He held up an ice cream company with a toy gun. He robbed a man of a cash roll that turned out to be singles. His crimes were desperate, poorly planned and usually fueled by booze. His family were hard-working farm laborers who moved to central California in search of fieldwork.īy the late 1950s, Sherley was repeatedly in trouble with the law.
#Johnny cash folsom prison blues full
Glen Sherley was born in Oklahoma in 1936, when the Great Depression was in full swing. Whether either of them found it - whether this meeting was a good thing or a bad thing - is hard to say. Fifty years ago, they were fighting their respective demons, both looking for salvation. This moment sparked a union between Cash and Sherley that affected both men profoundly. “I thought, ‘I just saw the happiest man alive.'” “Glen jumped out of his seat and looked like his eyes were going to bulge out of his head,” says former reporter Gene Beley, who was covering the show. Glen Sherley, in the front row, has no idea that this is going to happen. “This song is written by our friend Glen Sherley. “It was written by a man right here in Folsom Prison,” Cash says. Greystone Chapel, a driving, three-chord ode to the granite house of worship within Folsom Prison. He’s California state prisoner A597959C - just another face in the crowd.Ĭash announces his final number, a song called Down in the front row, there’s an inmate with a chiseled face and dark pompadour piled high, sucking on a Pall Mall. He’s onstage under the harsh fluorescent lights, standing tall behind a nicotine veil of smoke. The object of their excitement is Johnny Cash. They’re hooting, hollering, clapping, pounding fists on metal tables. There are 1,000 convicts in mess hall #2 at Folsom Prison. After opening acts Carl Perkins and the Statler Brothers each played a song, Cash stepped to the mike and with that deep voice uttered, “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash,” then launched into “Folsom Prison Blues,” a song that was actually written in 1953 and had already given Cash a hit in 1955.It’s a January morning in 1968. Cash performed two shows that day, one in the morning, the other early in the afternoon. “But once we were into it, that was one good show.” “I was about as relaxed as a bug in a Roach Motel, being still new to the business of getting up on stage in front of people without a bloodstream full of drugs,” Cash wrote in his 1997 autobiography. He got sober in late 1967 and arrived at Folsom Prison on January 13, 1968-fifty years ago-to record a live album. In the late 60s, Cash had fallen out of favor with the Nashville music industry, his career struggling as he fought drug addiction.
The scenes of tortuous violence affected Cash deeply and in 1957 he began performing in prisons, including a 1959 show at San Quentin which found inmate Merle Haggard in the front row.īut it was his performance at another California prison, Folsom State, that has become one of music’s most iconic moments. In 1951, while serving in the Air Force in Germany, Cash watched Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison, a film that depicted brutal conditions endured by inmates at the California institution. Contrary to urban legend, Johnny Cash never spent any time in prison.