Johnny Cash

“All you have with you in the cell is your bare animal istinct.

I speak partly for experience, I’ve been behind bars a few times”

The man who walks through the gates of Folsom maximum-security prison to sing in front of an audience of inmates is a Johnny Cash who already has a lot of dust on his shoes.

He had already written pages of music history with the tracks recorded at Sam Phillips' Sun, had begun touring with his show (which would later become a TV phenomenon) alongside artists like the Carter Family, Carl Perkins and the Statler Brothers (who naturally accompany him to Folsom), as well as with his beloved June, who within a few months would become his wife — but he had also lived through the other side of the coin, stories of amphetamines and tranquilizers, near-overdoses and arrests followed by stints behind bars.

So the man who stands before the Folsom audience is not just an artist ready to run through his repertoire of songs — he's a troubled man speaking to other people just like him.

Indeed, the songs on the setlist aren't, as is usually the case on such occasions, Cash's greatest hits: there's no "Walk The Line", "Hey Porter" or "Ring Of Fire" here. Instead, the chosen songs tell stories that hit very close to home for the audience in front of him.

Aside from the famous "Folsom Prison Blues", magnificent in its galloping rhythm, Cash offers his audience ballads of loneliness ("I Still Miss Someone") and death ("The Long Black Veil"), tales of suicidal escape attempts ("The Wall"), touching declarations of love ("Give My Love To Rose") and heartbreaking letters from prison ("Send a Picture Of Mother").

But Johnny doesn't just want to touch the inmates' hearts with melancholy ("Green Green Grass Of Home") — born storyteller that he is, he also lightens the mood and entertains.

He jokes about wry poverty in the waltzing "Busted", mocks the gallows in "25 Minutes To Go", displays a hilarious cynicism in "Joe Bean", and gets an industrial quantity of laughs with "Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog", the tale of a scruffy, chicken-eating mutt, and "Flushed From The Bathroom Of Your Heart", whose title alone says it all.

"At Folsom Prison" may not be a compendium of the finest music Johnny Cash ever wrote, even though it contains memorable tracks like the adrenaline-fueled "Cocaine Blues", the aforementioned "Folsom Prison Blues", or the simply perfect country of "Orange Blossom Special" and "Jackson" — but it is the best snapshot of the towering stature of this extraordinary artist.

An album that, beyond being a huge commercial success and finally bringing a hitherto niche genre into the mainstream, stands as the most vivid demonstration of Cash's technical and interpretive gifts. A record that shaped generations of artists to come, starting with Steve Earle, who pens precious, heartfelt words in the booklet of the 1999 reissue.

“At Folsom Prison” captures better than any other record the many facets of the artistic and human personality of the man in black from Arkansas — a man and artist who, far more than most of his peers, knew how to fall and rise again, to live alongside and do battle with his own demons, through memorable songs and spectacular failures alike, right up until the end of his career, when he still had something to teach younger colleagues about how to interpret a song.

So much so that, old and ill, he took a song by a young dark-industrial rocker and made it his own, turning it into the most moving video-musical testament of all time.

Johnny the outlaw and the addict, the believer and the transgressor, the romantic and the compassionate — it's all here.

Within the walls of Folsom Prison.

“I left the world in '91 to resurface in '95 from Davison County jail.

(Steve Earle)

(In 2008 a Legacy Edition of the album was released, containing the entire concert on 2 CDs plus a DVD with the documentary telling the story of the event)

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15/03/2009