Cash returned to Folsom State Prison for a second concert recording in 2008, which was released posthumously in 2010 as part of a series of archival releases from his estate. The concert had been recorded as a double feature with another show, but the specific dynamics of the original 1968 recording were not reproducible.
By 2008, Cash had been dead for five years. What was released in 2010 was a recording from 1966 — a pre-Folsom Prison album Cash concert at the same institution — that had sat in the Columbia vaults for more than forty years. The 1966 recording predates the album and shows Cash performing for Folsom inmates two years before the famous January 1968 shows, at a point when his drug use was near its worst.
The comparison between the 1966 and 1968 recordings is instructive. The 1966 performance is energetic and engaged, but Cash’s voice shows the wear of the drug years in ways that the 1968 performance, made after months of sobriety, does not. The audience responds, but with less of the specific intensity that characterizes the 1968 recording. The 1966 show is evidence of Cash’s long commitment to prison performances; the 1968 recording is evidence of what Cash at his best could produce.
The continued availability of the 1966 recording after its 2010 release gave historians and listeners a comparison point that was not previously available. It confirmed that the 1968 album was not simply a product of the venue and the audience — that Cash’s specific condition in January 1968, newly sober and newly committed to a performance that he believed mattered, was part of what made the recording exceptional.