The arc of the song’s history — from an inmate’s composition at Folsom, to an overnight learning, to a performance that was unknowingly witnessed by its author, to inclusion on a career-reviving album, to a failed attempt to build a free life around music, to a death that ended the story abruptly — is not a neat one. It resists the narrative shapes that popular biography tends to impose: neither triumph nor simple tragedy, but something more complicated, in which genuine gifts and genuine opportunities were insufficient against the weight of a life lived in and around institutions.
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## San Quentin and What Followed
The commercial and critical success of At Folsom Prison made a second prison recording almost inevitable. Cash and Johnston returned to California the following year, this time to San Quentin, for a concert recorded on February 24, 1969.
At San Quentin went further commercially than its predecessor in one significant respect: it reached number one on both the country and pop album charts, the first Cash album to achieve the pop milestone. The specific track that drove its pop success was “A Boy Named Sue,” written by poet and cartoonist Shel Silverstein. Cash had received the song from Silverstein the day before the San Quentin recording and learned it in the same overnight-learning fashion he had applied to “Greystone Chapel” a year earlier.
“A Boy Named Sue” reached number two on the pop chart — blocked from the top by the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” — and was the kind of unlikely crossover that confirmed Cash’s ability to reach audiences far outside the country music mainstream. The song’s dark comedy — a son who tracks down the father who gave him a ridiculous name, intending to kill him, and in the climactic confrontation comes to understand why his father did it — was accessible in a way that Cash’s prison songs were not. It was funny, narratively clear, and performed with evident delight.