Stuck in Folsom Prison: Great music from behind bars

Johnny Cash, At Folsom Prison and At San Quentin
Although country legend Johnny Cash never served time in prison himself, he had his share of scrapes with the law, and always had sympathy for people who'd done wrong. "Folsom Prison Blues," with memorable lines like "I shot a man in Reno / just to watch him die," was one of the first songs he ever wrote, inspired by a viewing of the film Inside The Walls Of Folsom Prison while he was in the Air Force in 1953. Cash played several jailhouse shows throughout his career, but the two most important and iconic are inarguably his 1968 and 1969 concerts at California's Folsom and San Quentin prisons, which provided a big boost to his then-flagging career and realized his longtime dream of actually recording a live album from inside prison walls. Although some of the crowd reactions were sweetened in post-production before the albums' release, Cash's fiery passion and rapport with his captive audience are genuine and magnetic. Both concerts were filmed for subsequent documentaries. 2008's Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison has been making the rounds of film festivals and arthouses around the country. The San Quentin concert was also filmed for Britain's Granada Television, and later turned into a documentary by filmmaker Michael Darlow—which screens at south Minneapolis cinema The Trylon tonight at 7:30 and 9 p.m.

Bukka White, "Poor Boy Long Way From Home"
Bluesman Booker T. Washington White was so dedicated to his music that he actually risked extra time in prison for it—awaiting trial on an assault charge for shooting another man in the leg, he skipped bail and left Mississippi for Chicago, where he was invited to a recording session. According to legend, the police caught up with him while the tapes were still rolling. Back in Mississippi, White was convicted and sentenced to two years at Parchman Farm penitentiary, during which time "Shake 'Em On Down" was a hit, also resulting in the "Bukka" nickname he's now known by, thanks to Vocalion Records misspelling his name on the label. In 1939, folklorist John Lomax visited him at Parchman and recorded two more songs, both classics: "Sic 'Em Dogs On" and "Poor Boy Long Way From Home." (You can hear the latter song in the YouTube clip below, which is accompanied by an unrelated photo from the same era.)


James Carter And The Prisoners, "Po' Lazarus"
Lomax and his father, Alan, also a folklorist, made many trips to prisons in the deep south from the 1930s to the 1950s, capturing dozens of field recordings that documented music, much of which now resides in the Library Of Congress. Since then, the Lomax recordings have been influential on generations of subsequent musicians, and sometimes provided some unexpected and much-delayed fame—such as James Carter's performance of the traditional work song "Po' Lazarus," recorded in prison in Mississippi in 1959 and accompanied by the rhythm of his fellow inmates breaking rocks with sledgehammers. The song was plucked from obscurity by the Coen brothers, who chose it to open their movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? 40 years later. The O Brother soundtrack kick-started a huge resurgence of interest in the old songs, but Carter, still alive and retired after a career in anonymity as a shipping clerk, had completely forgotten having recorded the song until he was tracked down by an investigative reporter, given a $20,000 royalty check and flown to the Grammy Awards.


Roky Erickson, "I Walked With A Zombie"
After helping invent psychedelic rock in the mid-1960s as leader of 13th Floor Elevators, Texas songwriter Roky Erickson hit a major low when he was busted for marijuana possession and pled insanity, using his hundreds of LSD trips as (pretty compelling) evidence. He was declared a paranoid schizophrenic and institutionalized in the Rusk Hospital For The Criminally Insane, where he underwent electroshock therapy and Thorazine treatments that, arguably, left him worse off than before—though his time in the hospital was also a spur to his creativity. He wrote constantly, penning more than 100 songs and playing some in a band that included a fan who had murdered his own family. One of his many Rusk songs was the charmingly odd "I Walked With A Zombie,"  a shambling rocker, consisting almost entirely of endless repetitions of the title phrase (taken from Jacques Tourneur's eerie 1943 horror film of the same name), and supposedly inspired by the glassy-eyed stares of the drugged inmates he spent time with at Rusk.

Daniel Johnston, Mountain Dew jingle
As far as biopics go, 2005’s The Devil And Daniel Johnston’s unflinching look at the troubled Austin singer-songwriter is on the darker end of the spectrum. One of the documentary’s few moments of comic relief surprisingly comes from a recording Johnston sent to manager Jeff Tartikoff as an in-patient at Weston Hospital in West Virginia: When not requesting Tartikoff reunite The Beatles so they can serve as his backing band, he sent along a potential Mountain Dew jingle to bolster his newfound dream of being the beverage’s new spokesman. Despite Johnston’s undeniable charm and Mountain Dew’s thirst for all things extreme and in your face, it’s hard to imagine a corporation going for a shaky but warmly unsettling ditty that paints Mountain Dew as so tantalizing that it saved him from sin—even devils love drinking it. Needless to say, Tartikoff says he “unfortunately never got a response” from Pepsi. (Surprisingly enough, though, Target later used Mary Lou Lord's cover of Johnston's "Speeding Motorcycle" in an ad.)