What At Folsom Prison did differently from those documentary recordings was make the event itself — the concert, the audience, the relationship between performer and crowd — part of what was being captured. Lomax’s recordings were of inmates performing for a folklorist; Cash’s recording was of Cash performing for inmates. The direction of the relationship was reversed: instead of a researcher going into a prison to document what was there, an entertainer was going in to give something to the people there, and the resulting document captured the transaction between them.
The commercial success of At Folsom Prison then created a template that other artists followed. Big Mama Thornton recorded at San Quentin in the late 1960s. B.B. King recorded “Live in Cook County Jail” in 1971, an album that addressed the racial dimensions of incarceration more directly than Cash had. The genre of the prison concert album, which barely existed before 1968, became a recognizable format in the years that followed.
The subsequent Cash prison albums — At San Quentin (1969), Johnny Cash at Madison Square Garden… no, the more directly relevant prison ones: At Folsom Prison Volume II (a posthumous compilation), and the two further prison recordings Cash made in the 1970s — extended the original concept while confirming that it was not infinitely replicable. The energy of the first Folsom recording was particular to its moment: the specific convergence of Cash’s recovery, Sherley’s song, Johnston’s production approach, and an audience that had never seen anything quite like it.
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## The Second Time Cash Played Folsom