“Folsom Prison Blues” was written by Johnny Cash in 1953 while he was stationed in West Germany with the U.S. Air Force, and was recorded at Sun Studio in Memphis on July 30, 1955. It is one of the foundational sides of Cash’s Sun Records run alongside “I Walk the Line” and “Cry, Cry, Cry,” and the live 1968 version recorded at Folsom State Prison turned the song into one of the most-recognised pieces in American popular music.
The song’s authorship has a long shadow. Cash adapted — closely — the melody, structure, and several lyrics from Gordon Jenkins’s 1953 song “Crescent City Blues,” sung by Beverly Mahr on Jenkins’s Seven Dreams album. The opening couplet (“I hear the train a comin’ / it’s rollin’ ’round the bend”) is shared verbatim. Cash was not credited on the original Sun release, and Jenkins quietly accepted a settlement of around $75,000 in the early 1970s once the song had become a hit.
The famous “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die” line is Cash’s own and is the lyric most often quoted; the rest of the song is a meditation on regret and confinement told from inside the prison walls. The piece sits cleanly inside the country/folk/blues hybrid that defined Sun-era Cash, and its bluegrass life is largely as a moderate-tempo singer’s number that any vocalist with a low end can carry.
