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From the Vaults: Johnny Cash By Cole Louison Maybe the greatest thing about Johnny Cash doing a concert in a maximum security prison is that the performer himself has been incarcerated more than once. It is hard to separate the smoke from the flames when it comes to the man in black, and the album Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison only adds fuel to the fire. Out of the silence, the infamous "Hello. I'm Johnny Cash," opens the recording. Immediately following Cash's greeting is the noise of the all-male, imprisoned crowd as the band launches into Folsom Prison Blues. Like a lot of the songs on the album, there are repeated references to guns, death, drugs, women, trains and prison. When I was just a baby, my Moma told me son, Always be a good boy, don't ever play with guns But I shot a man in Reno, Just to watch him dieeee (Here, one man's scream penetrates the dull roar of
the audience) When I hear that whistle blowin' I hang my head and cry "Dark as the dungeon," the next song on the album, talks about the dreary and lonesome conditions in a prison cells. In I still miss someone, one of the few songs having nothing to do with prison, Cash takes on the point of a man unable to enjoy the social scene because he misses his old love. The next two songs are some of the darkest ever to come out of Cash. Another first person story song, "Cocaine Blues" is about a man, Willy Lee, who takes a shot of cocaine, shoots his woman with "that lonesome 44" and runs to Mexico where he is captured and sentenced to 99 years in Folsom Prison. From there Cash takes on the voice of a man on the day of his execution. Twenty Five Minutes to Go ends: "And now I'm swingin' and here I go o o o . . ." Cash ends the set by himself with the ballad The Long Black Veil, sung, again, from the first person point of view, this time that of a dead man remembering his wrongful execution and the woman he protected by sacrificing himself. When Cash isn't talking between songs, voices of prisoners or the voice of a man in charge of the prisoners can be heard. The second set starts and ends with the voice of the man instructing the prisoners. "Send A Picture of Mother" begins the set, followed by The Wall, told through the point of view of a man, still incarcerated, who remembers a prisoner who was gunned down trying to escape. The concert then takes a more cheery turn with two short, quirky songs: "Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog" and "Flushed From the Bathroom of Your Heart." June Carter, Cash's wife, then makes an appearance to help with the quick-paced Jackson, in which the two take turns singing versus about starting anew in Mississippi. "You sure look nice," Cash says to his wife, through the howling of the crowd, as she comes to the microphone. "Thank you, I'm . . . glad to be back in Folsom." "I like watchin' you talk." "I'm talkin' with my mouth. I-" "-Let's do a song." Carter helps with another heart-crushing story song about a man found on the railroad tracks, who has just been released from prison and knows he won't make it home to see his love and son. The tempo picks up once again as the two sing the drum-driven "I Got Stripes," a huffy-puffy song about a man bragging about being put into solitary confinement. "I got stripes, stripes around my shoulders, I got chains, chains around my feet," Cash boasts. Not surprisingly, the tempo is broken again with the homesick, slow ballad, The Green, Green Grass of Home. The closing song of the album, "Graystone Chapel," was written by one of the prisoners in the crowd. "There's a gray, stone chapel here at Folsom," Cash begins in his familiar, rock-solid, bullfrog voice. "A house of worship in this pen of sins." Backed by the harmonizing of the other band members, Graystone Chapel is a soft, uplifting, peaceful song that Cash uses to close his concert of stories about the dead, defeated and oppressed with the final lines: "and it's given me the strength to carry on." Partly because of its length, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison was never released alone on compact disc. The Folsom concert, along with another Cash played in San Quentin, was released on a CD in 1987. In Ithaca, the record certainly will not be easy to come by. I stole mine two years ago when I was visiting my Grandmother at Lakeside Nursing Home on route 96, as they had a stack of records but no record player. Folsom was on the top of the stack of records in the lounge, Johnny Cash's sweating, sneering face looking up off the bookshelf. The record is in perfect condition with the exception of a skip on 25 Minutes To Go, a list of 25 thoughts and observations by a man about to be hung. The line between "I can see the mountains, I can see the sky, three more minutes to go," and "I can see the buzzards, I can hear the crows," is the one that gets stuck. It ends " . . . for a man to want to die" and starts, over and over again: "and it's too durn pretty, and it's too durn pretty and it's too durn pretty . . ." Cole Louison is a junior at Ithaca College. |
