Cash was not a killer. He had not been to prison. He was a 21-year-old airman from Arkansas who had watched a movie and felt something he wanted to put into sound. The identification was imaginative rather than biographical, but the specificity of the resulting song made it sound like confession rather than fiction. That ambiguity — the sense that Cash meant every word he sang, even when he was singing about experiences he hadn’t had — was central to his power as a performer.
He returned to the United States in 1954 and moved to Memphis, where he auditioned for Sam Phillips at Sun Records with a musician friend named Marshall Grant on bass and Luther Perkins on guitar. Phillips, who had already discovered Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis and knew what commercially viable talent sounded like, told Cash to go home and sin, then come back with a song he could sell. Cash came back and was signed.
“Folsom Prison Blues” was recorded for Sun in 1955 and became an early hit. The narrator’s voice — deep, deliberate, unhurried — was unlike anything else on the country charts. Country music in 1955 had a range of vocal styles, from the ornamented high tenor of bluegrass to the smooth crooning of Nashville pop. Cash’s voice was none of these things. It occupied its own register and operated at its own pace. It sounded like it had come from somewhere specific and was not trying to be anywhere else.
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## Sun Records and the First Wave