It's the kind of project people get obsessed with, like Portland musician Danny Wilson did. The concert album reinvigorated Cash’s career and became the stuff of rock 'n'roll legend, reaching a whole new generation through the Hollywood biopic “Walk the Line.” Not for the music, but for the place it was recorded: California’s Folsom Prison.Ĭash had been performing in prisons for a decade, ever since his song “Folsom Prison Blues” became a hit with inmates. … It still honors his sound.Fifty years ago this month, Johnny Cash released an album that was unlike anything that came before it. But sometimes it’s our interpretation, and it’s close enough that it feels right. We’re also not trying to make something brand new of it.
“It’s close, but it’s not like an exact replica of the song.”Īdded Burney: “We’re not interested at all in mimicking what he did. We do our own thing really a lot,” he said, pointing to changes in key and tempo, and sometimes adding in an instrumental solo that Cash and the Tennessee Three didn’t do. “We’re not trying as a band anymore to sound exactly like (Cash). And that’s what is more important to us, is to do that.”Īnd “close” is what the band aims for, rather than “exact,” according to Benefield. I don’t mean to sound too arrogant, but I think we get real close. But of the people that I’ve heard who do try to do a tribute to him, I don’t think anybody gets closer than we do. “Listen, nobody sounds like Johnny Cash, that’s why he’s Johnny Cash. We started it to play his music,” Burney said. “We didn’t start it to be a tribute band. (Burney confessed to dyeing his salt-and-pepper hair black once, long ago, but said he “just hated it” and shaved it off.) While the Johnny Folsom 4 plans to replicate the performance as closely as possible, and will certainly dress the part, as they do at all of their shows, they’re not – and never have been – out to win a lookalike contest.
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