The Grammy nominations followed. At the 11th Annual Grammy Awards, the album won Best Album Notes, and “Folsom Prison Blues” won Best Country Vocal Performance, Male. The critical response was equally strong: reviewers noted that Cash’s connection to his Folsom audience was unlike anything in mainstream country, that the album captured a kind of emotional authenticity that studio recordings rarely achieved.
Cash described the Folsom album as where things “really got started” for him again. This is a relatively modest formulation for what actually happened. At Folsom Prison did not merely restart a stalled career; it repositioned Cash as an artist whose cultural significance extended beyond the country music market. The critical and commercial response to the album attracted listeners who would not have called themselves country music fans, people who were drawn to the rawness of the recording, to the specificity of the Folsom situation, to Cash’s particular authority as a performer who appeared to mean every word he sang.
The ABC television network, noting the album’s impact, offered Cash his own television show. The Johnny Cash Show ran from 1969 to 1971 and provided Cash with a platform that few country artists of that era had access to. It brought him to audiences who had not bought the album, confirmed his status as a mainstream American cultural figure, and gave him the opportunity to present music — folk, rock, gospel, country, singer-songwriter — in combinations that crossed every genre boundary Nashville maintained.
The year after At Folsom Prison, Cash recorded a second prison album, At San Quentin, at another California state prison. At San Quentin went further commercially than its predecessor: it reached number one on both the country and pop album charts, the first Cash album to achieve the pop chart milestone. It produced “A Boy Named Sue,” written by Shel Silverstein and recorded live at San Quentin, which reached number two on the pop chart. Cash went on to record two more prison concert albums over the following decade.