Marty Stuart — who would later become Cash’s son-in-law, having married his daughter Cindy Cash in 1983 — described Cash’s specific quality as a performer in terms that addressed this directly. The audience knew, Stuart observed, that Cash was not romanticizing their situation or exploiting their predicament for commercial gain. They knew he had been to prison himself, in the sense of having been in holding cells and county jails, however briefly. They knew he had used drugs to the point of dysfunction. They knew the song about Folsom was real in its origins, however fictional its narrator. They were not extending charity to a performer who was trying hard; they were recognizing someone who, in some register they could read, was not entirely unlike them.
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## The Album’s Relationship to Preceding Prison Recordings
At Folsom Prison did not emerge from a vacuum. The idea of recording live music in a prison setting — and releasing the result commercially — had precedents.
Folkways Records, the label founded by Moses Asch that specialized in documenting American vernacular music, had for years been recording music in settings outside the conventional studio. Alan Lomax, the folklorist who worked with the Library of Congress from the 1930s onward, had made field recordings in prisons — most famously, he recorded Leadbelly at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola in 1933, and that recording contributed to Leadbelly’s subsequent career in the folk revival. The idea that prison settings contained authentic American music that deserved documentation had been part of the folk revival consciousness for decades before 1968.