On this day in 1968 Johnny Cash performed two concerts at Folsom Prison in California, one at 9:40 AM, the other at 12:40 PM. The album recorded from the two sets was released in May of that year and helped resuscitate the singer's flagging career. He was 35.

Cash wrote "Folsom Prison Blues" in 1955. It's about a man stuck in Folsom Prison for not listening to his mother. (She'd urged him not to play with guns, but he subsequently shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.) Johnny Cash appears...