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Liner Notes Folsom Prison Blues 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 volitionsometimes involuntarily. Each time, I felt the same feeling of kinship with my fellow prisoners. Behind the bars, locked out from "society," you're being rehabilitated, corrected, rebriefed, re-educated on life itself, without your having the opportunity of really reliving it. You're the object of a widely planned program combining isolation, punishment, training, 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 mattress 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. Everything it seems that makes a man a man: Women, money, a family, a job, the open road, the city, the country, ambition, power, success, failurea 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 aliveand 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 meneven 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 minewith the Folsom Prison Blues. Johnny Cash, 1968 Top Of Page
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Info Personnel
Recorded:
ChartsAlbum - Billboard (North America)
Singles - Billboard (North America)
Info At Folsom Prison was one of two legendary live albums Johnny Cash recorded in front of a prison audience in the late '60s. Part of the appeal of the records is the way Cash plays to the audience, selecting a set of songs that are all about prison, crime, murder, regret, loss, mother, God, and loneliness. Cash stimulates the audience's emotions, which in turn stimulates his performance, especially since he delivers the songs with the conviction of someone who has lived through it. There aren't many hits on the record — "Folsom Prison Blues," "I Still Miss Someone," "Jackson," "Give My Love to Rose," and "I Got Stripes" are the familiar items — but few albums come as close to capturing the darkness and rage that lays deep in Cash's music, as well as the depth of his talent. [The 1999 CD reissue of At Folsom Prison presents the complete concert, including three previously unreleased tracks: "Busted," "Joe Bean," and "The Legend of John Henry's Hammer."
In 2003, it was one of 50 recordings chosen that year by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry. In 2006, it ranked #3 on CMT's 40 Greatest Albums in Country Music.
Re-Release Info Want to hear part of the reason why Johnny Cash is an icon, a singer respected and influential in country, folk, and rock & roll? THIS is it! In 1968--one of the most tumultuous years in American history since the Depression--Cash recorded an album live in front of a (literally) captive (but wildly appreciative) audience, in Folsom Prison. With two guitars, bass, drums, and a small vocal group (including Cash's wife June Carter Cash and the Statler Brothers), Cash sings his hits and lesser-known songs ("Send a Picture of Mother") and some haunting country standards ("Dark as a Dungeon"), as well as songs about REAL outlaws ("Cocaine Blues") to a rapt audience that hangs on every word. That boom-chicka-boom sound is as sharp as the first mean wind of winter, and Cash is in fine fettle (though his voice cracks from time to time). With its unique setting, this is as harrowing an album as any ever recorded. ***
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