They did. The laughter during the comedy songs was genuine and large. The silence during the quieter pieces was real silence. The crowd was not performing an appreciation of Johnny Cash; they were having it.
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## Greystone Chapel
The last song in both sets was Glen Sherley’s “Greystone Chapel.”
Before he played it, Cash introduced Sherley. He pointed out the song’s author from the stage, singled him out in a cafeteria full of his fellow inmates, and told the crowd that the man who wrote the song was in the room.
Cash later said this was a mistake. He used the words “terrible, terrible thing” to describe pointing Sherley out in that setting, among all those men. The spontaneous logic of the moment had seemed right — to give credit to the man who deserved it, to tell the audience that one of them had created something worth performing. But in the context of a prison, with the specific social dynamics of an institutional population, to be singled out for praise by a celebrity performer in front of guards and fellow inmates was not a neutral experience.
Sherley was in the front row. He had no idea the song would be on the setlist. He had given the recording to Gressett as a kind of message in a bottle, without any certainty that it would reach Cash at all, let alone be performed the following day.
When the band started playing “Greystone Chapel,” by several accounts Sherley’s reaction was visible and intense — the specific description from one account was that he “just melted in his seat.”