Pitchfork

The California State Penitentiary at San Quentin is California's oldest prison, built by inmates and completed in 1852. Current prisoners include serial killers, child murderers, child rapists, kidnappers, and torturers; it is the only jail in California with an active death row. In 1969, Johnny Cash staged a live concert at San Quentin-- the previous year, Cash's recorded performance at Folsom Prison in Sacramento County had lasted 39 weeks on the Billboard chart, becoming his best-selling LP to date. At San Quentin outsold its predecessor, perching at the top of the chart for four consecutive weeks. The original LP featured 10 songs (edited for sequencing), a 2000 reissue offered 18 tracks, and now Legacy's 3xCD set houses all 31-- 13 of which were previously unavailable-- along with a British television documentary originally aired in 1969. Clearly, singing in prison is a veritable franchise.

Cash's decision to strum up a jail probably had as much to do with his own burgeoning mythology-- the Man in Black, the cold-blooded killer, the anti-Nashville rebel-- than any desire to remedy the U.S. prison system (although Cash did eventually actively advocate prison reform, meeting with President Richard Nixon in July 1972). All the ethical snafus inherent to the deed-- it's easy to argue that Cash exploited the convicts' plight to buoy his own rep, or to sympathize with the families of the prisoners' victims, who might not want to see their loved ones' killer clapping his hands to "A Boy Named Sue"-- are hard to dismiss, but At San Quentin is still a spectacular musical performance, one of the most mesmerizing live records in American history.

Some of the most notable new additions are the openers, which, for obvious reasons, weren't included on the original Cash LP or its reissue: Carl Perkins performs his own "Blue Suede Shoes" to warm up the crowd, complete with a rollicking electric guitar solo. Perkins is followed by Virginia's Statler Brothers (their "Flowers on the Wall" was immortalized in Pulp Fiction, and gets a rousing reception here). A late-incarnation of the Carter Family (now Helen, June, Anita, and Mother Maybelle) coo, warble, and Carter-scratch through "The Last Thing on My Mind" and "Wildwood Flower" before Cash finally strides onstage. Most of Cash's performance is familiar by now, but a medley of murder ballad "The Long Black Veil" and "Give My Love to Rose" is engrossing, and his "Orange Blossom Special", weirdly excluded from the other releases, is riddled with questionable double-harmonica and breathless asides.

The 1969 Granada Television documentary, narrated by a (now half-garbled) British voice, eschews typical docu-trappings, avoiding talking crit-heads and shot/voiceover pairings for multi-camera concert footage and an interesting (if brief) meditation on Cash's role as the archetypal western hero: a killer, a savior, and an outlaw. Or, the kind of musician who plays jails, inadvertently glorifying the warm glow of incarceration and making prison look a little bit more fun (plenty in the San Quentin audience are wearing sunglasses, smoking cigars, sneering at the camera, clapping and nodding their heads to Cash's clipped strums). Audience members are interviewed by the crew, probably to humanize their plight, but we get more talk about personal heroes (and not being able to fight for their country and how they miss their wives and how it's actually society's fault that they're all convicts) than any frank admissions of guilt (or details of their respective crimes).

June Carter, whose charm and verve remain intact, tries her best to look complicit, but something in her physical presence-- fidgeting, smiling too much and too big, sneaking sideways glances at Johnny-- seems to indicate general discomfort with the entire endeavor. Cash is accompanied, as usual, by the Tennessee Three, and his performance is jovial-- he jokes with the convicts, snickering "You're in the wrong place to bend over, don't you know it?"-- and clearly propelled by the audience's adulation.

The Legacy Edition is the most comprehensive document of Cash's night at San Quentin, and offers the most authentic portrait of the performance-- from the opening acts through the closing medley, the songs are presented chronologically. As confounding as it is that it took thirty-seven years for an unabridged release, this version of At San Quentin is a satisfying documentation of a still-questionable project.