Inmate Merle Haggard hears Johnny Cash play San Quentin State Prison

[Draggingtree]

Jan 1, 1958:

Inmate Merle Haggard hears Johnny Cash play San Quentin State Prison

 

"Folsom Prison Blues" gave Johnny Cash his first top-10 country hit in 1956, and his live concert performance at Folsom—dramatized memorably in the film Walk The Line—gave his flagging career a critical jump-start in 1968. But the prison with which Johnny Cash was most closely associated wasn't Folsom, it was San Quentin, a maximum-security penitentiary just outside of San Francisco. San Quentin is where Cash played his first-ever prison concert on January 1, 1958—a concert that helped set Merle Haggard, then a 20-year-old San Quentin inmate, on the path toward becoming a country music legend.

Haggard was a product of Bakersfield, California, a hard-bitten Central Valley town that was the final stop for tens of thousands of poor, white farmers and laborers who migrated west during the 1930s, 40s and 50s seeking work in the factories, farm fields and oilfields of California. These Oklahomans, Texans and others referred to by the blanket term "Okies" brought with them a love of country music, and not just any country music, but "Loud music that plays until all hours," as Wynn Stewart sang in his 1962 country hit "How the Other Half Lives."

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/inmate-merle-haggard-hears-johnny-cash-play-san-quentin-state-prison