Summary Of Folsom Prison Blues By Johnny Cash

Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” was a hit song on Cash’s debut album With His Hot and Blue Guitar that helped bolster Cash’s musical career. “Folsom Prison Blues” was first recorded by Sun Records in the summer of 1955 reaching #4 on the Billboard Country and Westerners bestsellers chart. In 1968, “Folsom Prison Blues” was rerecorded during a live performance at Folsom Prison and was included on one of Cash’s most successful albums, At Folsom Prison. This recording reached #1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs in 1968, which boosted the popularity of the song. While Cash is credited with writing “Folsom Prison Blues”, the melody and some lyrics were taken from a 1953 song called “Crescent City Blues” by Gordon Jenkins. The form, instrumentation,

Cash, who was a strong proponent of prison reform, performed many prison concerts over a span of 30 years. Although Cash never served any time himself, “he identified with the prisoners because many of them had served their sentences and had been rehabilitated in some cases, but were still kept there the rest of their lives” according to Cash’s youngest brother. The lyrics of “Folsom Prison Blues” strongly resonated with the prisoner’s sense of confinement and lack of freedom within the walls of a prison. Cash’s prison performances gave the prisoners a rare opportunity to experience a sense of freedom while incarcerated. Johnny Cash used his publicity to advocate prison reform and to acknowledge the population locked away in

The original recording in 1955 did not include drums while the recording at Folsom Prison in 1968 utilized the drums. Cash was able to replicate the sound of a drum in the original version by placing a piece of paper under his guitar strings and strumming the rhythm of the drums. Johnny Cash was the only vocalist in “Folsom Prison Blues” which created the sense that Cash was singing from personal experience. Cash combines the traditional train song and prison song and strikingly uses the train as a symbol of freedom and the prison as a symbol of captivity and confinement. Cash contrasts the two themes throughout the song with lines such as “And I ain’t seen the sunshine since I don’t know when / I’m stuck in Folsom prison, and time keeps draggin’ on” representing life within the prison. Later in the song Cash sings, “I bet there’s rich folks eating from a fancy dining car / They’re probably drinkin’ coffee and smoking big cigars”, which contrasts life in prison. While most of the song has a dark depiction, the last verse of the song ends with a bit of hope. The narrator explains that if he was released from Folsom prison he would take the train farther down the line, “And I’d let that lonesome whistle blow my blues