Johnny Cash continued performing until his health made it impossible. His last public performances came in 2003, at the Carter Family Fold in Hiltons, Virginia — a venue run by June Carter Cash’s family, an intimate setting very different from the arenas and stadiums where he had spent much of his career.
June Carter Cash died on May 15, 2003, following complications from heart surgery. She was 73 years old. Cash’s public response to her death was brief and contained; people who knew him described him as profoundly diminished. He continued working — he released “Hurt,” his cover of the Nine Inch Nails song, in January 2003 and completed American VI: Ain’t No Grave before his death — but the final months were clearly those of a man whose center had been removed.
He died on September 12, 2003, at Baptist Hospital in Nashville, from respiratory failure related to diabetes complications. He was 71 years old. The tributes that followed were broad and international: rock critics, country listeners, folk historians, and younger musicians who had encountered him through the American Recordings series all found ways to describe what his work had meant to them.
The Library of Congress had added At Folsom Prison to the National Recording Registry that same year, 2003 — the year Cash died. The timing was coincidental, but it had a specific resonance: the album that had revived his career in 1968 was formally designated a cultural artifact of permanent significance in the year that his life ended.
The registry’s designation is worth returning to as a conclusion to this account, because it articulates something important about why the Folsom recording has lasted. The National Recording Registry is not a list of the most popular or the most commercially successful recordings in American history, though it includes some of those. It is a list of recordings that are “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” The specific grounds for At Folsom Prison’s inclusion — a performance that captured something true about a moment in American life, by a performer who had genuine standing to address that moment, in front of an audience who had no reason to pretend — are grounds that the album itself demonstrates every time it is played.