Empathy in the Dungeon

In the huge cafeteria of California's Folsom Prison, a baritone lament ech oes over a shuffling country beat:

I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die . . .

Two thousand inmates whoop and whis tle. A prison official barks out an order:

"Duffy, No. 9041 -- custody office!" The singer launches into a knowing ditty about prison discipline, interpolating, "They're mean bastards, ain't they?"

He plunges the hall into tense silence by intoning a melancholy ballad:

Won't you tell the folks back home I'll soon be comin' , And don't let 'em know I never will be free . . . be free . . .

The prison whistle shrieks. Clang! go the steel cellblock doors.

This is Johnny Cash at Folsom Pris on. The performance, which took place last January, resulted in one of the most original and compelling pop al bums of the year. Country Singer Cash, a top concert attraction at Manhattan's Carnegie Hall as well as Nashville's Grand Ole Opry is a big favorite in the penitentiary circuit. "We bring the prisoners a ray of sunshine in their dun geon," he says, "and they're not ashamed to respond." Furthermore, "they feel I'm one of their own." That is because Cash, lean and tough look ing at 36, sings with granite conviction and mordant wit about sadness, pain, loneliness and hard luck. Though he is not an ex-con himself, his empathy with jailbirds is a natural extension of the at titude expressed in his songs, that life both in and out of prison is a kind of sentence to be served.

The Folsom album was made when Cash, after six years of trying, finally convinced Columbia Records that one of his prison visits would make a successful on-location recording. He was right. In the four months since it was released it has sold more than 300,000. Perhaps more significantly: it has sold far beyond the usual boundaries of the country market. This is not entirely new for Cash. In his dozen years as a top recording performer, he has broken out of the country category with nationwide pop hits several times before (I Walk the Line, Ring of Fire). But the Folsom album seems to appeal to a wider, more diverse audience than anything else he has evej done; it ranks among the top choices of the bestseller charts not only for country music but also for pop, and it has received glowing reviews in the underground rock publications.

In fact, the album stands as a timely symbol of the growing infusion of country sounds into the U.S. pop mainstream. More and more, country performers--from established figures like Buck Owens to newcomers such as Glen Campbell and John Hartford--are commanding national audiences. At the same time, pop performers, including Bob Dylan and the Byrds, are gravitating closer to the country style. "With better communications, there's more exposure of country music," says Cash. "I think people go back to it to find the basic thing, the grass roots. People like my songs, for instance, because there's realism in them, unlike most songs. They have true human emotion as well as being real stories."

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