10 Greatest Live Albums In Rock Music History
8. Johnny Cash - At Folsom Prison
This is a live record with a great gimmick that could easily have turned out disastrously. Put simply, if just about anyone else had decided to swan into a penitentiary and ask a group of convicts to sit patiently while they performed some ditties, it could have gone badly wrong.
This was Johnny Cash, though, a man who was no stranger to a brush with the law. he was as real as it gets, and brought just the type of narrative, emotion-driven country music guaranteed to win the potentially tough crowd. Smartly (inevitably), he opens with "Folsom Prison Blues", getting the men straight onside with the tale of a stone cold jailbird watching the world pass him by through the bars of a cell.
Cash was evidently allowed to perform uncensored here, launching quickly into “25 Minutes To Go” (a song about execution) and “Cocaine Blues” (a song about cocaine). It’s not all tough guy stuff, though: he brings up his soon-to-be-wife June Carter for “Jackson” and "Give My Love to Rose", and croons a stately cut of “Green, Green Grass of Home”.
He’d go on to repeat the prison record three times, but never with as much success as this, an album that couldn’t work for many reasons, but does for precisely one: it’s Johnny Cash.