These Oklahomans, Texans and others referred to by the blanket term “Okies” brought with them a love of country music, and not just any country music, but “Loud music that plays until all hours,” as Wynn Stewart sang in his 1962 country hit “How the Other Half Lives.” Merle Haggard would eventually become an architect of the hard-driving, no-frills Bakersfield Sound, which shook the Nashville establishment in the 1960s. Haggard was a product of Bakersfield, California, a hard-bitten Central Valley town that was the final stop for tens of thousands of poor, white farmers and laborers who migrated west during the 1930s, 40s and 50s seeking work in the factories, farm fields and oilfields of California. San Quentin is where Cash played his first-ever prison concert on January 1, 1958-a concert that helped set Merle Haggard, then a 20-year-old San Quentin inmate, on the path toward becoming a country music legend. But the prison with which Johnny Cash was most closely associated wasn’t Folsom, it was San Quentin, a maximum-security penitentiary just outside of San Francisco.

The performances – one in the morning, another in the afternoon – can be heard on the album Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison.“Folsom Prison Blues” gave Johnny Cash his first top-10 country hit in 1956, and his live concert performance at Folsom-dramatized memorably in the film Walk The Line-gave his flagging career a critical jump-start in 1968.

Then we went through a second gate, and, when it clanked shut, John said, ‘Jim, there’s a feeling of permanence in that sound.’ After that, I started wondering when we were going to get out of there. The granite walls in Folsom are about eight feet thick, and we had just gotten off the bus and gone through one giant gate into a holding area. On January 13, 1968, Cash and June Carter, the Statler Brothers, the Tennessee Three, with Carl Perkins on guitar, recorded a live version of the song before the prisoners of Folsom State Prison, Folsom, California.

I sat with my pen in my hand, trying to think up the worst reason a person could have for killing another person, and that’s what came to mind.įor decades Cash nearly always opened his gigs with Folsom Prison Blues after greeting the audience with the same introduction each time: “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash,”. Cash once recounted how he came up with the line ‘But I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die’: He was a former German physician and SS doctor in Mauthausenįolsom Prison Blues cleverly combined two folk idioms – the train song and the prison song. Eduard Krebsbach immediately before his execution in Landsberg prison.

Johnny cash folsom prison video