The band ran through the setlist, worked out transitions, addressed any technical issues with the instruments and equipment. Carl Perkins rehearsed his opening set. The Statler Brothers rehearsed theirs. Cash went through the program with the band, shaping the sequence and the pacing that would carry the morning performance through nearly two hours without losing the audience’s attention.
Governor Reagan’s visit on January 12 — the day Floyd Gressett brought Sherley’s tape to Cash — created an unusual context for the final rehearsal day. Cash meeting a sitting governor at a motel in Sacramento while preparing to record a prison concert album, with a tape of an inmate’s song in hand: the specific convergence of these elements on that specific evening had a quality that subsequent accounts have recognized as genuinely strange. The recording that resulted from the following day — a document that became, in time, one of the most celebrated albums in American music — was preceded by a rehearsal that included a future president of the United States and an overnight learning of a song written behind bars. American cultural history produces these collisions regularly; they rarely look like history while they are happening.
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## A Note on Verification
The commercial figures, chart positions, Grammy details, and biographical facts in this article draw on the sources listed in the source notes below. Where dates in those sources differed — the album release date, for instance, is given as March 1, 1968 by some sources and May 6, 1968 by others — the more widely corroborated figure is used and the discrepancy noted in the source citations. No claim has been made that cannot be traced to a verifiable source accessible to researchers. The Glen Sherley biographical material, including his death date of May 11, 1978, comes from multiple independent sources that agree on the principal facts. Bob Johnston’s production philosophy and his biography draw on interviews and accounts available in published form. The technical details of the recording — the microphone models, the number of recording machines, the production approach — come from contemporaneous accounts and from Johnston’s own descriptions, available in the sources cited.