Cash attempted to bribe a local deputy, who turned the money down, and then spent the night in a LaFayette jail. He was also arrested on 1967, in Walker County (Georgia), after being involved in a car accident while carrying a bag of prescription pills. This incident gave the spark for the song “Starkville City Jail”. On May 11, 1965, in Starkville (Mississippi), he was arrested for trespassing late at night onto private property to pick flowers. He received a suspended jail sentence and a $1,000 fine on October 5, 1965. Johnny Cash was arrested crossing the Mexican border into El Paso (Texas) after some officials found 100 pills in his guitar case. He claimed to be the only person ever sued by the government for starting a forest fire. Cash eventually settled the case and paid $82,001. During the Court, when the judge asked Johnny why he did it, he simply said: “I didn’t do it, my truck did, and it’s dead, so you can’t question it.” The federal government sued him and was awarded $125,172 ($871,303 today). In June 1965, his truck caught fire due to an overheated wheel bearing, triggering a forest fire in Los Padres National Forest in California. However, he spent time in jail and had trouble with the Law in more than one occasion: Their cheers were added in post-production: in reality, the prisoners hesitated to cheer the song out of fear of punishment from the guards. On the live recording the prisoners can be heard cheering after the “I shot a man in Reno” line. While the first release of the song was in 1955, the 1968 At Folsom Prison version is a rare example of a live song which is considered more definitive than its studio-recorded counterpart.Ĭash’s original 1955 Sun Studios single release peaked at #4, but the 1968 version recorded live in front of prisoners went to #1 on the Billboard Country chart and became one of Cash’s signature songs. The song combines elements from two popular folk genres, the train song and the prison song, both of which Cash would continue to use for the rest of his career. The song was also heavily influenced (some would say plagiarized) by “Crescent City Blues”, originally recorded by Beverly Mahr and written by her husband Gordon Jenkins, who managed to win a settlement from Cash in 1969. “And I just wanted to write a song that would tell what I thought it would be like in prison.” “It was a violent movie,” remembered Cash. He said he was inspired by a crime drama that was played for the troops on base called Inside The Walls of Folsom Prison. The song’s title is a clever reference to two types of Blues: the song’s genre and the blue Folsom Prison uniforms.Ĭash wrote “Folsom Prison Blues” while stationed in Germany with the Air Force in 1952. Although he never actually did time in the California prison for which it is named, songs like this and his live shows for inmates made him an icon of reckless bad-assery. Perhaps more than any other song, “Folsom Prison Blues” cemented Johnny Cash’s status as the outlaw country archetype.
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