Johnny Cash

An unexpected plus from the rash of tie-ins for the new film about Johnny Cash: archival footage on the Country Music channel.

I can safely say that for however long we have had the country music channel, I haven’t watched it before this week. However, in the last couple of days they have aired old Johnny Cash interviews from Sixty Minutes, and the Granada (UK) documentary about Johnny Cash at San Quentin.

I watched the documentary as I really enjoyed Live at San Quentin as a CD, as well as Live at Folsom Prison, and was interested to see what the documentary was about.

The performance itself was fascinating—you can’t get a sense from the CD of just how cramped the quarters were and how electric a stage presence Cash had.

It was also interesting to see that the interviews with prisoners and wardens was fairly humane—in fact, as I was watching it, I was wondering who had made the programme because it seemed a little too prisoner-friendly to be made in the US.

What I was really struck by was how much better spoken the inmates were than the current generation appear to be, and how much class-consciousness there was in their comments of why they were treated the way they were (not so much that they were in prison, but prison conditions themselves). Some of that class-consciousness was probably an editorial judgement, but it was interesting.

Also, they were thinner, and the general prison population seemed about in line with ethnic populations in the outside—as opposed to the disparities and fatties that have emerged in the last 25 years.

Anyway, it was a real time-capsule and an unexpected treat from an unexpected source.