This Day in Country Music History (Johnny Cash Performs at Folsom Prison)

January 13, 1968 – The legend of Johnny Cash, a part of the rockabilly and country-music scene since his first recordings for Sun Records in the mid-1950s, grew larger with his concert at Folsom Prison in Northern California. The subsequent Columbia recording, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, released that summer, went on to appear on the country music charts for 90 weeks – and, even more amazingly on Billboard’s Top 200 for 122 weeks.

The explosive popularity of the concert and record took nearly everyone by surprise. The late Sixties were an era when, in the words of the 1981 Barbara Mandrell song, it wasn’t easy being country “when country wasn’t cool.” Psychedelic rock was filling more and more corners of the airwaves. 

Particularly nettlesome, in an era when rising crime was causing daily headlines – and in a year marked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy – was Cash’s decision not only to perform in a prison but to record a live album there. Studio exec Clive Davis – an industry guru fabled then and now for shrewd business instincts – even warned that it would destroy the singer’s career.

But the concert was a triumph, filled with stark moments such as Cash singing the stunning line, “I shot a man in Reno / Just to watch him die" or performing "Greystone Chapel," a song written by Folsom inmate Glen Sherley, serving a five-to-life term for armed robbery. 

But inevitably, myth has grown around much of the concert, notably around the song “Folsom Prison Blues.” Though Cash did have several run-ins with the law (chiefly over drugs) and the image he cultivated as an “outlaw” with buddies Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, Cash was inspired to write the latter song not out of personal experience but after watching the film Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison (1951).