The specificity of that knowledge is audible in the Folsom performance. Cash did not perform his standard touring set; he built a program specifically for this audience and this space. The crime songs that might have seemed gratuitous in a standard venue were appropriate here. The comedy songs that required the audience to simultaneously hold darkness and laughter were exactly suited to people who had reason to hold both.
—
## “Orange Blossom Special” and the Problem of the Train
The train occupies a specific place in American folk and country music that is inseparable from the experience of imprisonment. Trains represented freedom, movement, the possibility of going somewhere else — all of which were denied to the men in the Folsom cafeteria. Cash had been singing train songs since his earliest records. “Folsom Prison Blues” is partly a train song; the narrator watches a train go by from prison and thinks about freedom.
“Orange Blossom Special,” which Cash performed at Folsom, is a classic fiddle tune describing a named passenger train that ran between New York and Miami. Cash performed it as a showcase for the harmonica — he played the melody on harmonica, mimicking the train’s rhythm and the whistle sounds, transforming a string tune into something that filled the cafeteria with the sound of motion.
The audience’s response to “Orange Blossom Special” at Folsom is one of the most purely joyful moments on the album. The song did not contain dark content, did not reference crime or punishment, did not demand complicated emotional responses. It was a virtuosic display of a musician doing something technically demanding and clearly enjoyable, and the inmates responded to it with the kind of delight that uncomplicated pleasure in skill produces.