The first song was “Folsom Prison Blues.” The specific lyric about shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die drew a reaction from the crowd that is one of the most distinctive moments in live recording — a collective recognition, half-laughter and half-something harder to name, from an audience that understood what the song was about in a way that most concert audiences never would.
Cash moved through the set with the deliberateness that characterized all of his best performances. He was 36 years old, newly sober, recently engaged. He had spent the previous several years in various states of pharmaceutical incapacitation. The sharpness with which he performed at Folsom — the economy of his phrasing, the directness of his address to the audience — was at least in part the sharpness of someone who had recently recovered the full use of his faculties.
The set included songs about crime and its consequences (“Cocaine Blues,” “25 Minutes to Go,” “The Wall”), songs about loneliness and the people left behind (“I Still Miss Someone,” “Send a Picture of Mother,” “Green, Green Grass of Home”), train songs and work songs (“Orange Blossom Special,” “The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer”), comedy songs (“Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog,” “Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart”), and duets with June Carter (“Jackson”). The range was deliberately broad — Cash was not performing a narrow program designed for a specific audience but a full representation of what he did, trusting that an audience of Folsom inmates would engage with all of it.