He served in the United States Air Force from 1950 to 1954, spending most of his service at Landsberg Air Force Base in West Germany, where he worked as a Morse code interceptor — a job that involved listening to Soviet radio transmissions and transcribing them. He was good at it; he had perfect pitch and an exceptional ear. He was bored by it. He bought a guitar and formed a band called the Landsberg Barbarians with other service members.
It was at Landsberg that he saw the film that would redirect his life.
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## The Movie That Made the Music
In 1953, Cash’s Air Force unit watched a 1951 film called *Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison*. The film was not, by most critical assessments, a remarkable piece of cinema. It was a prison drama, the kind of genre film that studios were making by the dozen in those years — a story about inmates, corruption, and the inhumanity of prison conditions.
But something in it struck Cash with enough force that he went back to his barracks and began writing a song.
The song was “Folsom Prison Blues.” It is built around a narrator who is in prison, watching a train go by outside the walls, thinking about freedom and choices. The key line — the one that would cause Cash problems fifteen years later after the Kennedy assassination — describes the narrator having shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. The line is brutal in its directness and entirely at odds with the kind of sentiment that country music of the early 1950s typically offered.