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Extending his big right paw to shake the governor's hand, he said affably,

"Hello Governor-I'm Johnny Cash."

Reagan shook the hand warmly and grinning from ear to ear, quipped, "You're telling me.

They exchanged a few words, then Reagan asked interestedly, with a nod

toward the performers singing and playing all over the big banquet room, "How's it going?"

Johnny glanced around, then said easily, "We'll make it. We're kinda busy right now, but you know how it is-it'll all come together at once."

After Reagan swept out of the room, Cash ran through a few more songs and retired for five hours of sleep. The next morning, Cash revisited Sherley's song, and by seven o'clock he, June, Bob Johnston, and Cash's father Ray were in limousines traveling 25 miles northeast to Folsom. The others rode in the large camper that Cash usually took on the road. Hours before, two veteran Columbia engineers based in Hollywood-Bill Britain and Bob Breault-had arrived to set up the boxes of recording equipment, running cable between a small makeshift recording room and the dining hall where a wooden stage draped with a welcome banner and straddled by two shotgun-toting guards awaited the performers and audience. Under a blanket of gray clouds, while the engineers toiled inside, the convoy wended up the driveway to the forlorn Folsom Prison city. Coach Kelley and a sparse crowd of photographers and off-duty guards waited to greet them. One of the guards had crossed paths with Cash years before at San Quentin where the singer performed with a nagging cold. Ten years later, he stopped Cash in front of the gates. Was he feeling better this day? Cash nodded.

Amid the small group of people documenting Cash's arrival were photographer Jim Marshall, whom Columbia hired to shoot photos for the planned album, and Los Angeles Times reporter Robert Hilburn, who would write liner notes for the first single from the concert and pen a feature story on the concert for his paper. The news media in San Francisco, Sacramento, and Folsom virtually ignored the buzz at Folsom as did the Department of Corrections' own newsletters and press releases. Only an Up with People extravaganza at lucky ol' medium-max San Quentin got attention in the official prison press.

Free from the media's intense gaze, Cash posed uneasily for a few photographs at the main gate before boarding a prison bus that drove them deep into the sprawling compound. Five guards hovered around them. Everybody appeared worried. Stepping off the bus a few moments later, the lines in Cash's face deepened and shadows of the grim buildings darkened further his black figure. As he looked around outside the bus, his face expressed either trepidation or determination. The Statler Brothers tried with jokes and teasing to gas up the mood, but found few takers: The entire troupe made their way in with few smiles. Cash's eyes drooped into his cheeks, while June-normally so effervescent-cast her head and eyes toward the asphalt ground. When one of many gates crashed behind them, Cash addressed Jim Marshall: "Jim, there's a feeling of permanence to that sound." Marshall-who'd shot a man in Frisco some years before but ducked a heavy sentence-agreed.

They had been told by guards that Folsom didn't negotiate with hostage takers, so they knew that conspiracies to grab them could end bloodily. Such warnings set a mind to thinking, as did concerns for June's safety and uncertainty about just how this show would go. Dressed in black and striding somberly, they appeared to be a funeral procession making its way from church to graveyard: Cash the priest, Carter the mourning widow, the rest-Cash's father Ray, the Statler Brothers, the band-pall bearers. "It was an eerie thing," says Marshall Grant.

Inside, the prison guards escorted the Cash entourage to a makeshift dressing room off of the kitchen where the funereal disappeared. Smiles returned. It felt safe. Cash strummed his guitar and sipped coffee; Marshall clowned with June's winter hat; Johnston hammed it up for the photogs; and an old man or two took turns flirting with June, who was now sparkling in her Appalachian beauty. However, not all decompressed. Luther sat to the side on a bench, nibbling a sandwich, as stoic then as he always was on stage, and Carl Perkins, who detested giving his time to lawbreakers, squirmed nearby.

Outside the dressing-room cocoon where Cash and his gypsy circus mingled, in the real Folsom, morning had broken differently.

At 7:00-mandatory waking time-a dull light drifted into the cell blocks of Folsom. Millard Dedmon-who often read in the dimness-and a few other prisoners had risen long before daybreak, but most stirred grudgingly, crawling from their beds to stand at their cell doors and wait to be counted. "Count time," a voice thundered over the public address system, an alarm for those still in their nest. After a northern California winter's night, which had slipped in through busted windows and ancient doorways, cold concrete floors and steel doors extended a cruel greeting. Standing to meet their counter, the men tightly pulled blankets around their shoulders and kicked away the cardboard that they had leaned bed-level against the cell door to block the night's draft.

When the clicking heels of the counting guards had passed, the inmates awaited the rustling of one of their own, the trustee-also known as the tiertender or keyman-who carried hot water. Trolling the corridors, he stopped at each cell and siphoned the water from a large bucket into a gallon bucket that the inmates held inside their cells. It was the one humanizing touch of the morning, steaming water for their bird bath. At 7:30, the inmates left their cells for breakfast before dispersing to their jobs, to their recreation in the yard, or back to their cells. The group of 1,000 prisoners slated to attend the 9:40 show made their way to dining room #2. Few inmates chose to miss Johnny Cash that day. "Everybody was there," recalls Millard Dedmon. " ... This is escape from the inside. You're getting into a situation that's more like the kind of recreational thing or the entertainment thing that you would be able to choose, to enjoy, on the streets, in the free world. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, I mean everybody just flocked to the shows and things."

For this show, all of Folsom was in preparation. Sherley-who'd been cleared to attend both shows-braced himself for his meeting with Cash; the associate warden gathered a few mementos to present to the singer after the show; and the Columbia engineers checked and rechecked microphone levels as they made ready to tape on their four-track machines.

The morning was accentuated by the promise of Cash and his concert, but throughout the cold-steel facility, as always, eyes remained open for trouble. Only two weeks before two inmates had punched a guard, gagged him, and held him at knifepoint in an effort to get at an inmate whom they accused of snitching. Tensions were high in the wake, and evidently remained so, even with Cash's intervening concert: A few weeks after Cash left, an inmate work stoppage spread through the prison, drawing the aim of the guard's wary eyes and their polished Winchesters.

As 9:40 approached, guards watched for knives, for fights. There was no reason to believe that at the Cash show a score wouldn't be settled or some nut wouldn't lunge at June or Johnny. But the hall filled without incident. Dismissed from the cellblocks tier by tier, black, white, Hispanic filed in, jostling for a good view. Bob Johnston surveyed them all, futilely trying to make eye contact:

I stood by the door and watched all the convicts come in and go out. I looked at them, and out of all of those people who came and went, there was not one convict who looked you in the eye. And I asked one of the guys there, I said, "Why is that?" He said, "Because if you look somebody in the eye they're going to say 'Do I know you?' or 'What the fuck are you on?' And then it starts and somebody gets a shove." So he said that's the way that that works there, and that's the reason why. So I went up to some guy, I think his name was Chester, little bitty guy, bad teeth, hundred and forty, eye glasses, and I said, "What are you in here for?" And there was three guards standing there, and he said, "I beat three men to death with a baseball bat. By God, I'd do it again if I had the chance. Fucking people." And the guard said, "Calm down, calm down." And I said, "Wow." And he didn't even look like he could win a fight, much less beat three people to death with a baseball bat.

If the second show was Johnston and Cash's primary insurance policy against a lackluster concert, m.c. Hugh Cherry was his secondary policy.

A great supporter of Cash from the 1950s when he was among the first disc jockeys on the West Coast to spin the Sun sensation's records, Cherry took charge of guaranteeing that the prisoners knew they were to cheer and howl and roar throughout the show. "Respond," he pleaded with the prisoners minutes before Carl Perkins took the stage. "You are a part of the album. You are a very important part, and if you hear something you like react in kind." In the absence of the kind of ruffian reaction Cherry was attempting to scare up, Johnston, Cash, and everybody knew the live prison album would be altogether flaccid.

Cherry gave way to Carl Perkins, who shot off a rousing version of "Blue Suede Shoes" to explosive applause. "Let's see how loud 1,000 men from Folsom can be," barked Cherry in the rockabilly hero's wake. "Let's hear it." The decibels shot to the roof. Only Cash seemed not to respond. From the side of the stage against the white-washed granite walls, he stretched and shuffled about as he watched the action unfold. "As relaxed as a bug in a Roach Motel," he said later about the day, Cash wondered if he could pull off the show without his usual handful of pills, although Marshall Grant figures that the star was only about 75 percent straight that day. Bob Johnston stood next to Cash, clenching a slender cigar in his mouth, while the Statlers sauntered to the mic to follow Carl Perkins.

As the quartet crooned, the engineers frantically worked to balance the microphone levels while cranking up the amplification so people in the back could hear everything (and therefore react raucously to everything). But the right sound proved elusive. The show halted, and the Statlers stepped back from their spots. The prisoners groaned, bringing Harold Reid back to his mic. "This is part of your punishment," he joked, "so everybody stay real still." After a few minutes without music, the engineers solved the problem and gave the Statlers the go-ahead to return. Picking up where they left off, the group dished out their snappy "This Old House" and goosed the audience with their light-heartedness. By the time they exited, after having grown "us a new eyebrow" through all the waiting, as one of the Statlers put it, the crowd was primed.

Cherry reappeared. "We're ready to do the record session. Are you ready?" Cheers. "Now I need your help. When John comes out he will say-which will be recorded-'Hi there, I'm Johnny Cash.' When he says that then you respond. Don't respond to him walking out. Welcome him after he says 'Johnny Cash.' I'll have my hands up. And you just follow me. Okay? You ready?"

That was the only way to bring Cash on stage; he needed no introduction. So Cherry held up his hands, imploring silence, and Cash paced to

the mic. "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash," he bellowed. "They did what he asked, nobody said a word, it was totally still," Cash later recalled. "And when I said, 'Hello I'm Johnny Cash,' that's when they reacted. Just overwhelmed me."

If there was no other introduction, there was no other opening song. Luther's gut-deep, boom-chicka-boom intro sliced through the cavern-like dining hall, cutting open a slit through which Cash's mournful voice followed: I hear the train a 'comin/It's rollin round the bend/And I ain't seen the sun shine/Since I don't know when.

On the outside, at the county fairs and nightclubs, they cried for "I Walk the Line." Inside, the anthem was "Folsom Prison Blues." Everybody knew it; they mouthed the lyrics as Cash sang them. It was their song, about their wretched home. When Cash dove to the low notes, he plunged into solitary, the security housing unit, grazing against the sharp metal and jagged granite on the way down. When he said that time kept dragging on those who felt the clumsy passage of the hours whistled their understanding. The song was Cash's pronouncement of allegiance to the men, and when it ended like toppling metal cans, the hall erupted. They identified with "Folsom," and Cash's performance of it carried him and them both through the show in rowdy partnership.

Listeners to the album when it was released a few months later heard eruptions throughout the first song; most thrilling was a shrill cry that flew up when Cash told the prisoners he'd shot a man in Reno. But what the record buyers heard after Cash uttered the bloody line was pure image-making, spliced-in merriment. In reality, the crowd had remained enthralled by the first glimpse and words of the black circuit rider before them, remaining so right on through the song, saving their clamorous gusts exclusively for the its conclusion.

But the album's post-production was at that moment farther from Cash's mind than Gordon Jenkins and Landsberg, Germany. In the wake of "Folsom," what Cash was thinking became clear. Life is rough, especially prison life; he'd show it in song, show that he understood it. Millard Dedmon had made his way to the middle of the crowd; a jazz fan, he could have been forgiven for shunning Cash's country music, but far from it, he needed no introduction to "Folsom Prison Blues" and opened himself to Cash's vibe. "His general demeanor while performing and while there on stage, just gave you the attitude that he really understood, and was, you might say, empathetic, sympathetic with our position and what we were up against, dealing with having to pay that debt."

It was time for solidarity. "Busted," "Dark As a Dungeon," "I Still Miss Someone," "Cocaine Blues." "Dark As a Dungeon" grieved over life in the coal mine, but in Folsom the mine became prison. There was no distinction. The prisoners-many of whom probably thought Cash had done hard time anyway-began to see him as their own, one of the prisoners. In Cash's mind, the line between their criminal past and his brushes with the law was probably disintegrating too. Although he'd spend the rest of his life explaining that he'd never served hard time, at this stage he routinely inflated the meaning of his scattered nights in the slammer: "I speak partly from experience," Cash wrote in his liner notes to At Folsom Prison. "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 prisoner." He wanted to be one with him, and the songs helped him do it.

From solidarity, he moved to a little bad-assed bravado among soul mates, coughing up his first remarks: "I just want to tell you that this show is being recorded for an album release on Columbia Records, and you can't say hell or shit or anything like that.... How does that grab you, Bob?" They guffawed at Cash's mocking of his producer Johnston, who was Cash's warden that day. "They'll probably take that word out of it," he quipped as he sank down into "I Still Miss Someone," the galloping lament of lost love whose imagery of falling leaves and cold wild winds make it one of country music's most elegant songs.

On through the morning, in a place where afternoon is morning and morning is night, the prisoners took their cues, erupting at his every move, saving the need for the engineer's splicing razor. "It exploded!" said Bob Johnston many years hence. "He could have stood up there and told stories about how he was from Arkansas and used to work in the cotton fields." Cash was swaggering. In a few breaths, it was almost like he was ready to gripe about the especially low-down batch of pruno somebody had laid on him, or the women he'd dreamt about last night, or the wretched guards who rattled his cell door to wake him for morning count or who stared into his cell all night just looking for the flash of his shank or the glow of his joint. "Let it blow" was how Cash characterized the mood in 1999. "We are in the timeless now. There is no calendar inside the cafeteria today."

Standing to Cash's right as he let it blow was Marshall Grant with his electric bass, standing like a funeral director greeting the bereaved. Grant peered at the jammed room, mesmerized by the dull glow that the long lights above cast on the prisoners. If Cash was in the timeless, Grant was swimming in the macabre, snapping back to reality only as the last bar of "Busted"-the second song of the set-faded. Before him, the crowd rose like a churning, cleansing wave. "You could feel it as it went on, you could feel it after the second song. 'Hey, there's somethin' great going on here.' And the prisoners themselves had an awful lot to do with that. They drove the nails. I mean we were there, and we did our best but, boy, the prisoners were so responsive and so appreciative. And it was just fantastic.... They came to see John. And they ate him up." And Grant and the band made Cash all the more palatable for the eating. Through the first five songs, the sound poured like cream from a pitcher. The band pulsed, Cash hummed, and the Columbia engineers captured the mixture with soft gloves.

On stage, Cash stepped like a matador, erect, his guitar a cape. He was El Cordobés, turning Folsom's tiny wooden stage into Madrid's Plaza de Toros. Torrents of applause rushed him with every violence-charged lyric. There was, in Folsom that day, a spirit of simpatico. Marty Stuart thinks God's hand alighted on him: "The guy was on fire; he had been there enough times, and he had rehearsed that prison-singer scenario, the jailhouse scenario enough to really have his act down. He was cocky. He was at the top of his game. I mean he had heaven all over him. He was just twinkling.... And I've often thought about what a master showman he was because from the flick of one finger, he could've blown that place apart."

If Cash was pouring powder from his keg, the band was striking the matches. The Tennessee Three-Luther, Marshall, and drummer Fluke Holland, as well as Carl Perkins, whose guitar filled out the band's thin patches and added the spicy flourish here and there-churned out a maddening beat. Luther's and Carl's licks slashed through the murky cafeteria air, as if they were "carved in metal," as one writer later put it. The instrumentation was undoubtedly tempered inhibition, like Cash himself, an out-of-control train that never seemed to wreck. "It's like a football team or basketball team playin' on their home court, they always do better," says Grant. "And it was the same way with us in Folsom. [The prisoners] were so enthusiastic that I think all of us just did better. I mean as I listen to that album now and I listen to other things that we done that's been recorded along about that same time, there was just a little edge on everything [at Folsom]. The tempos were up a little bit and everybody was up a little bit."

Grant's observation of the band's Folsom edge has much merit, particularly when one compares the Folsom album to Cash's far more popular Live at San Quentin, recorded and released shortly after, in 1969. Considered side by side, San Quentin is an eraser brushing across a chalkboard while Folsom is jagged fingernails scraping down the slate. In the first show at Folsom (from which virtually all of the album is culled), Cash surrendered to his heart;

at San Quentin, Cash could have been taking cues from a director.

The second show at Folsom couldn't measure up to the first show either. By 12:40 when it began, Cash and the band, weary from the first show, were ready for bed; the edge that had cut through the morning had dulled. Only one cut from Cash's insurance policy-a performance of "Give My Love to Rose"-was dubbed onto the album.

During the first show, however, the star continued to ply his songs like a sledgehammer. On "Cocaine Blues"-the bloody ballad of unrepentant misogyny- the raucous prisoners cheered Cash the murderer as he ran from the law like a fox in the hunt, rising up at the song's every turn. He was giving all, thinking from time to time that he could have been among them. His voice teetered on collapse; the prisoners could hear the raw croaking in his throat. There was no cushion in there. It was as rough and hard as the granite quarries that lay a short distance up the American River valley on the prison grounds. He clowned through some comic relief, "25 Minutes to Go," his hanging song, but it bloodied his throat.

Cash's voice needed rest, but he pushed forward into "I'm Not in Your Town to Stay," a ballad written and recorded in 1936 by Karl Davis and Harty Taylor of the Cumberland Ridge Runners: I'm not in your town to stay and I'll soon be on my way/I'm just here to get my baby out of jail. But Cash slipped and forgot the words. An otherwise heartfelt rendering of a song Cash had never recorded failed to make the album. But his flub offered a seat for rest. He slowed and gave his voice respite. "You're recording this," he growled at Bob Johnston. "Ain't a damn thing happening." He dawdled, egging on the audience whose gas tank also needed filling. "Wanna be on records?" he yelped. "Go ahead and say something nice." The men squawked in glee.

Cash coughed to retrieve some moisture, some grease for the lyrics, and found a tad more respite in the extended harmonica riffs and periodic rapping in "Orange Blossom Special." After, he took a seat for "some slow ballad type songs that we wanted to do for this album, and especially for you."

Resting his long feet on the stage front and craned over his guitar, Cash showered his crowd with "slow ballad type songs" of death and imprisonment: "The Long Black Veil," "Send a Picture of Mother," and "The Wall." "I gave them a stiff shot of realism," he said later, "singing about the things they talk about, the outside, shooting, trials, families, escaping, girl friends, and coming to the end. They knew it was for them. Just them and me." But the rowdiness had died down with Cash's volleys of realism, as the prisoners seemed to be staring silently at a mirror Cash was holding up for them. One wondered just how much escape Cash was offering, what with all the ballads of misery and homicide.

And Cash appeared to recognize this, or perhaps all the while he had expected the pall to fall over the men. The sensitive showman who needed to preserve the suppleness of his audience, he lightened the mood with two strange novelties written by Jack Clement that had appeared on his Everybody's a Nut LP of 1966: "Dirty Old Egg-Suckin' Dog" and "Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart." "Flushed" was just plain weird (At the table of your love/I got the brush off/At the Indianapolis of your heart/I lost the race), but the prisoners indulged him anyway, rolling in joy over the corny humor.

The mournful men stuff continued to peel away with Cash's humorous ditties, but the heaviness evaporated altogether when June Carter hit the stage. (The balance of the Carter family had stayed home for this Folsom show.) As June would say in concerts everywhere (except in prisons and Billy Graham crusades), this was the "sex part" of the show. Because of just that, Cash and the band had worried that the prisoners might lay some coarseness on her. Marshall Grant: "I was afraid of what they might say and what they might do and what they might holler out, and if it'd be profanity or untasteful in any way, but that didn't happen. And maybe they had been warned before. I don't know that, but it seemed like they had because they were so well-mannered when June was out there."

If the prisoners whistled a time or two or considered her slender legs, who could blame them? June waltzed on stage in an angel's glow. Adorned conservatively in a dark suit, chestnut hair falling lightly on her shoulders, she was light streaming into a dark room. Her vision was an escape all its own. Cash flirted with her, as they launched into "Jackson," their release of the previous year, which would be awarded a Grammy in a matter of weeks. Dueling lovers in song, theirs was comedy much sleeker and accomplished than "Flushed." Carter was the impish lover, daring her man to go to Jackson, and the audience delighted in it. She growled and did a jig, scolding her man-and the men wished she'd scold them.

In the subsiding applause after "Jackson," June addressed the men: "I enjoyed singing the song 'Jackson' with Johnny Cash. I've thought of you boys so many times having been here last year with my family [sic]. I really am pleased to be back and be with you." Lifted by the appreciative assembly of male admirers, she and Cash sprinted into "I Got a Woman," which was left off the final album. Remaining in the hall, though, floating like a glistening red balloon, was the possibility that June-with her looks, her flirtatiousness, her innocent humor-had nearly stolen the show.

As June handed back the stage to Cash, the show was nearing an end, and Cash searched for a landing strip. Weary from 13 rounds with Folsom, Cash's voice was flagging, but he reached for the throttle one more time and surged through "I Got Stripes," "a hard and bitter narrative of arrest and prison," commented one observer. He added the rambling "Legend of John Henry's Hammer," in which the prisoners found hilarious double entendre (I believe this is the first time I seen the sun come up that I couldn't come up with it). Punished by seven minutes of "John Henry," Cash peddled back to the ropes one more time, calling June back to recite one of her poems from the county fair circuit: I went out to milk the cow one day/With my stool and bucket full of hay/I flung down my bucket, and I flopped on my stool/I said, "Be still Bossie, you stubborn ol' fool/Be still now Boss, quit jumping around/I've been out all night just a' sneakin' around"/She looked sympathetic with her eyes big and brown/And said, "Just hang on, and I'll jump up and down."

It should have sunk like a stone in the American River, but from June's lips it was Frost; the inmates mustered a generous reaction.

Where was Cash's knockout punch, the Glen Sherley song? He needed it, but he saved it. Meandering through an obligatory rather uninspired take on Curly Putnam's "Green Green Grass of Home," the dream of the death row inmate, which Cash had never recorded in the studio, it was one too many prison songs over the line. Did the prisoners really need so many reminders of their bleak circumstance?

Finally, he reared back and unfurled "Greystone Chapel." "This next song was written by a man right here in Folsom Prison, and last night was the first time I've ever sung this song. And we may be a little rough on it today. We may have to do it twice. We'll definitely do it again on our next show in order to try to get a new recording of it because it is new and it may be released as a single record out of the album, I'm not sure. Anyway ... this song was written by our friend Glen Sherley." The men-a little rough feeling themselves-hoisted a cheer. He looked down at Sherley: "Hope we do your song justice, Glen." He looked at his band: "What key do we do it in?"

Sufficiently oriented and with June Carter and the Statlers crooning behind, Cash straddled Sherley's unwieldy ballad. There's a greystone chapel here in Folsom/A house of worship in this den of sin. When Cash uttered these lines, the applause cracked up from the floor like unexpected thunder. Throughout the show the reaction had not been so decisive, so serious. But somehow "Greystone" commented on their plight like no other song that day had, not even "Folsom Prison Blues." It was a symbol of Cash's bond with convicts and the possibility of redemption-and it remained so. You wouldn't think that God had a place here at Folsom/But he saved the soul of many lost men.

In the raining applause, Cash reached down to shake Sherley's hand before hustling back to the kitchen area. The second show in two hours loomed. At some point near their utilitarian backstage, a prisoner-worker broke the rules and approached him. "Johnny," he called.

A guard moved to restrain the man, but the singer waved him away. "The guard let him have one question," Cash later recalled. "You know so 'n' so back in Arkansas?' 'Never heard the name,' I said. 'He said he knew you,' the kid said, and the guard pushed him back. He broke the rules just trying to make a country boy connection."

Another prisoner got closer once they got backstage. He extended his sinewy tattooed arm and Cash seized it. It was Glen Sherley again. The two laughed and chatted easily before the next show. "[He] may have been a prisoner," recalls Marshall Grant, "but this is the happiest man I've ever seen in my life when they allowed him to come backstage. It had to be the biggest day in his life because he liked to have died when John did 'Greystone Chapel.'" According to Grant, Sherley saw from the beginning that using his song to wrangle a meeting with Cash could be the vehicle to ride out of Folsom. "His plan was to see if he could make a mark somehow with John, and maybe somehow someway get out.... Glen told me this himself." The scheme would prove successful.