This is worth noting because the Folsom album is sometimes discussed as primarily a dark record — an album about crime and consequence, performed for people who understood crime and consequence from the inside. It is partly that. But it is also an album about entertainment in the fullest sense: about the pleasure of skilled performance, about laughter and surprise, about the range of human experience that music can hold. The comedy songs and the virtuosic moments like “Orange Blossom Special” were not relief from the album’s serious content; they were part of what the serious content required. A performance that sustained darkness without comedy or pleasure would have been a lecture, not a concert.
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## The Setlist as Document
The setlist from the January 13 morning show is a document in itself, worth reading as a constructed sequence rather than a random collection of songs.
The show opened with “Folsom Prison Blues” — the song named for the place, the song that Cash had written in Germany fifteen years earlier about an imaginary prisoner at this specific location. The choice to open with it was both obvious and charged: it was a declaration that Cash understood the specific nature of this performance and was not going to pretend otherwise.
“Busted” followed — a song about poverty, about the specific humiliation of economic failure, about the experience of having nothing and being judged for it. Harlan Howard had written it; Ray Charles had made it famous; Cash’s version at Folsom was a statement about the material conditions that lead people to the choices that lead them to places like Folsom.