14. The Johnny Cash prison concerts
Johnny Cash began playing concerts in prisons and county jails in the late 1950s, during the height of his first period of heavy drug use. On New Year’s Day, 1958, Johnny Cash and his entourage played a concert at San Quentin State Prison, with one of the inmates who saw him perform being a twenty year old petty thief and burglar named Merle Haggard. Haggard was serving a fifteen year sentence for a burglary for which he had been convicted two years earlier, at the age of eighteen. Haggard was released early for that conviction, in part because of his youth, and left prison determined to become a musician, admiring Cash for his arrogance towards the guards, which created for him a new base of fans for him and his music.
In 1968 Cash played a concert at Folsom Prison, which he recorded and released as a live album which rejuvenated his flagging career. The following year he recorded a concert at San Quentin, which led to another successful album. Both of the albums reached number one on the country music charts. In 1969 Cash sold more records than the Beatles, with 6.5 million shipped. He played a concert in a Swedish prison in 1972, Osteraker Prison, producing another live album (in which Osteraker was substituted for San Quentin) and in 1976 performed at a Tennessee prison, which was videotaped for television. The prison concerts coupled with Cash’s bad boy image produced a perception among some of his newly won fans that Cash was a former prison inmate, which though widespread was untrue.