He may not have been an actual criminal, but the Man in Black could be light-fingered when it came to songwriting, as is shown by one of his signature songs… Folsom Prison Blues.
Words By Jordan Bassett
It’s one of the most famous lines in music history: “I shot a man in Reno / Just to watch him die.” Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues turns 70 this year, but its most savage lyric is still shocking all these decades after the Man in Black cut the country classic for Sun Records.
There are multiple reasons for this. The first and most obvious is the cold, impassive way that he delivers the admission in his steady baritone, which conveys no sense of remorse (though there’s plenty of self-pity). Then there’s his spartan acoustic strumming, rounded out with Luther Perkins’ ghostly electric guitar and the relentless march of Marshall Grant’s stoic bassline, all evoking the rhythm of the train that the narrator watches chugging past his cell window.
Lyrically, too, the song is devastatingly simple, as Cash carves out his scene with ruthless efficiency. “When I was just a baby,” he sings, “my momma told me, ‘Son, always be a good boy/ Don’t ever play with guns.’” This picture of childhood innocence is swiftly obliterated when he reveals the atrocity for which he’s imprisoned.
Arresting Rhythm
Folsom Prison Blues, Johnny Cash’s second single, chugged its way to No.4 on Billboard’s Country Songs chart. This put it some distance ahead of his debut single, the stark Cry, Cry, Cry, which peaked at No.14 on the list. The stage was set for Folsom’s masterful successor I Walk The Line, a country No.1 the following year. Cash’s star was very much in ascendance, though to modern ears the prison-based track may seem a somewhat bizarre and unlikely hit single.
This would be to overlook the plethora of ‘train songs’ and ‘prison songs’ in popular music at the time, which everyone from Elvis Presley (Mystery Train) to The Robins (Riot In Cell Block #9) traded on in the 50s. Cash’s genius was not only to combine the two, but to do so in such a singular, assured manner.
He’d been inspired to write the song while serving in the United States Air Force in West Germany during the early 50s. While there, he watched the 1951 noir movie Inside The Walls Of Folsom Prison and wondered: what’s the worst thing a person could be imprisoned for? When Cash came up with an answer, the result was his most chilling lyric.
Locked Up & Loaded
Alas, not all of the lyrics were inspired by the film. The melody of Cash’s song was lifted from big band composer and pianist Gordon Jenkins’ 1953 slow-burning torch song Crescent City Blues, which opened with such familiar-sounding lines as: “I hear the train a-comin’/ It’s rolling ’round the bend/ And I ain’t been kissed, Lord, since I don’t know when.”
It seems that the fledgling Cash was simply naïve to the copyright implications of such a move. “At the time, I really had no idea I would be a professional recording artist,” Cash explained to a Canadian magazine in the mid-1990s (as quoted in the Los Angeles Times). “I wasn’t trying to rip anybody off.”
Barbara Barnes Sims, a publicist at Sun Records from 1957 to 1960, spotted the lift immediately (she assumed the original song was an uncopyrighted traditional number). In her book The Next Elvis: Searching For Stardom At Sun Records, Sims remembered meeting Cash at a recording session in 1958: “My intention was to compliment him when I said, ‘I think it was great what you did with that Gordon Jenkins number.’ He knew at once that I was referring to his adaptation of Folsom Prison Blues… He sputtered and became very defensive, saying, ‘I told Sam [Phillips] about that.’
“Hullo, I’m Johnny Cash…”
It’s somewhat surprising that Phillips shrugged off the discrepancy, given that the Sun founder was reportedly almost bankrupted by a lawsuit over Rufus Thomas’ 1953 single Bear Cat, a snarling ‘reply record’ that imitated Big Mama Thornton’s original version of Hound Dog. More surprising still is that Jenkins didn’t get his lawyer on the phone… yet.
In his autobiography, Cash, the Man in Black recalled that by 1968, he’d “been doing prison concerts for more than a decade, ever since Folsom Prison Bluesgot the attention of the inmates at the Huntsville, Texas prison” during his performance in 1957.
And so the incendiary live album Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison was born, opening with a faster, fiercer rendition of Folsom Prison Blues, this time featuring rockabilly and country sticksman W. S. Holland – a Cash regular since 1960 – on drums. When that version landed at No.1 on the Billboard country chart (and No.32 overall), it finally caught the attention of Gordon Jenkins, to whom Cash shelled out a $75,000 settlement.
This livewire take has arguably become the definitive version of the song, not least because of the singer’s ultra-cool introduction, which summons the ominous tone of the timeless tune that will follow: “Hullo, I’m Johnny Cash…”
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