Citizen Cash by Michael Stewart Foley

Author:Michael Stewart Foley [Foley, Michael Stewart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

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ALTHOUGH MANY BIOGRAPHERS have described At Folsom Prison as a project Cash knew would revive his professional prospects, risking the appearance of being pro-criminal in 1968 hardly seemed careerist. In retrospect, it’s easier to see how the album changed Cash’s life and put him on the path to superstardom, tapping as it did into the middle-class fascination with outlaws, but at the time, there was enormous risk in challenging the status quo. Besides, taking into consideration the earlier social-realist records, At Folsom Prison was no comeback project. It was a culmination. Whether he knew it or not, Cash had been working toward it for a decade.18

Cash made his most cohesive and coherent statements about prisoners and their treatment in his Grammy Award–winning liner notes for the album. Printed on the back of the cover as a facsimile of Cash’s own handwritten notes, they are all about relating to, and empathizing with, the nation’s incarcerated. “The culture of a thousand years is shattered with the clanging of the cell door behind you,” Cash famously began. “Life outside, behind you immediately becomes unreal. You begin not to care that it exists.” Having never been sentenced to time in prison, Cash could not actually know any of this from experience, but as he alluded slightly disingenuously, he had “been behind bars a few times.” Sometimes, he said, he had been there “of his own volition,” but other times it had been “involuntarily.” And each time, he said, “I felt the same feeling of kinship with my fellow prisoners.” This kind of seemingly earnest and true tale, we know, is overstated, though the person reading the notes in the record store aisle could not have been blamed for accepting it as truth. Just as he had extended his shared sense of poverty with Native peoples to a fuller understanding of their plight, here Cash imagines beyond his shared experiences of being arrested and going before a judge; as an artist, he imagines beyond what he has witnessed, and he tries to bring his audience with him.

More important is that Cash, in this season of law and disorder, dared to muse openly on the effectiveness of prison, philosophizing on its utility in modern society. He invited the album’s listeners to put themselves in the inmates’ place: “Behind the bars, locked out from ‘society’ you’re being re-habilitated, corrected, re-briefed, re-educated on life itself,” he wrote. Subjected to a program that combines “isolation, punishment, training, briefing, etc.,” all with the aim of making “you sorry for your mistakes” and “re-enlighten[ing] you” on lawful behavior outside in the event of parole, you, the prisoner, are “supposed” to be welcomed and forgiven by society. Here, Cash’s own skepticism is obvious. “Can it work???” he asks. “‘Hell no,’ you say.” “How could this torment do anybody any good?” Cash asks. “But then, why else are you locked in?” Ultimately, that is the question that lingers, for Cash seems to take it as a given that the primary purpose of prison

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