Cash paid for the funeral. Glen Sherley was buried in Shafter, California.
Marty Stuart, the country musician and Cash associate, later said that “Greystone Chapel” was “kind of the heart of that record.” The song’s author had a life that the record could not change sufficiently to save him. These two facts sit alongside each other without resolving each other.
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## What the Recording Captured
The specific qualities that made At Folsom Prison exceptional as a recording are worth examining, because they were not all accidents of circumstance.
Bob Johnston’s production decisions were deliberate. The choice to place microphones close to the musicians and capture the signal without EQ was a conscious rejection of the Nashville Sound’s production values, which involved heavy use of equalization, reverb, and orchestration to smooth country recordings into something more palatable to mainstream radio audiences. Johnston’s approach produced a sound that was dry, immediate, and unpolished — a sound that accurately represented what it felt like to be in that cafeteria on January 13, 1968.
The audience was not a neutral recording element. Cash’s awareness of his audience — an audience of men who were not attending as a cultural choice but as a consequence of their circumstances, who had no option to leave and no particular reason to perform an appreciation they did not feel — forced a specific kind of honesty. The performers could not coast. The audience would have known if they were coasting.
The laughter during “Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog” and “Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart” was genuine, spontaneous, and large. Comedy in a prison setting has a different character than comedy in a concert hall; the need for laughter, in that environment, is real and urgent in a way that it is not for most audiences. When Cash delivered the comedy material — deliberately, without breaking character, in his characteristic deadpan baritone — the crowd’s response was not polite appreciation but release.