Cherry’s instruction gave the inmates explicit permission — from someone associated with the event’s organizers — to respond freely. It removed the ambiguity about whether enthusiasm was appropriate or risky. The result was an audience that responded from the first note with an intensity that the microphones captured and that the final album transmitted to every subsequent listener.
The specific reactions on the album — the explosive cheer when Cash announced his name, the half-laugh and half-groan at the Reno shooting line, the sustained engagement through nearly two hours of performance — are partly a function of Cherry’s warm-up and the permission it granted. The performances themselves earned and maintained the response, but the conditions that made the response possible were partly constructed.
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## Ronald Reagan and the Governor’s Visit
A detail that subsequent accounts of the Folsom recording note without always explaining is the visit of California’s then-governor Ronald Reagan to Cash’s rehearsal at the El Rancho Motel in Sacramento on January 12, 1968 — the night before the concerts.
Reagan had been governor of California since January 1967. His political identity was then being shaped in ways that would define the following decades: he was establishing himself as the leader of a conservative movement that emphasized law and order, reduced government spending, and opposition to what he characterized as permissiveness in California’s liberal institutions. His presence at a rehearsal for a Johnny Cash prison concert was not an obvious fit with that identity.
The visit is documented in several accounts of the album’s recording. Reagan arrived with his entourage, watched Cash and the band run through their material, and spoke with Cash. The specific content of that conversation is not recorded in sources available for this article.