day: a morning show at approximately 9:40 a.m. and an afternoon show. The album drew primarily from the first show; most performers were exhausted and could not match the energy of the first show by the afternoon. The cheering from the audience following the line 'I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die' — widely assumed to be spontaneous — was in fact added by producer Bob Johnston in post-production. The song 'Greystone Chapel' was written by Folsom inmate Glen Sherley and had been slipped to Cash the previous night; Cash included it in the programme as a show of respect for the inmates.
e) Reception
At Folsom Prison was a commercial triumph that revitalised Johnny Cash's career. Despite Columbia Records initially investing little in promotion, the album climbed the charts steadily: by August 1968 it had shipped more than 300,000 copies; by October it was certified Gold (500,000 copies shipped). It reached number 1 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart and number 13 on the Pop Albums chart. The single 'Folsom Prison Blues' charted on the Billboard Hot 100 on 25 May 1968 and entered the Hot Country Singles chart a week later; after Robert F. Kennedy's assassination on 5 June 1968, some radio stations stopped playing the song due to the line 'I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die', and Columbia (over Cash's protests) remixed the single with the line edited out. At the 11th Annual Grammy Awards (1969), the album won Best Album Notes (written by Cash himself) and 'Folsom Prison Blues' won Best Country Vocal Performance, Male. Life magazine's Al Aronowitz praised Cash as singing 'like someone who has grown up believing he is one of the people that these songs are about'. Rolling Stone and the Village Voice celebrated the album's 'stark realism'. Rolling Stone placed it at number 88 on its 500 Greatest Albums of All Time (2003 edition). AllMusic awards five stars. It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2018 and selected for the Library of Congress National Recording Registry in 2003.
Johnny Cash
John R. Cash (born 26 February 1932, Kingsland, Arkansas, USA — died 12 September 2003, Nashville, Tennessee, USA), known professionally as Johnny Cash and as 'The Man in Black', was an American singer, songwriter, guitarist, and actor, one of the most influential musicians in American history. He grew up in Dyess, Arkansas, in a family of impoverished cotton farmers. He served in the US Air Force from 1950 to 1954, stationed in West Germany, where he assembled his first band. After discharge, he moved to Memphis and auditioned at Sun Records, where producer Sam Phillips signed him; his debut single 'Cry! Cry! Cry!' (1955) became a regional hit, and 'I Walk the Line' (1956) was his first number 1 country hit. He signed with Columbia Records in 1958. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s he became one of country music's biggest stars, but by the mid-1960s a prescription drug and alcohol addiction had eroded his career and health. His recovery in 1967 set the stage for the Folsom Prison recording and a remarkable career reinvention. His relationship with June Carter (whom he married on 1 March 1968) and his conversion to evangelical Christianity were central to his recovery. The success of At Folsom Prison and At San Quentin (1969) led to his own network television variety show, The Johnny Cash Show (ABC, 1969–1971, filmed at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville). He became a strong public advocate for prison reform. In the 1990s, producer Rick Rubin signed him to his American Recordings label and produced a series of five albums — the American Recordings series — that brought Cash to a new generation and are considered among the greatest recordings of his career. His cover of Nine Inch Nails' 'Hurt' (2003) won the Grammy for Best Short Form Music Video. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1980, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1977.
This text was generated by Claude (Anthropic). It may contain errors or inaccuracies.
