164. Johnny Cash, "At Folsom Prison"

 

This isn't the only Johnny Cash live album.  For that matter, it's not the only Johnny Cash live album recorded in a prison, or even the only Johnny Cash live album recorded in a prison in California.  Johnny Cash has to be the undisputed master of live albums recorded in prisons.  But this is the one that put Cash back on the map at a time when he was struggling for relevancy.  And it worked; the album went gold not long after its release and revitalized Johnny Cash as a viable artist (although kicking his addiction to uppers probably helped just as much).

If I had to describe the album in one word I might say "rollicking" or just "fun."  Cash is clearly at ease, joking around with the audience, who rewards him with enthusiastic cheering.  His voice isn't in top form; it sounds like he needs to clear his throat basically the whole time, but he delivers the songs with so much heart and verve that you can overlook it.

We start out, as we must, with "Folsom Prison Blues," a song Cash wrote years earlier, sung from the perspective of a prisoner in that very institution, driven crazy by the sound of the free on a train outside the walls.  It has the famous lines "I shot a man in Reno/Just to watch him die" that got the song banned from radio in some markets in a much simpler time.

A lot of the songs are obviously chosen for the setting, like "Dark as the Dungeon," which is ostensibly about coal mining but has obvious parallels to life in prison.  Cash changes the words of "Cocaine Blues," a dark tale of a man who shoots his woman while fucked up on whiskey and blow, to "ninety-nine years in the Folsom Pen" instead of the original "San Quentin."  And near the end there's a touching rendition of the classic "Green Green Grass of Home," which would obviously resonate with a bunch of dudes who would like nothing more than to touch the grass of home.

If you've seen the Joaquin Phoenix-led Cash biopic Walk the Line, you'll know this concert as the framing device for the movie, and you may recall that June Carter was also there to sing on "Jackson" and "Give My Love to Rose."  She sounds especially jazzed to be there.

There has been a regrettable lack of country music on this list, and while you couldn't really call this straight country, we'll take what we can get.  It's certainly a pleasure to listen to.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Surely.