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## The Records That Followed
The success of At Folsom Prison produced several immediate consequences and several longer-term ones.
The immediate consequences included the ABC television deal, the At San Quentin album, and Cash’s increased visibility as a cultural figure with significance beyond country music. The television show gave him a platform he used to book artists who would not have appeared on a country music program in another context — Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Louis Armstrong, Merle Haggard, and Pete Seeger among them. The show ran for two seasons, from 1969 to 1971, and established Cash as a figure who could mediate between American cultural traditions that did not usually speak to each other.
The longer-term consequences included the template the album created for live recording in non-standard venues. Big Mama Thornton and B.B. King recorded prison albums following the success of Cash’s. The idea that a performance for a captive audience could produce recording of wider commercial and critical value — that the specific character of the audience could enhance rather than limit the music — was established by At Folsom Prison and extended by what followed it.
Cash’s subsequent career went through significant further fluctuations. His 1970s work at Columbia produced the occasional hit but did not maintain the momentum of the 1968–1972 period. He lost his Nashville recording contract, spent a period performing in Branson, Missouri, and experienced a creative decline that parallel his earlier commercial one. The American Recordings series with producer Rick Rubin, beginning in 1994, produced a second major career revival — an older, more visibly mortal Cash reinterpreting his own songs and others’ in recordings that attracted a new generation of listeners.