Johnny Cash - 50 Years After Folsom & Beyond

Johnny Cash playing one of two live concerts at
California's Folsom State Prison January 13, 1968 

Friday marked the 50th anniversary of the recording of legendary country singer Johnny Cash's classic live triple-platinum album "Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison", which he famously recorded live at the California state prison of the same name.

The same concert which produced the brilliant live recording of his 1955 hit "Folsom Prison Blues" - which is arguably one of THE classic contemporary live American song recordings of all time.

Backed by June Carter, guitarist Carl Perkins and the Tennessee Three, Cash played two different shows that day.

As Joe Rosato reported for the local Bay Area NBC affiliate on Thursday, to mark this important American music anniversary, Folsom State Prison officials rolled out the proverbial red carpet and invited members of the press to see Dining Room Two where Cash and his band performed two different live shows to about 1,000 inmates on a stage specially-constructed for the occasion back on January 13, 1968.

Much like other influential American country singers like Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, Cash famously cultivated an "outlaw" image with his often-black wardrobe, troubled personal life, moody personae and distinctive haunting singing style, but he never actually served time in a prison.

His own personal experiences of being locked up by the law were limited to seven different overnight stays in various local jails on relatively minor offenses related to alcohol - like possessing amphetamine pills (to which he was addicted for years), public intoxication and reckless driving.

But throughout his career, Cash maintained a soft spot in his heart for incarcerated prisoners and many of his songs explored the existential struggles of those who languished in jails isolated from friends, family and society - possibly Cash's way of expressing the regret, sadness and loss he experienced in his own life.

The Cash family in 1949, his older brother Roy is
on the far left, Johnny is on the far right

In 1944, when Cash was 12-years-old, his beloved older brother Jack was accidentally yanked into a table saw while cutting wood to support the family - while he somehow managed to crawl for help, his midsection was so torn apart that he died a week later from his gruesome injuries.

Cash idolized Jack, and according to his sister Joanne (pictured left, front right), the experience left him profoundly changed from the happy child that he was before the accident.

According his sister, after his brother's death, Cash became much more melancholy and introspective as he began spending more time by himself writing poems and songs.

He grew up in rural Dyess, Arkansas surrounded by music, the Cash family sang spirituals and gospel together both at home, and at the home of his grandparents.

Johnny first started singing publicly in church, but it was his oldest brother Roy Cash (pictured above) who first encouraged Johnny to pursue a career as a professional singer.

Roy Cash had started a string band called the Dixie Rhythm Ramblers in the late 1930's or early 1940's who played local venues in and around Arkansas, and even had a regular show on local radio  station KCLN for a time.

According to Rolling Stone contributing writer Mikal Gilmore's 2008 book "Stories Done", after the rest of the members of his band were killed during World War II, Roy's interest in music faded, but he continued to encourage his younger brother and actually introduced Johnny to some of the musicians that he first played and recorded with.

Cash was coming off of a relative low point in his professional career when he first approached his label Columbia records in 1965 or 1966 with the idea of performing live inside a prison.

At the time he was emerging from a struggle with addiction and it had been some time since he'd had a hit song.

Johnny Cash with his first wife Vivian Liberto

He was also facing backlash and concert cancellations from some conservative southerners over accusations that his first wife Vivian Liberto, who he met in San Antonio, Texas in 1951 when he was in the Air Force, was black.

Cash, a progressive who used some of his songs to share the plight of African-Americans and Native Americans, was forced into the awkward position of having to publicly defend his wife's race as white in order not to alienate his mostly-white fans.

You can judge for yourself, but from looking closely at a photo of Cash and Liberto, at the least, she does appear to be of mixed race heritage, and it's a pretty sad state of American society that people would criticize him because of the perception of the race and ethnicity of the woman he loved and the mother of his children.

Understandably, the hateful campaign put tremendous stress on their marriage and they eventually separated in 1967 -  so Cash had been looking for a way to both reinvigorate his career and reconnect with his audience for some time.

Personally, I'd be curious to know if the accusations against Cash over Vivian Liberto's race had anything to do with Cash's decision to enter a highly-public relationship with June Carter (pictured below), an attractive and talented musical prodigy who played four instruments who'd been performing publicly with her famous Carter Family relatives since she was 10-years old.

Aficionados of classic early 20th century American folk and bluegrass music (including your's truly) will obviously know that the Carter Family, A.P Carter, his wife Sara and sister-in-law Maybelle Carter (June Carter's mother) are widely regarded as country music royalty who shaped the sound of modern country music in the late 1920's - they are cemented as American music icons.

Cash and June Carter enter Folsom
State Prison on January 13, 1968 

June Carter was certainly talented, beautiful and successful in her own right, but given the southern (white) backlash over his marriage to Vivian Liberto in the 1960's, I think it's a fair question to ask if Johnny Cash was intrigued with the possibility that marrying someone with Carter's musical and racial heritage would have a positive impact on his own career.

I'm not suggesting he didn't love her, I'm just saying it's a fair question given the racially complex-nature of the U.S. and the divisive societal landscape of 1968.

Columbia executives were initially hesitant about the idea of Cash recording inside a prison before finally approving it in 1967 after an executive shakeup.

As Joe Rosato reported for WNBC, Cash originally wanted to play a live concert in California's San Quentin Prison in Marin County which houses the state's death row, but the warden never returned Cash's manager's phone calls.

So Cash suggested they contact Folsom State Prison officials instead, they immediately agreed - the rest is history.

The live version of "Folsom Prison Blues" became a top forty hit, the album shot to number one on the country music charts and even reached number 15 on the pop charts - over three million copies have been sold since it was first released.

The popularity of the album jump started Cash's career and because the album cost Columbia so little to produce, they eagerly backed his desire to record live in other prisons - he would record three other live albums from prisons including one at San Quentin in 1969.

"Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison" became so popular, fans and tourists began flocking to Folsom State Prison just to see it and the prison eventually built a museum outside the walls of the prison with photos of Cash from the day he recorded the album and other prison memorabilia.

Having been raised in rural Dyess, Arkansas during the Great Depression, Cash understood what it was to be disenfranchised, poor and on the fringes of society.

Dyess Colony residents in the communal cannery

Dyess Colony, or "Colonization Project No. 1." as it was originally known, was formed in 1934 as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's massive Works Projects Administration (WPA) projects to help the millions of Americans whose lives were decimated and uprooted by the Great Depression.

The federal government purchased 16,000 acres of swampy, snake-infested "bottomland" in Arkansas' Mississippi County to be used as a resettlement colony for rural Arkansas farmers and sharecroppers who'd been ruined by drought and the Great Depression.

It was a planned farming community with 500 newly-constructed modest two-bedroom homes with an outhouse and a barn where rural families selected from a list were given a five-room home and approximately 20 to 40 acres of land which they had to clear.

The idea was that they would use their farming skills and labor to farm the land to be able to eventually purchase and own the land according to a loan repayment schedule managed by the state and federal government.

Residents were also given a mule with which to plow and work the land, a cow, groceries and supplies to farm and would be expected to pay off the loans and also receive a share of the profits from the local community store and cannery (pictured above).

Like most WPA community housing and farming projects, Dyess Colony was whites only - as with many New Deal projects and Department of Agriculture programs intended to assists farmers, African-Americans were often excluded based solely in the color of their skin.

Growing up in such an environment during the Depression it's not hard to understand why Johnny Cash had such a life-long affinity for prisoners, and a heart-felt sympathy for the struggles they faced which became the subject of so many of his songs - and part of his personae as an artist.

Books Through Bars volunteers

It's unfortunate that so many conservative politicians today lack the kind of compassion for incarcerated Americans that Johnny Cash had.

For example, last Wednesday morning I listened to an interesting segment on the Brian Lehrer Show on disturbing efforts by some New York state prison officials to severely curtail incarcerated inmate's rights to access information and educate themselves.

In a nutshell, a NY state prison pilot program would severely curtail prisoner's access to books.

How? By limiting them from ordering books from a pre-selected group of six vendors, some which censor the kinds of books prisoners can order, or charge exorbitant rates for books - or limit how prisoner's, or their families can pay for those books.

The segment is worth a listen if you want to click the link above to listen to Seth Pollack, an organizer with Books Through Bars, an all-volunteer non-profit based in Philadelphia launched in 2010 that provides books to prisoners that request them in seven states.

As the Guardian reported last Monday, here in New Jersey, some prisons are actually trying to ban inmates from reading Michelle Alexander's ground-breaking book "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness"

Tyler Haire in 2014

How about the ProPublica article detailing the sad case of Tyler Haire and more than 100 other inmates in Mississippi jails forced to wait for years just to get a bed in a psychiatric facility to have their mental condition professionally evaluated to determine whether they should be hospitalized and given treatment or incarcerated?

As the ProPublica article reports, "A copy of the state's waitlist shows that as of August 2017, 102 defendants - accused, but not yet convicted of various crimes - were waiting in various county jails for forensic evaluations. One had waited 1,249 days. Another 1,173 days, still another 879." 

Haire was 16 when he was locked up and "spent his 18th, 19th, and 20th birthdays in the jail" awaiting an evaluation to determine his competency to stand trial for charges of attacking his father's girlfriend with a knife - even though he'd been diagnosed with seven different mental disorders as a child.

Mentally-ill people who haven't even been convicted of a crime by a court of law being incarcerated for years without proper treatment waiting to be seen and evaluated by a medical professional.

It's 2017 and Tyler is still waiting.

As Johnny Cash famously sang in "Folsom Prison Blues" - "I hang my head and cry".