‘Crescent City Blues’: Did Johnny Cash steal his greatest hit?
Originality is a pretty scarce resource in the music realm; after all, there are only so many melodies you can create with the same 12 notes at your disposal. Even an artist as pioneering and seemingly original as Johnny Cash owes at least part of his output to the inspiration of other artists, particularly in the case of his breakout hit.
If you have ever seen the Cash biopic Walk The Line, you’ll probably remember the stand-out scene in which the ‘Man in Black’ stuns the dismissive studio executives with his impromptu rendition of ‘Folsom Prison Blues’. Exactly how accurate that scene was is something of a mystery, although it undoubtedly made for a compelling watch. As far as the film’s suggestion that the song proved Cash’s songwriting star power, though, the reality is a little muddier.
When the song was originally recorded at the infamous Sun Studios back in 1955, the idea of singer-songwriters was still rather novel. Very few of the emerging rock and roll stars of the day were writing their own original material, instead recruiting teams of tried-and-tested songwriters to conjure up guaranteed hits for the likes of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, or anybody else to lend their voices to.
So, the fact that Johnny Cash wrote ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ by his own hand was enough for him to stand out as a true original. During the 1970s, though, that originality came under fire, resulting in a vicious artistic spat and an out-of-court settlement.
As it turns out, ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ wasn’t quite plucked from the ether, as far as Cash was concerned. The songwriter had based large parts of the track, including both its melody and a lot of its lyricism, on a far less famous track named ‘Crescent City Blues’, released two years earlier, in 1953.
That song was penned by Missouri-born performer Gordon Jenkins, for his Seven Dreams album – which, incidentally, might be one of the earliest examples of a concept album. At the time of its release, the song wasn’t a hit, but it certainly found its way onto Johnny Cash’s turntable, as the parallels between ‘Crescent City’ and ‘Folsom Prison’ are far too colossal to be a mere coincidence.
Whether Cash deliberately plagiarised the song, or merely used it as unknowing inspiration for his breakout track, Jenkins pursued legal action against the country hero during the 1970s, which was eventually settled out of court for $75,000 – which, even when adjusted for inflation to over half a million dollars, is far less than ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ earned Cash over the course of his lifetime.
Johnny Cash certainly wasn’t the only person taking undeniable inspiration from forgotten songwriters during the mid-1950s – his former touring partner, Elvis Presley, certainly did his fair share of ripping off forgotten blues artists. However, the fact that ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ was such a defining moment in the early days of the ‘Man In Black’, first establishing him as a country hero, makes the plagiarism case all the more disappointing.
Then again, virtually every song released in the modern age has been indebted to another song, artist, or scene in one form or another; that is how the artistic world develops, through interpolations and inspiration. So, perhaps ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ wasn’t quite as sinister in its thievery as that $75,000 settlement might suggest.
