„Perhaps his most famous recordings were the ones he made in prisons, especially his two shows at Folsom Prison. Cash seemed at home there. He didn’t see himself as better than those men. He was just one of the guys, and understood the prisoners in ways they realized, without his ever saying anything. It didn’t hurt that he’d written some of his best songs from the point of view of condemned and convicted men. The inmates loved him for that. America loved him for that.
»He doesn’t sing for the damned,« Bono once commented about Cash, »he sings with the damned.« That was the true mark of Cash’s Christian walk: the empathy he had for the men and women often overlooked in our society. Prisoners; the hardworking field workers in rural America; the down-and-out and downtrodden; those of us struggling with personal demons, the kind that rob from us the best parts of ourselves.
When Cash got serious about his faith, and left the women and alcohol behind, some of his old friends were not very happy with him. »They’d rather I be in prison than church,« Cash admitted. Waylon Jennings was especially tough on Cash, according to Turner, accusing him of »selling out to religion.«
»He’d be attacked by agnostics and atheists if he appeared too pious,« explained Turner, »and he would be denounced by the religious community if he appeared too worldly.«
Talk about a tough line Cash had to walk. But he tried to walk it.”