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## The Legacy and What Came After
The honors that came to At Folsom Prison accumulated over the decades and are now substantial. The album was added to the Library of Congress National Recording Registry in 2003, the same year Cash died. It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2018. Rolling Stone ranked it number 88 on its 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time (adjusted to 164 in the 2020 revision). Time magazine included it in its list of the 100 greatest albums in 2006. CMT ranked it the third-greatest country album ever made. Various publications and critics have called it the greatest live album ever recorded.
These accolades, arriving over fifty years, reflect the judgment of successive generations of listeners and critics — people who encountered the album in different contexts, with different reference points, and arrived at similar conclusions about its significance. The judgment is not unanimous, but its breadth and durability are remarkable for a live album recorded in a prison by an artist whose career was then in recovery.
The Library of Congress designation is perhaps the most consequential formal recognition, because it places At Folsom Prison in a category of cultural artifacts deemed worthy of permanent preservation. The National Recording Registry is not a list of commercial successes or critical favorites, but of recordings that are “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” The specific grounds for the At Folsom Prison designation — a performance that captured a moment in American life that could not be reproduced, by an artist whose connection to the subject matter was genuine, in front of an audience whose response transformed the recording into something more than music — are evident in the record itself.