There may never be another artist who embodies contradictions as effortlessly as Johnny Cash.
He was the country music singer who hobnobbed with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. He wrote compassionate, civil-minded songs for society’s downtrodden while leading a personal life dominated by drug addiction and abrasive relationships with his family, friends and colleagues.
And perhaps most eccentric of all, despite making millions of dollars under the bright lights of concert halls, Cash began playing concerts in prisons all over the country.
The concerts led to live recordings, and it was in the bleak Folsom Prison cafeteria performing to a crowd of criminals that Cash recorded one of his most successful albums, “At Folsom Prison.”
That storied performance is the narrative framework for “Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison,” a new documentary screening tonight at Hammer Museum which attempts to shed light on Cash’s mysterious interest in prison life.
“If there was a main theme to the film, it’s understanding Johnny Cash’s belief in redemption,” said the film’s director, Bestor Cram.
The documentary was inspired by “Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison: the Making of a Masterpiece,” a book by Michael Streissguth.
Streissguth has written three books on Johnny Cash in addition to co-producing the documentary, and he said he hopes the film will help put the performance in its proper historical context.
“The ’60s was about solidarity with the fringes of society, and (Cash’s Folsom concert) was really a quintessential 1960s statement,” said Streissguth.
Cash’s music had used prisoner’s and prisons as thematic material ever since the beginning of his career. “Folsom Prison Blues” was one of his first nationally recognized songs, and a certain lyric in the song touched a vein with inmates, according to Streissguth.
“But I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die/When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and cry.”
After the song, inmates began writing letters to Cash asking him to play, and starting in the late 1950s, Cash obliged.
“He believed he had a moral responsibility to pay attention to those people,” Streissguth said.
The concerts were also a shrewd career move at a time during which Cash’s popularity seemed to be flagging, according to Cram.
“He felt something for the prisoners, and he knew that his interaction with them was going to spark in him a response that would be heard in the live recording,” said Cram.
The concert was a gamble, in more ways than one. To play at Folsom, a maximum security prison, Cash had to sign a waiver saying that the authorities would not negotiate if a hostage situation arose. Cash’s label, Columbia Records, disapproved of the album, according to rock photographer Jim Marshall, who entered the prison with Cash.
“The record company was thinking, “˜Why waste the money to record a prison concert?'” Marshall said. “But it became one of his biggest-selling records,” he added.
Though Cash never actually shot a man in Reno to watch him die, it didn’t affect his rapport with the prisoners or the success of the concert. As Marshall tells it, Cash had the audience in the palm of his hand the moment he stepped onto the stage.
“If John had said to the prisoners, “˜Follow me out of here,’ there would have been a … riot,” said Marshall, who was the only
photographer present at the recording.
Cash would go on to record another live concert at San Quentin Prison with cameras present. But the 24 rolls of film Marshall shot that night are the only visual record of Cash’s performance at Folsom Prison.
With those photographs as well as new interviews from Cash’s relatives, members of his band, the Tennessee Three, and Millard Dedmon, a former Folsom inmate who was present at the recording, Cram wanted to create a more visceral narrative of the immortal performance and express its significance to Cash’s life and the people in it.
“We’re looking at Cash’s footprints, the impressions he left on the people at Folsom Prison,” Cram said.
The impact of Cash’s concert is evident in at least one man. Glen Sherley, the Folsom convict who wrote “Greystone Chapel,” a song Cash sung at the performance, was released and had a brief but successful career as a singer/songwriter.
Dedmon, a prisoner for life, was also released thanks to reforms brought about by Cash’s advocacy, according to Streissguth.
But the Folsom concert wasn’t admired for the prison reforms it may have helped bring about, and was no mere publicity stunt.
It was an eloquent articulation of Cash’s true musical persona ““ a blunt, yet expressive voice for society’s outcast and forgotten.
Cash himself said it best in the song “Man in Black.”
“But just so we’re reminded of the ones who are held back/Up front there ought to be a man in black.”