Johnny Cash never spent a day in prison. He was arrested seven times on misdemeanor charges, but spending the night in jail was the closest he came to incarceration. Still, that experience, along with years of heavy drinking and drug use, might have given him some insight into the life of a prison inmate. Maybe he realized his own path could have easily mirrored one of theirs, with a few different choices. At any rate, when he recorded two concerts at Folsom State Prison in northern California 47 years ago on January 13, 1968, he sang like a man who knew what life on the inside was about.

Cash had become interested in prison life after seeing the drama “Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison.” He released “Folsom Prison Blues” in 1955, more than a decade before he would record it in front of actual inmates at Folsom. Cash was said to have great compassion for inmates, and started playing prison shows beginning with a show at San Quentin in 1959.

By 1968, Cash had gotten his drug use under control. At 35, his career had started to wane, and he was able to get enough support from Columbia Records to back the idea of a prison album. Calls to Folsom and San Quentin were made, and Folsom responded first. Cash, along with June Carter (who would become his wife two months later), Carl Perkins, and the Tennessee Three, recorded two concerts at Folsom on this date. The resulting album “At Folsom Prison,” rejuvenated Cash’s career, even though Columbia made only a token effort to promote it. A second prison album, “At San Quentin,” followed the next year.

Listening to parts of “At Folsom Prison” might give the impression of a room of rowdy inmates, but the prisoners were actually careful to reserve their cheers, since they didn’t want to be hassled by guards for cheering Cash’s mournful descriptions of prison life. Cheers on the line “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die” were added during post-production.

Modern musicians are often criticized for glorifying crime, but it’s worth remembering Johnny Cash “shot a man in Reno” way back in 1955. (Cash said he wrote the line after trying to think of the worst possible reason to shoot a person.) Luckily for him, his concerts were the closest he ever came to life inside a prison before his death in 2003. And luckily for all of us, a few of them were preserved to give us a sense of how an outlaw singer was able to connect with real outlaws.

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