The Man In Black

On This Day In History
1968: Johnny Cash performs at Folsom Prison

Quote Of The Day
"I wore black because I liked it. I still do, and wearing it still means something to me. It's still my symbol of rebellion against a stagnant status quo, against our hypocritical houses of God, against people whose minds are closed to other ideas."
(Johnny Cash)

No other recording artist can hit me in the gut quite like Johnny Cash, the emotional sincerity in that voice and those lyrics! The only recoring arist among my all time favourites who is not an electronic artist, despite the fact that I really don't like Country music. Which artist today would dare to do something as career destroying as "playing to a bunch of murderers and rapists" (as an executive at Columbia Records is reported to have said)? Nick Cave, possibly. Can't think of anyone else.

Anyway, before I link to my favourite track on At Folsom Prison (a song written by an inmate that really makes you wonder what "damn good" the prison system does anybody), some more words from the man himself.

“The culture of a thousand years is shattered with the clanging of the cell door behind you. Life outside behind you immediately becomes unreal. You begin to not care that it exists. All you have with you in the cell is your bare animal instincts.



I speak partly from experience. I have been behind bars a few times. Sometimes of my own volition sometimes involuntarily. Each time, I felt the same feeling of kinship with my fellow prisoners.



Behind the bars, locked out from “society,” you’re being re-habilitated, corrected, re-briefed, re-educated on life itself, without you having the opportunity of really reliving it. You’re the object of a widely planned program combining isolation, punishment, taming, briefing, etc., designed to make you sorry for your mistakes, to re-enlighten you on what you should and shouldn’t do outside, so that when you’re released, if you ever are, you can come out clean, to a world that’s supposed to welcome you and forgive you.



Can it work??? “Hell NO.” you say. How could this torment possibly do anybody any good…..But then, why else are you locked in?



You sit on your cold, steel mattressless bunk and watch a cockroach crawl out from under the filthy commode, and you don’t kill it. You envy the roach as you watch it crawl out under the cell door.



Down the cell block you hear a steel door open, then close. Like every other man that hears it, your first unconscious thought reaction is that it’s someone coming to let you out, but you know it isn’t.



You count the steel bars on the door so many times that you hate yourself for it. Your big accomplishment for the day is a mathematical deduction. You are positive of this, and only this: There are nine vertical, and sixteen horizontal bars on your door.



Down the hall another door opens and closes, then a guard walks by without looking at you, and on out another door.



“The son of a ….”



You’d like to say that you are waiting for something, but nothing ever happens. There is nothing to look forward to.



You make friends in the prison. You become one in a “clique,” whose purpose is nothing. Nobody is richer or poorer than the other. The only way wealth is measured is by the amount of tobacco a man has, or “Duffy’s Hay” as tobacco is called.



All of you have had the same things snuffed out of your lives. Every thing it seems that makes a man a man; a woman, money, a family, a job, the open road, the city, the country, ambition, power, success, failure – a million things.



Outside your cellblock is a wall. Outside that wall is another wall. It’s twenty feet high, and its granite blocks go down another eight feet in the ground. You know you’re here to stay, and for some reason you’d like to stay alive–and not rot.



So for the fourth time I have done so in California, I brought my show to Folsom. Prisoners are the greatest audience that an entertainer can perform for. We bring them a ray of sunshine in their dungeon and they’re not ashamed to respond, and show their appreciation. And after six years of talking I finally found the man who would listen at Columbia Records. Bob Johnston believed me when I told him that a prison would be the place to record an album live.



Here’s the proof. Listen closely to this album and you 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.

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.”


- Johnny Cash (handwritten notes in 1999 re-release of At Folsom Prison) 


Greystone Chapel