At Folsom Prison Review

Cash had been asking Columbia to let him record in a prison since the fifties and had been refused every time. Bob Johnston said yes, drove a mobile rig to Folsom, and caught two shows in a cafeteria with terrible acoustics. That is the production, and it is honestly middling: the guitars are thin, the vocal mic is hot, and the roar that follows the line about shooting a man in Reno was widely reported to have been raised in the mix afterwards, because the men had been warned to behave and mostly did.

The setlist is the argument. Almost every song is about being locked up, condemned or wrecked, and Cash sequences them like a man building a case. 25 Minutes to Go is Shel Silverstein counting down to a hanging, one minute per line, and the laughter it gets is not comfortable. Cocaine Blues is played fast enough to sound like a man outrunning something. Dark as a Dungeon and The Wall handle the same subject without a joke anywhere near them. Then Greystone Chapel, written by Glen Sherley, a Folsom inmate who was sitting in the audience: the chaplain had passed Cash a tape the night before and he learned it in a motel room.

It restored a career that had been sliding for years, put Folsom Prison Blues back at number one on the country chart, and went into the National Recording Registry in 2003. Rough sound, permanent record.