Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 122

Record label: CBS

Produced: Bob Johnston

Recorded: Folsom Prison, California; January 13, 1968

Released: April 1968

Chart peaks: 8 (UK) 13 (US)

Personnel: Johnny Cash (v, g); June Carter (v); Carter Family (v); Marshall Grant (b); WS Holland (d); Carl Perkins (g); Luther Perkins (g); The Statler Brothers (v)

Track listing: Folsom Prison Blues (S); Busted; Dark As The Dungeon; I Still Miss Someone; Cocaine Blues; 25 Minutes To Go; Orange Blossom Special; The Long Black Veil; Send A Picture Of Mother; The Wall; Dirty Old Egg-Suckin’ Dog; Flushed From The Bathroom Of Your Heart; Jackson (S); Give My Love To Rose; I Got Stripes; Green Green Grass Of Home; Greystone Chapel

Running time: 55.49

Current CD: Sony 82876766582 adds: Live At San Quentin album plus extra tracks recorded at Folsom: Busted; Joe Bean; The Legend Of John Henry’s Hammer

Further listening: Johnny Cash At San Quentin (1969); American Recordings (1994)

Further reading: The New Johnny Cash (Charles Paul Conn, 1973); Johnny Cash: The Autobiography (Johnny Cash with Patrick Carr, 1998); www.johnnycash.com

Download: iTunes; HMV Digital

By 1968, Johnny Cash was a tired old C&W performer who seemed all washed up. Languishing on the Columbia label, he hadn’t had a real hit in years and faced a middle age of playing two-bit roadhouses for declining audiences and diminishing returns. A live album might be his only salvation.

Cash had been held behind bars a number of times, and Columbia bosses agreed with him that an album recorded in one of the prisons where he’d done time might revive his moribund career. Cash chose Folsom Prison as the venue: he had several times enthralled inmate audiences there with his honest blue-collar life stories and sympathetic banter. Cash returned to Folsom with high hopes, a full mobile recording crew and his future wife June Carter.

His music was the same as it always had been. Kicking off with his old Sun hit Folsom Prison Blues and following his usual formula of performing equal parts Cash originals and folk/country covers, he had the inmates of Folsom in the palm of his hand as his formidable storytelling abilities rose to the occasion. Lyrics about poverty, cocaine and whisky abuse, about endless days of coalmining and the horror of life behind bars are stock-in-trade American folklore to Cash’s many fans, but of course resonated even more strongly to the inmates he sang for on that chilly January evening.

Cash remains justifiably proud of this recording, which not only re-ignited his career in the States but signalled a turnaround in his previously chaotic private life: ‘(You) listen closely to this album and you hear the clanging of doors, the shrill of the whistle, the shouts of the men – even laughter from men who had forgotten how to laugh. There’s some stuff here I’m proud of.’