God bless Johnny Cash for bringing a little joy to people living out their punishment. Nobody ever thinks of them, even if the time they are serving is deserved.
Yes, the movie Walk The Line is about the life of Johnny Cash and pretty accurate. He’s the first big celebrity to perform and record an album performing for prison inmates.
LMAO at your facial expression when he sang that line about shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die. 😂😂😂😂😂 It's a great song though. He was saying that he regretted what he had done. No, it's not about him.
"Those people keep moving and that's what tortures me." The lyric where you said it went left, was about being tortured by knowing people outside prison are still free.
Johnny cash had a huge prison ministry even before it had a name. He wrote so many songs from the stories he heard from inmates. This performance was at a prison. Folsom.
I have watched several Johnny Cash reactions but this is the first time I heard the iconic "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash" he always opened his performances with. I miss that.
According to Michael Streissguth, the cheering from the audience following the line "But I shot a man in Reno / just to watch him die" was added in post-production. According to a special feature on the DVD release of the 2005 biopic Walk the Line, the prisoners avoided cheering at any of Cash's comments about the prison itself, fearing reprisal from guards. - Wikipdia
Johnny Cash wrote this song while he was in the military. Cash hated being in the military and used that as his motivation for 'Folsom Prison Blues.' The original recording is much slower in its tempo. While recording the songs at Folsom Prison, the band sped the songs up to help keep the prisoners more engaged in the music. By the way, Jayy, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley were good friends, and were on the same label together in their early days, Sun Records. In 1956 Cash and Presley, along with Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins, did an impromptu jam recording session while still with Sun Records. The sessions weren't released until 1981 under the title of 'Million Dollar Quartet.' Some of the songs were pretty good. Definitely something you should seek out for yourself sometime.
The 'Tennessee Flat Top Box' is really catchy, too. 'I Still Miss Someone' is very nostalgic. 'Were You There', is an amazing gospel number with incredible vocals. Some choices for you. And 'I've Been Everywhere' is classic good ol' fun!
Johnny did spend a little time in jail for drugs but just for processing...he wrote this song while stationed in Germany in the US Air Force...he said he felt like he was in prison but never was. My opinion is the words of this song does reflect on his life experiences up to the time he wrote it but not literally. Folsom Prison Blues was his first recorded song...there is a movie about Johnny Cash's life before he married June called Walk the Line....explains a lot..I recommend it if you have any curiosity about the man Johnny Cash.
Johnny was inspired by to write the song in 1953,after seeing the film Inside the walls of Folsom Prison.He never served time,he wrote it while he was in the Air Force in Germany,and saw the Folsom Prison film, on the Armed forces network.
Johnny wrote this song when he was in the military in 1953 in Germany. They saw a movie about Folsom Prison and it inspired him to write about how the prisoners must feel. The line that he killed a man just to watch him die was because he was trying to think of the worst reason a person could be there. But the main point of the song for him was to show the humanity of the people in such a horrible place. He was horrified by what he saw and he poured it into the song.
Watch the VH1 Storytellers with him and Willie Nelson. He wrote this one, and he tried to imagine what the most evil reason a man could have to kill a person.