Trying to pick a favorite Johnny Cash song, for me, is a little like trying to pick the most beautiful star in the sky (a little exaggeration but not much--Cash wrote over 1000 songs in his lifetime). So much beauty, so many to choose.
Johnny Cash is another in a long line of music performers whose bio is just a bit too crowded for a one paragraph description. Suffice it to say that Cash is beyond a legend. I'd be hard pressed to name too many solo artists (Springsteen, Petty, Mellencamp, maybe a handful of others) whose work I admire as much as his--and I'm not much of a Country Music fan. Cash sold over 90 million records in his lifetime, has so many album and single releases that Wikipedia had a discography section for each (never seen that before in all my years of half-assed research), had his own TV show, won four Grammy Awards, and toured non-stop for the better part of forty years. Cash was not without his demons--he had lifelong drug addiction problems (amphetamines), and despite his oft stated love for second wife June Carter Cash, was also quite the womanizer. He is the only Country Music artist to be enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a performer (the others were inducted as influences), and is the only music performer to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Country Music Hall of Fame, and the Gospel Music Hall of Fame. He's also in the Songwriters Hall of Fame. When Cash passed away in 2003 (just four months after June Carter Cash had passed) from complications from diabetes, he'd come a long way from the poor Tennessee sharecropper's son he'd grown up as.
Fun Fact #1: Johnny Cash was born as J.R. Cash--just initials, no first name. He changed it to John R. Cash when he joined the service because the military--prickly fuckers that they are--had rules against anyone being called by just initials.
Originally released in 1955 on his debut album, With His Hot and Blue Guitar (and quite the debut album title there, too), "Folsom Prison Blues" would go on to reach #3 (with a bullet!) on the Country Singles Chart, and #17 (also with a bullet!) on the Billboard Hot 100. Just to show how truly great the song is, Cash released it again as a single in 1968, this time the live version from his seminal LP At Folsom Prison, and it went to #1 (once more with a bullet!) on the Country Singles Chart, and #32 (yet again with a bullet!) on the Billboard Hot 100. The song also was listed at #51 on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Greatest Country Songs of All Time.
Much like Roger Miller's "King of the Road," sparse would be an apt description of "Folsom Prison Blues." It really says something when an artist can make so much of so little--there are only two guitars, a bass, and Cash's vocals throughout the song. In it, Cash tells the tell of a man sent to prison for life because he shot a man "just to watch him die" (Cash said he wrote that line to make the character as despicable as possible, but be that as it may, it's hard not to feel a bit of empathy for him), and how sad he is to hear the train blowing its whistle as it goes by because he knows he'll never be on it. Cash wrote this song when he was in his early twenties, and the maturity he shows in his songwriting is remarkable--as I noted he makes us empathize with a despicable man, and still takes just two minutes and fifty-six seconds to make us feel his sorrow with nary a misplaced word or phrase. When he toured, Cash would always open his shows with the words, "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash" and immediately proceed into "Folsom Prison Blues"--and it says a lot about the man and the tune that a song he wrote when he was a very young man still had the power to move him and his fans so many years down the road. In the end, that's why I chose this one--it's Cash's signature song and his most endearing and enduring.
Fun Fact #2: While trying not to turn this post into a novel...Cash had no drummer for the recording. So you might ask, where did the drum like sounds in the background originate? Oddly enough, they were created by placing a dollar bill between the strings of a guitar and strumming the muted strings in rhythm. Even in music, necessity proves to be the mother of invention...
Lyric Sheet: "I hear the train a comin'/It's rolling round the bend/And I ain't seen the sunshine since I don't know when..."
Enjoy:
Fuck Donald Trump,
emaycee
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