The man in the black: Johnny Cash

Christian Century, Oct 4, 2003 by C. Clifton Black

   Now this Greystone Chapel here at
   Folsom--
   It has a touch of God's hand on
   every stone.
   It's a flower of light in a field of
   darkness,
   And it's given me the strength to
   carry on.
   Inside the wails of prison, my body
   may be,
   But my Lord has set my soul free.

The concert ends as it began, with thousands in jail. But in between eternity invades a prison cafeteria.

If Folsom is plaintive, Johnny Cash at San Quentin (1969) is a hell-raiser that morphs into camp meeting without a shred of camp. The concert was Cash's fourth at San Quentin. Among his back-up musicians was June Carter. Thirty-one years later she confessed how terrified she was: "San Quentin is a maximum-security prison. Some men are here for armed robbery, rape, pedophilia, arson, murder. And there were a few innocent men. It felt like a dream. 'O Lord,' I cried."

After some opening crowd-pleasers, Cash strums his guitar and addresses his audience in a no-nonsense tone that immediately gives them back some freedom of choice:

   I tell you what: ... [The producers]
   said, "You gotta do this song, you gotta
   do that song; you know, you gotta
   stand like this or act like this." And I
   just don't get it, man. You know, I'm
   here I'm here to do what you want
   me to and what I want to do.

With that, a thunderous holler went up. From there on, Cash held his audience.

A good thing, too. When his agent asked if more guards were needed to protect the stage, the security chief replied that one hundred, even two hundred guards couldn't control a thousand, spring-loaded prisoners if things spun out of control. They didn't.

Midway through the concert, however, Cash took a chance that must have caused somebody to flinch. He introduced a song he had written for the occasion: an angry, four-stanza damnation of that very concert hall.

   San Quentin, may you rot and burn
   in hell.
   May your walls fall, and may I live
   to tell.
   May all the world forget you ever
   stood,
   And may all the world regret you
   did no good.
   San Quentin, I hate every inch of you.

Almost every line of "San Quentin" drew a roar of recognition, and Cash immediately gratified the crowd's yell for an encore. Cash made no excuses for what men had done to land them in hell, but neither did he vindicate the hell others t,ad made for them.

Later, having broken the tension with "A Boy Named Sue" (the premiere of a feisty novelty that eventually sold over a million copies), Cash and crew again reversed field by rendering Thomas A. Dorsey's spiritual "(There'll Be) Peace in the Valley." As it turned out, "Peace" was no pious aberration but the first in a series of four religions numbers, which Cash slyly introduced as "a serious note" in the concert. Of course, he had been dead serious from the start. What he really intended was to inject some evangelical Christian spirituality, now that Sail Quentin's inmates were ready tn hear it. And they were.

The least well known of this set is, musically speaking, no great shucks. But as Cash's own proclamation of the gospel in that volatile context, it is a masterly piece of indirection whose real subject is the nobility of a derelict life changed by Christ: