His commercial instincts were also those of a small independent label: he needed hits, he needed volume, and he needed artists who could record prolifically to supply the catalog. Cash recorded at Sun with a speed that was partly his own energy and partly the economic requirements of a small label. The results were genuine — the Sun recordings remain among the most purely alive documents of his voice — but the context was limiting. Sun could not provide the national distribution, the marketing resources, or the album-focused approach that Cash’s ambitions required.
Columbia in 1958 was a different kind of entity: a major label with international distribution, an A&R department, and a Nashville division that was then at the center of country music’s commercial development. The Nashville Sound — the string-heavy, smooth production associated with Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley — was at its height. Columbia’s country roster included artists who were mainstream stars in a way that Sun’s artists, however historically significant, were not quite.
Cash’s decade at Columbia through the early 1960s produced hits and albums, including “Ring of Fire” and the other commercial successes that established him as a country star. It also produced a creative context that was not always well-matched to what Cash did best: the Nashville Sound’s orchestration and smoothing-out did not suit a voice and a sensibility that had always been, at their best, slightly rough around the edges.
When Johnston arrived at Columbia’s Nashville division in 1967 and brought his documentary approach — no EQ, first takes, musicians playing together in a room — he was applying to Cash’s recordings the aesthetic principles that Cash’s Sun recordings had embodied naturally. The Folsom album sounds, in some respects, like a Sun recording made in a prison: direct, unpolished, alive.