He died on September 12, 2003, four months after June Carter Cash’s death. He was 71 years old. The tributes that followed noted his impact across country, rock, folk, and gospel, his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame (1980), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1992), and the Gospel Music Hall of Fame (2010), and his Kennedy Center Honors (1996). He had sold more than 50 million albums.
The At Folsom Prison album is listed on his Wikipedia biography as the work that “revived his career.” He himself described it, more specifically, as where things “really got started” for him again. Both formulations are correct, as far as they go. What neither quite captures is the improbability of the whole sequence: the song written in West Germany in 1953 that led to a career that nearly destroyed its author, the recovery from the cave in Tennessee in 1967, the January morning in a California cafeteria in 1968, the inmate in the front row who heard his own song played without warning, the album that came out of all of it.
## The Band Behind the Man
No account of At Folsom Prison is complete without attention to the musicians who filled the cafeteria that morning alongside Cash.
Luther Perkins — no relation to Carl Perkins — had been Cash’s guitarist since the Sun Records years. His playing style was distinctive to the point of becoming a musical signature: simple, repetitive, deliberate lines on the electric guitar, playing the spaces between notes as much as the notes themselves. The boom-chicka-boom pattern that defined Cash’s early sound was partly Luther’s contribution — a guitar approach that matched Cash’s vocal delivery in its economy and its refusal to hurry.