If Johnny Cash shot a man in Reno, why did he do time in Folsom Prison?
There were so many things about Johnny Cash that, quite frankly, made absolutely no sense.
He was fiercely liberal, but never once voted to create change. He was arrested countless times, but never went behind bars for any of his crimes. And to that end, he famously once sang about shooting a man in Reno, but served the time for it in Folsom Prison, California. What the hell was that all about?
Of course, that last statement was more figurative than the other two, but it still fails to get around the fact that one of Cash’s most famous tunes, ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, actually poses more questions than it does provide answers. The simple story is about a man lamenting his own lack of freedom due to the consequences of his own actions – that much is easy to understand.
But when you truly start digging into the reasons behind why our forlorn narrator found himself behind bars, that’s where the confusion starts to present itself. Sure, if you did, indeed, shoot a man, then you are bound to be headed for the slammer. Yet at the same time, the prison overcrowding crisis can’t have been so bad back in the mid-1950s that they had to send you somewhere almost ten hours away from the scene of the crime?
Without question, it proves that the lyrics of ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ don’t really stand up to contention. However, it also speaks volumes that so many people have breezily overlooked this glaring loophole for so long, that it takes someone pointing it out for you to realise the massive extent of the irregularities.
Nevertheless, Folsom Prison has a ring to it that just cannot be mistaken. It was and still is absolutely brutal, being one of the first-ever maximum security jails and the place where 93 inmates have been executed over the years, but there’s no denying that Cash also injected an air of edgy romanticism to the place.
Whether it made Cash more of a star, attracted more people to the world of crime, or was a skewed combination of both, it was pretty much instantly clear that Folsom Prison was a site of true rock and roll folklore, despite the technical inaccuracies of the song that was devoted to it. Between when it was first written in 1953 and when he performed it to the prisoners in 1968, it was always embroiled in infamy.
It was equally the mark of Cash that he just took this all in his stride: the notoriety, the factual slip-ups, all of it. After all, he could have argued that it technically wasn’t his fault, given the song was written based on original material by Gordon Jenkins, which landed him in its own whole host of trouble.
But even still, the truth of the matter is that there is no settling the discrepancy between Reno and California, and it’s something you just have to accept unless you want to unfurl the entire tapestry of Cash’s storied legacy. If you choose to believe that a murderer would be transported ten hours across the course of the US by road, then that’s your own prerogative.
