“Folsom Prison Blues” by Johnny Cash

"Folsom Prison Blues" came out as a Johnny Cash single in 1955 and landed on his debut album, Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar!, a couple of years later. He'd written it in 1953, building on material by Gordon Jenkins, and in it he welded together two old folk forms, the train song and the prison song, that he'd keep mining for the rest of his career.

The recording is bone-bare: Cash on acoustic guitar, Marshall Grant thumping the double bass, Luther Perkins picking a clipped electric line, Sam Phillips producing. It stuck to Cash for good as one of his signature songs. In 1968 he took it inside the walls, singing it to the inmates at California's Folsom State Prison for At Folsom Prison, and that live version went to number one on the country charts and won a Grammy for Best Country Vocal Performance, Male.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.