The song ran five and a half minutes in its recorded form. Cash performed it with evident conviction — this was not a favor being done to a prison inmate but a genuinely good song being given a performance equal to its quality. The specific character of “Greystone Chapel,” with its assertion of spiritual possibility inside the most restrictive of human institutions, was exactly suited to the closing of a concert at the place that had inspired it. The chapel was visible through the cafeteria windows. The audience could see it from where they were sitting.
Cash ended both shows with it.
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## The Second Show and What Was Used
The second performance began at 12:40 p.m., approximately three hours after the first. Johnston and Cash had planned two shows to give themselves a recording backup — if the first show produced unusable material, the second would provide alternatives.
The first show was better. Johnston later said, by several accounts, that Cash simply couldn’t match the energy of the morning performance in the afternoon. The musicians were fatigued. The audience’s first-show intensity — the pure surprise and delight of an audience that had been waiting for this — was not replicable. The second show was a good performance. The first was exceptional.
The final album drew almost entirely from the first show. Only two tracks from the second performance appeared on the original LP: “Give My Love to Rose” and “I Got Stripes.” Everything else — the opening “Folsom Prison Blues,” the mid-set material, “Greystone Chapel” at the close — came from the morning.