“I bet there’s rich folk eatin’ in a fancy dining car
They’re prob’ly drinkin’ coffee and smokin’ big cigars
But I know I had it comin’, I know I can’t be free
But those people keep a-movin’, and that’s what tortures me”
The total area of the United States is 3,794,101 square miles and almost every square mile of it has a history rooted in lawlessness and a freedom that would best be described as “free as in beer,” not “free as in free.” British convicts were sent here. One of the first things that white people did here was attack the Indians. Black people were enslaved. We went to war with Britain because we did not want to pay any taxes. We have always been a democracy, but we were also okay with class systems early on.
We are a country of pioneers eternally looking for something new, and when the West called us we blazed trails in droves. The settling of the American West—that wide open and lawless frontier of the 1800′s—might do a better job of describing the identity of the United States than its own Constitution or the Revolutionary or Civil War.
In my thirty two years of living on this earth I have been told that we are a country of gun-loving people. John Wayne, Sam Peckinpah, Dirty Harry, and all that jazz. Guns, our social narrative goes, are as American as baseball, apple pie, Wall Street, and a bald eagle. While I cannot refute our overall infatuation with guns, I will say that I think our admiration for them is mostly transparent. We think they’re cool, we think the idea of the Wild West is cool, but realistically no one wants to live in a society in which guns are constantly drawn and shootouts occurring on the street or in abandoned warehouses are commonplace. We like to watch Dirty Harry beat down punks, and we’d like to sound and look like him but we don’t want to be the one in charge of beatdowns and discharging lethal justice.
I mention all of this because “Folsom Prison Blues” is rooted in things that make up the American fabric (and mythology): the West, guns, class systems, justice, and repentance. The lyrics quoted above capture all of these things perfectly. The narrator “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die” and now he is haunted by the fact that all of those people inside the cars of the nearby train are moving on with their lives and he never will. And to help him deal with it all he envisions them all as being rich; people who could never understand the man’s motives and how he arrived into this world.
Musically, “Folsom Prison Blues” is a tour de force. The stand-up bass provides the anchoring, the drums have a sort of train mimicry going on with its time measurements, and Johnny Cash’s simple yet powerful guitar picking during the breaks are nothing short of attention-grabbing.
Visually, Johnny Cash embodies that particular type of recklessness that America worships to some degree: a recklessness that lies at the midpoint between charming and severe. Cash always wore black—his nickname being “The Man In Black”; he embraced performing at prisons; he looked like a guy who could be a corrupt sheriff of some Texas border town; he was unbelievably blunt in interviews; he took copious amounts of drugs in his youth. He was Outlaw personified.
Now, when it comes to the Pantheon Johnny Cash automatically gets his own space. But which song best defines him? Obviously, anyone could make a case for “Ring Of Fire” or “I Walk The Line” or his cover of Nine Inch Nail’s “Hurt” as being the song that represents him the best.[1] My reasoning for selecting “Folsom Prison Blues” lies with the lyrics above. Those lyrics could have been words taken from a story by Twain, Melville, Whitman, Faulkner, or Cather. They are thoroughly American, right down to our desire to always want the villain to apologize so that he can begin his journey to tragic hero.
Johnny Cash was 23 when he recorded “Folsom Prison Blues.” It was the second single he ever released and it was his first hit. Throughout his career, this song was his signature to end his live shows. The combination of prison and train elements in the lyrics of this song would go on to define his career both musically and in terms of image.
Artists like Elvis and Bob Dylan and James Brown: those are people we wish we could be; Johnny Cash is who we are. And if you need any proof just look at the picture of him above and try to think of any other picture of a rock star that better encapsulates America.
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[1] As much as I love his version of “Hurt,” and as much as I get chills every time I watch the video for it, I couldn’t realistically select a song he did during the 2000′s when so much of his legacy and image is tied to his music produced in the ’50′s.
