Johnston backed the idea. He called two California prisons — Folsom and San Quentin — and asked about the possibility of recording a live concert. Folsom responded first. The project was approved.
His argument for doing it, by the accounts of those involved, was essentially economic: a live album in a prison would cost almost nothing to record. No studio time, no session musicians to pay beyond the band Cash already employed, minimal production overhead. If it failed, the loss would be minimal. If it worked, the upside would be substantial.
The argument that this was a low-risk venture was partially disingenuous and Johnston probably knew it. A prison album that failed commercially would be a very particular kind of failure — one that associated Cash with a failed experiment in a marginal audience — and Cash’s career was not in a position where it could absorb many more failures. But the economics were real, and they were the argument Johnston made.
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## The Song From Inside
Floyd Gressett was a minister and friend of Johnny Cash’s who had a connection to Folsom Prison. He served as a kind of liaison between Cash and the prison community — someone who had been involved in the earlier prison performances Cash had given.
Sometime before the January 1968 concert, Gressett received a recording from Glen Sherley, an inmate at Folsom. Sherley had written a song called “Greystone Chapel,” named for the actual chapel that stood within the prison walls. He had recorded his own version of it at Folsom and gotten it to Gressett through the prison’s recreation director, with the hope — unstated but obvious — that it might somehow reach Cash before the concert.