Johnny Cash is an icon.  There’s no debating that.  The album that cemented his icon status was “At Folsom Prison.”  To celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the release of the seminal album, Legacy Recordings expanded the original disc into a 2 disc, DVD box set.

The interesting thing about this release is that most people, even longtime Cash fans, didn’t know that two concerts were recorded for the live album.  After playing the tapes back, Bob Johnston and Johnny decided to release stuff from the first disc.  It’s interesting to listen to these historical recordings not only for the Johnny Cash content but for the introductions from Hugh Cherry and the ‘warm-up’ songs from the Statler Brothers and Carl Perkins.  There’s also a pair of previously unreleased tracks from the first disc in the form of “I Got A Woman” with June Carter (it a duet version of the Ray Charles standard).

While the second disc does reprise most of the songs from the first concert, both Carl Perkins and The Statler Brothers sing three tracks before Johnny comes on stage to sing with them.  Only “I Got Stripes” and “Give My Love to Rose” from the 2nd show were merged into the original LP Release.  The 2nd show also wasn’t as lively as the first one and Johnny messed up the lyrics on a couple tracks but ever the pro, he jokes his way through ‘em.

The DVD is an all-new documentary that discusses why the show was made and discusses a little bit about Cash’s life along with how his performances affected those in Folsom Prison that day and how he helped the writer of “Greystone Chapel” (a song written about Folsom), Glen Shirley not only get out of there but helped his career and put him on his tour. So, while it often gets infuriating when seminal releases get reissued, when there’s the amount of material that’s present here, this box set actually replaces the original album in the sense that it is a complete retrospective of what happened January 13, 1968.