Original subtitles

MUSIC: Grand Ole Opry Song by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

# Come and listen to my story if you will

# I'm going to tell about a gang of fellers from down at Nashville... #

By the early 1960s, for most fans, the centre of country music

was firmly located on 5th Avenue in downtown Nashville,

where, every Saturday night,

radio station WSM beamed out the Grand Ole Opry,

broadcast live from the stage of the Ryman Auditorium.

# First, I'll start with old Red Foley doin' the Chattanooga Shoe

# We can't forget Hank Williams with them good old Lovesick Blues... #

AUDIENCE LAUGHS

# It's time for Roy Acuff to go to Memphis on his train... #

The surveys said that the average person drove 650 miles - one way -

to come to Nashville, to come to the Grand Ole Opry.

The people that came, you could tell they were working people.

Lines would go down 5th Avenue and around down Broadway,

and literally thousands of people would be in line

to get a limited number of tickets.

# Ernest Tubb's number Two Wrongs Won't Make a Right

# At the Grand Ole Opry ev'ry Saturday night... #

All of its children had come to the mother church of country music.

It was almost like a badge of honour

that you had to bring your culture with you to the table.

That's why Bob Wills and his guys brought us Western music.

That's why Hank Williams brought the South with him from Honky Tonks.

Johnny Cash brought the black land dirt of Arkansas.

Bill Monroe brought music out of Kentucky bluegrass music.

Willie Nelson brought his poetry from Texas.

Patsy Cline brought her heartache from Virginia.

I mean, it was the most wonderful parade

of sons and daughters of America

that brought their hearts and their souls and their experiences,

and it gave us a great era in country music.

# At the Grand Ole Opry ev'ry Saturday night. #

APPLAUSE

MUSIC: When Two Worlds Collide by Jean Shepard

# Your world was so different from mine, don't you see... #

During the mid-1960s, the United States found itself

in the midst of profound cultural change,

and stubborn resistance to it...

..torn between peaceful protests and senseless violence,

hopeful idealism and angry despair.

# ..when two worlds collide

# Your world... #

All of it would be reflected in country music.

A young mother from the hollers of Kentucky would stand up

for the rights of women with uncommon bluntness,

and pave the way for other women artists to do the same.

A Mississippi sharecropper's son with big dreams would fulfil them

when people responded to the quality of his voice

instead of the colour of his skin.

And a dark-eyed, deep-voiced troubadour from Dyess, Arkansas

would somehow embody nearly everything

the '60s came to stand for -

heedless self-destruction and a concern for social justice,

an eagerness to experiment with new ideas

and a yearning for old-fashioned personal redemption.

# When two worlds collide. #

Let's welcome Johnny Cash! CHEERING

MUSIC: Understand Your Man by Johnny Cash

# Don't call my name... #

By 1964, Johnny Cash was headlining tours

that played to packed auditoriums in major cities,

not bucolic country music parks.

His shows featured a gospel quartet from Virginia

called the Statler Brothers,

Carl Perkins - Cash's old friend from his rockabilly years -

and Maybelle Carter and her three daughters, Helen, Anita and June.

And though he was billed as a country singer,

Cash was fascinated with all forms of American music.

I've never known a guy that knew as many songs as he did.

He knew every old gospel song, he knew every old pop song.

He taught us a song we put on an album one time,

an old Ink Spots song that we'd never heard.

And he taught us the lyrics to it.

He would carry a record player and stacks of records with him on tour.

And we'd sit in rooms at night and he'd play all these old folk songs.

He was into every field

and knew every song that had ever been written.

Cash's newest interest centred on the folk music revival,

emanating from New York City's Greenwich Village

and focusing not only on old, traditional tunes but also

on newly written, highly personal lyrics and songs of social protest.

# Oh, what did you see my blue-eyed son? #

At its forefront was a prolific young songwriter

from Hibbing, Minnesota - Bob Dylan.

# I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it... #

Cash sent him a fan letter, and got one back in return...

..along with an invitation to appear with Dylan

at the 1964 Newport Folk festival.

# Because you're mine

# I walk the line... #

They were attracted to each other.

He loved Bob. And Bob loved him.

Bob said that when he first heard I Walk The Line on the radio

that it was a voice that sounded like it came from

the middle of the earth.

There's this moment where Dad and Bob are at a piano.

They're singing I Still Miss Someone,

one of my dad's songs...

# I wonder if she's sorry... #

..and Bob knows it better than Dad.

He and Dylan were passionate about each other,

and the Greenwich Village folk tradition.

# And I still miss someone... #

The melody changed too, though. Yeah, I changed the melody...

Meanwhile, Cash's personal life was in shambles.

His constant touring continued to strain his 10-year marriage

to his wife Vivian, the mother of their four daughters.

She now suspected - correctly -

that he was having an affair with June Carter,

who travelled with Cash as part of his package shows.

But his bass player and close friend Marshall Grant

was even more concerned about his drug use.

Marshall never took a drink or a drug his whole life.

He felt tremendously protective of Dad.

He and June,

during the time the Carter Family was on the road with them,

they would flush pills, go in his room, find his pills, flush them...

..do everything they could to get him from point A to point B

and show up for the shows and not be high.

The addiction caused Cash to lose weight,

hollowed out his cheeks, made him fidgety and jumpy.

Appearing on Pete Seeger's television show with June Carter,

he squirmed and rocked in his chair,

uncomfortably fussed with his hair and scratched his neck,

nervously lit and re-lit a series of cigarettes,

even ended the show with his shoes off.

Take some shoes off!

On tour in El Paso,

Cash was arrested for possession of more than a thousand amphetamines.

Cash's manager mounted a publicity campaign

that earned his artists some sympathy in the press,

but nothing he or anyone else could do seemed able to keep Cash

away from his drugs.

Out on the road, shows were cancelled.

Promoters sued him.

In Nashville, the photographer Les Leverett showed up

to capture one of his recording sessions.

Cash arrived three hours late.

He kicked his boots off and, in his black-socked feet...

..sat there on that stool, carried it over to the wall,

leaned his head against the wall with a pad and a pencil

and started writing a song.

HE CHUCKLES

He's paying for this session. That's coming out of his royalties.

Instead of doing three weeks ago and bringing it with him,

he's writing a song.

# Were you there... #

And at the Grand Ole Opry one night, he ended his set

by smashing all the footlights with his microphone stand.

The managers told him

he was no longer welcome at the Ryman Auditorium.

In 1966, Vivian filed for divorce.

That same year, June Carter divorced her second husband

and, though she loved Johnny Cash,

turned down his repeated request that they get married.

He seemed too intent on destroying himself.

# Well, I like my lovin' done country style

# And this little girl would walk a country mile... #

Loretta Lynn, I don't think she gets enough credit as a songwriter.

I went and sang on a song with her...

..and the suggestion came that we might write

a couple of things together.

Loretta comes in and she's just absolutely delightful.

She came in with a box file. It said "Songs" on it.

And she tipped it out onto the table, and it's fragments of paper,

backs of old shopping lists,

a cardboard box from a box of underwear,

with lyrics written on them.

Sometimes, they're just a line long. They're just ideas.

And a piece of paper says...

.."Thank God for Jesus."

I said, "Is that a song title?"

She said, "Well, it is now."

When we first recorded Loretta,

I went in the control room and I told my brother,

I said, "Whatever's in that woman's heart comes out her mouth."

She turned to themes drawn from the experience of women like herself,

including her own turbulent marriage.

In 1966, she came out with

You Ain't Woman Enough (To Take My Man).

# You say you're gonna take him

# Oh, but I don't think you can

# Cos you ain't woman enough to take my man... #

You don't write about fantasies, you write about life and true life,

what was going on that day.

That's the way I did it.

Just life.

I mean, the songs are just life.

I've seen it or I've lived it.

And I never would tell my husband which one was...

SHE LAUGHS

# And you ain't woman enough to take my man... #

It was quickly followed by another song from a wife's perspective,

only this time, aimed at a husband

who stumbles home drunk expecting sex.

# You thought that I'd be waitin' up when you came home last night

# You'd been out with all the boys and you ended up half tight

# But liquor and love they just don't mix

# Leave the bottle or me behind

# And don't come home a-drinkin' with lovin' on your mind... #

That's how it goes.

# No, don't come home a-drinkin'... #

The same year that the National Organization for Women was founded

and the year the phrase Women's liberation was first used,

Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin' On Your Mind)

became Loretta Lynn's first number one hit.

She didn't consider herself part of any movement,

nor did her growing legions of female country music fans.

But they believed that, at last, someone was speaking for them.

They were going through the same thing.

They just knew that I was going through the same thing, too.

# And many a night I've laid awake and cried, dear, all alone... #

They just bought the record - see their husband coming,

put it on and turn it up.

SHE LAUGHS That's what they did.

# Don't come home a-drinkin' with lovin' on your mind... #

These were some songs that people weren't writing then.

Certainly no woman was writing songs like that.

And she had more to say, in her own feisty, unfiltered way.

Her most controversial song focused on a wife

who feels like a hen in a brooder house,

confined to an existence of having one child after another.

# All these years I've stayed at home

# While you had all your fun

# And every year that's gone by

# Another baby's come

# There's a-gonna be some changes made right here on nursery hill

# You've set this chicken your last time

# Cos now I've got the pill... #

Decca was worried enough about the song's topic,

sung by a mother of now six,

it held back The Pill's release for two years.

And when it did come out,

a number of country stations refused to play it,

until publicity about the boycott and demands from her female fans

made it a top-five country hit and crossed it over to the pop charts.

I saw this picture of Loretta.

She had a white Telecaster and she had on her short fringe skirt

and her cowboy boots, you know, singing The Pill. I thought...

Man, that was...

She was radical.

She was a badass.

It was happening to everybody but nobody would write about it.

They thought they'd insult people.

Well, I never thought about that

because people were living that kind of life.

And when The Pill come out, you know, when I had The Pill...

..everybody would look at me like, "Another dirty song."

SHE LAUGHS

It wasn't dirty! Everybody went out and bought it.

And if they'd had the pill out when I was having kids,

I'd have ate 'em like popcorn.

I don't know where I got the money to buy 'em, but...

I mighta had to steal 'em.

But her biggest success came from a song that simply recounted

her humble beginnings in Butcher Holler, Kentucky.

MUSIC: Coal Miner's Daughter by Loretta Lynn

# Well, I was born a coal miner's daughter

# In a cabin on a hill in Butcher Holler

# We were poor but we had love

# That's the one thing that Daddy made sure of

# He shovelled coal to make a poor man's dollar

# My daddy... #

I studied Coal Miner's Daughter like it was a textbook.

It's a Rosetta Stone.

It goes back to bluegrass and mountain music

and country music

and modern country.

Loretta Lynn is honesty,

bluntness.

She'll say anything, there's no filter.

She reminds me of Momma a lot.

She is a strong-willed woman

and is a survivor.

# ..Well, a lot of things have changed since way back then... #

If you write the truth and you're writing a song,

and you're writing about your life, it's going to be country.

It'll be country.

Cos you're writing what's happening.

And that's all a good song is.

# ..Except the memories of a coal miner's daughter. #

APPLAUSE

# We shall overcome

# We shall overcome

# We shall overcome some day... #

By the mid-1960s,

the long struggle by African-Americans to end legalised

discrimination in the South was finally producing victories.

Schools could no longer be segregated.

The hard-won Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned employers and public

places from denying them jobs or providing them equal access to

everything from drinking fountains to seats in cafeterias or on a bus.

That fall, in Nashville, a 31-year-old from

Sledge, Mississippi, with a deep, resonant voice,

entered a studio to record some country songs for the first time.

His name was Charley Pride.

My dad used to say, "Now, Pride...

"Just think about the name itself.

"Whatever you want to do, you want to try to do it good

"and do it quick."

# So I feel so blue sometimes I wanna die... #

The reason he was able to make it in country music was

because of his voice.

You know, eventually it didn't matter

what the colour of his skin was because his music was way too good.

He was born in 1934, the fourth of 11 children,

in a sharecropper's family that lived in a three-room

shotgun shack in the Mississippi Delta.

I grew up and walked four miles to school, four miles back,

that kind of thing.

But the whites had a bus.

We didn't have a bus.

When I'm walking to school, I walked way over to the side

because they had potholes and it was a gravel road.

If you were walking too close and the bus goes by and, shhwwwsh...

You get water all over you, see?

Plus the kids said, "Hey, nigger! Hey..."

You know, giving...

..talking to you and that sort of thing.

I always wanted to be somewhere

and do something different than picking cotton beside my dad.

I used to sit on the porch and I'd look up at the clouds.

Oh, how it'd be to float on them clouds.

I used to think of that, you know, when I was little.

I didn't realise what it would be.

So, when I saw Jackie Robinson go to the major leagues I said,

"That's my way out of the cotton field."

His ability as a pitcher landed him a spot on the Memphis Red Sox

in the Negro league, when Pride was still a teenager.

He later moved to Helena, Montana, where

he played on a minor league team and worked in a smelting plant.

But he had also grown up listening to The Grand Ole Opry, admiring

Hank Williams, and in Montana, he began performing in a local bar.

Passing through town, Opry stars Red Foley and Red Sovine

heard him singing Williams' Lovesick Blues

and were impressed enough to encourage him to try Nashville.

Pride showed up in Music City where he caught the attention

of Cowboy Jack Clement, the maverick producer and songwriter.

I thought country music was getting a little stale

at that time.

Yeah, I thought it needed some kick in the butt...

..or something.

And a friend of mine

was telling me about this Negro that was a great country singer.

If any producer should have taken on a black kid,

it was Jack.

Cos Jack liked to be different,

and Jack wasn't afraid of anything.

Well, I heard him sing and it was great.

I came back and I said, "Let's get him in here and recording."

But most of the labels in Nashville weren't interested in signing him.

Then Chet Atkins took the tapes to his bosses at RCA, waiting until

they liked what they heard before showing them a photograph of Pride.

They decided to release his early singles without making any

mention of Pride's race.

Many of the radio disc jockeys and the people listening assumed

he was just another white Southern country singer.

I was MCing a show in Detroit.

We had about 18,000 people, and when I went out I said,

"How many people here are from the South -

"first, second, third generation?"

Most of the hands went up.

Pride was about the third act on, so I gave him a big build-up -

"being here from down in Mississippi" and all that,

"and I hope you'll give him a big Detroit welcome,

"country Charley Pride."

APPLAUSE

Well, this is exactly the way it went.

Yay...

SILENCE

It stopped.

Yarrrrrrrrr...

Ooh...

Turning down a volume.

Did you see...?

You could drop a pin.

I said, "Ladies and gentlemen, I realise it's kind of unique me

"coming out here on a country music show wearing this permanent tan."

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

The minute I said that,

a big applause.

Yarrrrrr.... So I guess they said,

"Well, let's sit back and see what he's got to offer."

# I thought I had seen pretty girls in my time

# But that was before I met you

# I never saw one that I wanted for mine

# But that was before I met you. #

But once they saw me sing and heard me sing, they didn't say this but,

"I don't care if he's green - I like his singing."

When his single Just Between You And Me reached

number 10 on the country charts

Charley Pride's career was launched,

though for a while his label was still skittish about which

songs he recorded -

especially love songs.

They turned down his request to sing Curly Putman's

Green, Green Grass Of Home.

# Down the road I look and there comes Mary

# Hair of gold... #

Hair of gold?

# ..And lips like cherries. #

Hair of gold?

Did that get you good enough?

They thought that was just...

..that one line might just would hurt the...

"Look who he's singing to!"

They ain't got that many hair of golds of his colour.

Right?

But his biggest hit, Kiss An Angel Good Morning, spent five weeks

at the top of the country charts and crossed over to the pop markets.

# Old friends on the street

# They wonder how does a man get to be this way. #

He would become the first black member of The Grand Ole Opry

since Deford Bailey decades earlier,

the first black artist to have a number-one country record,

and the first artist of any colour

to win the Country Music Association's

Male Vocalist award two years in a row.

Times WERE changing.

Other awards would follow.

The nominees for the best country vocal...

I was giving the award out.

They told me, "If Charley wins,

"step back one step."

And the winner is Charley Price... APPLAUSE DROWNS SPEECH

So I hugged him.

You can't let people tell you where to stand and what to say.

Or I never could.

# The secret I'm speaking of... #

Charley Pride would go on to have 29 number-one country hits

and 12 gold albums.

# A canvas-covered cabin

# In a crowded labour camp

# Stand out in this memory I revive

# Cos my daddy raised a family there

# With two hard-working hands

# And tried to feed my mama's hungry eyes. #

The human being has a history of being awful cruel to some...

..something different.

"Okie" was not a good word, you know?

They were talked down to and looked down on.

It might have been something comparable to the

way that they treated the blacks.

When Merle Ronald Haggard was born, in 1937, his family had

already been living near Bakersfield, California,

for three years,

having fled Oklahoma after a fire destroyed their farm

during the depression.

They were still looked down upon as Okies.

# Never had the luxuries she wanted... #

Haggard was only nine years old when his father died from a stroke.

"Something," he said later, "went out of the world that

"I was never able to replace."

To fill the gap, his mother encouraged Merle's

budding interest in music, hoping it would keep him out of trouble.

It didn't.

He ran away for a while at age 10, by hopping a freight train,

then ran away again at 14,

hitchhiking all the way to Texas and back.

His freshman year in high school,

he showed up a total of 10 days.

But he listened endlessly to the Jimmy Rogers

records his mother bought him,

sneaked off to see Bob Wills perform,

took in local concerts by the Maddox Brothers and Rose.

But Haggard spent most of his teenage years running from the law.

He was constantly arrested for truancy,

and just as constantly escaping from juvenile detention centres.

Married at age 17, he started selling stolen scrap iron,

got caught and was jailed,

only to escape again.

Somebody was always after me, it seemed like.

I escaped 17 times from different places in California.

I was Bonnie and Clyde all rolled into one.

Just running from the law, doing time when they'd catch me.

In 1957, the police brought him in for a minor burglary.

This time, based on his rap sheet of escapes

more than the severity of any of his crimes,

he was sentenced to 15 years in San Quentin,

a maximum security prison.

No-one had escaped from it in eight years.

Merle Haggard became prisoner number A45200,

confined with several thousand of California's

most hardened criminals,

some of them on death row.

He was 20 years old and intent as ever on breaking out.

An inmate everyone called Rabbit invited Haggard to

join in on an escape he was plotting, but at the last

minute, advised the young man not to take part in the dangerous plan.

"You can sing and write songs," he told Haggard.

"You can be somebody someday."

It was a big decision to not go,

but it was kind of neat to know

that I could get out of there if I wanted to.

Haggard took the advice.

Rabbit's escape was successful for a time,

but during his recapture he killed a policeman,

was brought back to San Quentin

and later executed.

San Quentin.

Something happened to me there.

There was a time when I...

..I came to the fork in the road and took it, you see?

Haggard decided that his only way out was to become a model prisoner.

He volunteered for the toughest job, in the textile mill,

and played in the prison band.

One New Year's Day, he attended a concert for the inmates.

The performer was Johnny Cash,

and Haggard became inspired that someday he, too, might be a star.

"I would have been a career criminal and died young," he remembered,

"if music hadn't saved me."

# Mama tried

# Mama tried to raise me better... #

His wife had stopped visiting, even writing.

But his mother never gave up on him.

We've all got a mama.

And, you know, the majority of them tried.

Paroled after two and a half years, he returned to Bakersfield

and took a day job digging ditches.

Seven nights a week he played music in the city's honky-tonks -

the High Pockets, Rainbow Gardens, the Lucky Spot.

He toured briefly with Buck Owens, playing bass with the Buckaroos.

In 1965, he married the singer Bonnie Owens, Buck's former wife,

and recorded duets with her.

Then Haggard's solo career started picking up steam on its own.

During a three-year stretch in the late 1960s,

he put out a number one hit every four months.

The first thing we noticed about him,

well, he was Hollywood handsome.

I had girls stopping me on the street, asking me

how to meet Merle Haggard.

Stewardesses on aeroplanes said, "You know Merle Haggard?"

He was handsome, he could sing and he could write.

He was the total package.

# I'll drink my beer in a tavern

# Sing a little bit of these working man blues. #

Well, what is country music?

I would say, "OK.

"Just get any Merle Haggard record, you know,

"it doesn't matter which one.

"Just drop the needle on any track, and this will give you an idea.

"And you can take it from there."

"I felt like I was on a roll," Haggard recalled,

"but I couldn't help but wonder what would happen to my little

"growing public if they found out I was a San Quentin graduate.

"Mama even suggested I change my name."

He decided to stick with Haggard.

"It was my daddy's," he said, "and it's mine."

My favourite song of Merle's is Holding Things Together.

It's chronicling a family who has broken apart.

And, in this case, it's not the father who's left,

it's the mother who left.

And the father's left there to hold the family together.

# Holding things together

# Ain't no easy thing to do

# When it comes to raising children

# It's a job meant for two

# Alice, please believe me,

# I can't go on and on

# Holding things together

# With you gone... '

He sings, "Today was Angie's birthday.

"It must have slipped your mind."

HE BREATHES IN SHARPLY

Merle's good.

He says, "I tried twice to call you..

"..with no answer either time.

"But the postman brought a package I mailed some days ago.

"I signed it, "Love from Momma", so Angie wouldn't know."

You don't have to say anything more about Merle Haggard.

Pretty Miss Dolly Parton!

APPLAUSE

# Don't try to cry

# Your way out of this

# Don't try to lie

# Or I'll catch you... #

Her voice was...

..spellbinding.

What I think people are drawn to the most,

it sounds exactly like where she's from, you know?

That's exactly what you'd think

East Tennessee is supposed to sound like.

I grew up in the Great Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee.

There was a lot of gospel music, country gospel.

There was a lot of bluegrass music,

and a lot of just pure old country music.

You know, just sit around, probably just play the guitar

and banjo and autoharp, dulcimer,

kind of folk,

just mountain folk.

My mother's people were very musical,

they all played musical instruments

and we were the family that always would sing at funerals

or weddings and all the shindigs.

The fourth of 12 children,

Dolly Rebecca Parton was born in a one-room cabin

without electricity, running water or indoor plumbing.

The doctor who delivered her was paid with a sack of cornmeal

for his services.

We didn't have electricity.

And we had a battery radio.

My daddy used to want to listen to the Grand Ole Opry

and so we used to have to go out and pour water on the ground wire

and it would whistle in and out.

From the time she was a little girl,

she was vivacious, precocious and ambitious.

She started writing songs at aged five.

Her first one, Little Tiny Tassel Top,

was inspired by the doll her father had made for her

out of a corncob.

In 1964, the day after becoming the first in her family

to graduate from high school, Parton packed a cardboard suitcase,

boarded a bus and headed for Music City.

There, she worked part-time as a waitress and receptionist

and auditioned for Ralph Emery's early morning local television show.

Well, I had a dream.

And I had...

..a talent, I thought.

And I really believed that it was going to happen.

She sang a George Jones song called

You Gotta Be My Baby.

And just killed us.

Soon, she was the new woman star on Porter Wagoner's

hugely popular nationally syndicated television show.

Wagoner took her with him on tour

more than 200 nights a year,

recorded a series of duets with her

and helped get her a record deal with RCA.

But Wagoner could also be controlling and domineering,

insisting on overseeing every aspect of her career.

Parton bristled at the double standard,

as her self-written hit Just Because I'm A Woman made perfectly clear.

# And I'm sorry that I'm not

# The woman

# You thought I'd be... #

Porter thought he was just finding another girl to fit that spot.

You know? I was a whole ball of wax and Porter wasn't used to that,

so I had a mind of my own, too.

And I wasn't just going to be

told what to do or just be that and nothing else.

# ..Just because I'm a woman... #

Miss June Carter.

My mom could do it all.

She would tell you anything.

And one night I was on stage working

with them and my aunt, Nita and Helen and I,

we timed Momma talking between songs.

And she talked for 17 minutes.

Helen finally said, "June, these people might want to hear us sing."

By 1968, June Carter was not yet 40 years old.

As a member of the first family of country music,

she had already spent three decades in the business.

Now, with her mother and two sisters,

she toured regularly with Johnny Cash.

# Well she's my baby,

# When I'm in need... #

June was deeply in love with him,

but Cash's addiction to amphetamines was threatening his career.

He hadn't recorded a number-one record in four years,

and he failed to show up for half of his concerts on the road.

She feared worse was in store.

Even as children, we knew that they had something special.

Mom was saying, "If he didn't have me out here, he'd be dead".

She really felt like that if she wasn't out on the road with him,

kind of watching what was going on, to a certain degree,

that he would mess...

Get too messed up and might be gone, like Hank.

That's what Momma said, "I don't want to lose him like I lost Hank."

No-one seemed to be able to get Cash to quit.

Arrested for public drunkenness in Georgia,

he spent a night in jail,

but was released the next day,

because the judge's wife was a big fan.

"You want to kill yourself," the judge told him,

"I'm going to give you your God-given right

"to go ahead and do that, so take your pills and go."

Maybelle Carter tried kindness,

just as she had done with Hank Williams.

Grandma'd get that little cup of coffee and she'd sit there

and she'd play cards

and smoke cigarettes and talk and laugh and giggle

and tell jokes all night long.

Well, that was fine with John, so he always had a soft place to land.

Finally, June gave him an ultimatum.

If he wanted her to marry him,

he had to get professional help to fight his drug habit.

A doctor was brought in and for weeks, he and June and her parents

kept constant watch over Cash at his house near Nashville,

taking away any pills he managed to hide

and blocking anyone else from showing up with fresh supplies.

When he made that decision

to really, really get straight,

they, er...

They really surrounded him and sat out there in his house,

Momma and Grandma and Grandaddy.

This was the condition of, "If we're getting married,

"if we're ever going to be together

"and you're going to be around my daughters,

"and we're going to be a family with your daughters,

"all of us together,

"you have got to get cleaned up."

# I'm so lonesome

# I could cry... #

By early 1968, Cash was clean enough

and ready to make a new album.

# All of this was meaningless

# Because happiness is you... #

Redemption themes played out in my dad's life

and his career over and over and over.

# ..No more chasing moonbeams... #

Every show,

every day of his life,

there was this, um, struggle

and a search for redemption.

The same guy who sang, "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die"

sang, "Were you there when they crucified my Lord?"

In the same show.

Cash's idea was to record a live performance at a prison,

something he had wanted to do ever since his first prison concert

back in the 1950s.

He settled on the place that had inspired one of his biggest hits,

and now, the place he hoped would revive his career...

..Folsom Prison in California.

On Saturday, January 13, 1968,

Cash arrived at the prison.

With him were the Tennessee Three, Carl Perkins,

the Statler Brothers and June Carter.

Inside, 3,000 inmates gathered in the huge prison cafeteria,

seated at tables bolted to the floor,

while guards with shotguns watched from a safe perch above it all.

# Step on my blue suede shoes... #

Carl Perkins warmed them up with his early rockabilly hit,

Blue Suede Shoes.

Then the Statler Brothers performed Flowers On The Wall,

while Cash waited just offstage for his turn.

"I knew this was it," he later remembered,

"my chance to make up for all the times I had messed up."

When his time came, Cash opened his act in a new way.

He simply introduced himself...

Hello, I'm Johnny Cash.

..and launched into Folsom Prison Blues.

# I hear the train a-coming

# It's rolling round the bend

# And I ain't seen the sunshine since I don't know when

# I'm stuck in Folsom Prison

# And time keeps dragging on... #

The convicts loved it.

# ..But that train keeps rolling

# On down to San Antone... #

"And their response", Marshall Grant said, "inspired us

"to perform every song better than we had ever done it before."

# ..But I shot a man in Reno

# Just to watch him die

# When I hear that whistle blowing... #

My father had never been convicted of a felony,

but you couldn't hardly tell a convict that!

They took him in as one of their own because he accepted them,

he appreciated them,

and he had that magic on stage that connected with the people.

# After seven years behind these bars together... #

During his two concerts that day,

Cash seemed to be singing directly to each prisoner,

choosing songs that touched on loneliness and confinement,

bad luck and bad choices,

as well as irrepressible rebellion,

sometimes mixing in a little profane banter with the audience

and taunts at the warden.

# ..And send a picture of Mother if you will... #

# Hey, let's go on down to Jackson... #

When June Carter joined him on stage, the men went wild.

# Go play your hand You big-talkin' man

# Make a big fool of yourself

# Yeah, go to Jackson

# Go comb your hair... #

# Inside the walls of prison... #

But the biggest response came at the end,

when Cash sang Greystone Chapel,

which had been written by one of the Folsom inmates, Glen Sherley,

who was sitting in the front row.

# ..There's a greystone chapel here at Folsom... #

Cash and his musicians had only learned the song a day earlier.

But he had insisted on using it as the show's finale

because it dealt with the possibility of redemption

for even the most hardened sinner.

# ..But he saved the soul of many lost men... #

That spring, Colombia released the Folsom Prison album to rave reviews.

Commentators from every style of music now saw in him

something they all could agree upon.

"Talk about Magical Mystery Tours," the Village Voice said,

"Cash's voice is as thick and gritty as ever

"but filled with the kind of emotionalism

"you seldom find in rock."

The New York Times called his performance

"soul music of a rare kind".

Jazz critic Nat Hentoff proclaimed,

"There's no hemming Johnny Cash into any one category."

And Rolling Stone magazine,

"The bible of the emerging youth counterculture."

portrayed him as an important anti-Establishment rebel

in the tradition of Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan.

Country fans pushed Cash's Folsom Prison Blues

to number one on their charts.

And the album would remain on the pop charts for more than two years,

selling more than 3 million copies in the United States alone.

# All of this... #

Johnny Cash had become a superstar.

# ..Cos happiness is you

# No more chasing... #

One month after the Folsom Prison concert, in February of 1968,

he proposed to June Carter in front of an audience in Canada.

This time, she accepted.

"It was," he wrote in a note to himself,

"the best year of my 36 years of life".

# ..Loneliness is emptiness

# But happiness is you... #

But 1968, one of the most divisive

and turbulent years in American history,

had only just begun.

# ..And happiness is you. #

# Holding things together

# Ain't no easy thing to do

# When it comes to raising children

# It's a job meant for two... #