Johnny Cash Jail Show Sprung on TV

[Kooperman]

Johnny Cash Jail Show Sprung from 35-Year Confinement

Sat Mar 13,12:19 PM ET

By Dean Goodman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A Johnny Cash (news) prison concert that almost turned into a riot will receive its U.S. broadcast premiere on Sunday, 35 years after the electrifying show was filmed.

The Trio cable channel will air the one-hour documentary "Johnny Cash in San Quentin" at 9 p.m. ET/PT, with a few repeats scheduled later in the month.

Produced by Britain's Granada Television, the TV show intersperses performances of such songs as "I Walk the Line," "A Boy Named Sue," "Wanted Man" and "Daddy Sang Bass" with commentary from inmates doing time at one of America's toughest prisons. A warden also details the execution process, while one condemned double-killer coolly relates his lucky escape from the gas chamber.

Cash's then-new wife, June Carter Cash (news), dueted with her husband on "Jackson" and also helped out on harmonies with her mother, Maybelle Carter, and two sisters, Helen and Anita. All are now dead, as is the show's guitarist, Carl Perkins.

The highlight of the concert was probably a tune that Cash, then aged 36, had written especially for the occasion, "San Quentin," whose quietly incendiary lines included such pleas as "San Quentin, may you rot and burn in hell."

The captive audience went crazy when Cash finished the song, hundreds of hardened criminals jumping to their feet, clapping and cheering wildly.

"Somebody later told me, 'If you'd said "Break," they would have broken. They'd have rioted, torn the place up,"' Cash told author Nicholas Dawidoff in the 1997 book "In the Country of Country."

The Feb. 24, 1969, concert yielded a live album three months later, "Johnny Cash at San Quentin," a companion piece for 1968's "At Folsom Prison." Both albums were huge sellers, restoring Cash to the forefront of the mainstream music industry after a few creatively dry years.

"It was this breakthrough for a hardscrabble guy who really emblemized the rougher side of country music," said Kris Slava, vice president of acquisitions and program planning at Trio.

The TV special depicts "a working man reality, a sense that we're all in this together, and here it is, real life unadorned," he added.

Since it is apparent that the producer "probably had a bit of a political ax to grind," Slava said the special may have been too hot for U.S. broadcasters to air at the time. The prisoners appear articulate and repentant, which may have been at odds the law-and-order mood of the American public, Slava said.

"Johnny Cash in San Quentin" airs as part of Trio's "Uncovered TV" month, which features rare programs from around the world. Other U.S. premieres included British director Ken Loach (news)'s 1969 film "Kes," the first season of Australian sitcom "Kath & Kim" and "The Death of Klinghoffer," an adaptation of the opera about the murder of a handicapped American aboard the hijacked cruise ship Achille Lauro.

Trio, a unit of the Universal Television Group, is available to 20 million households via digital cable and satellite services.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...evision_cash_dc

[Shawn]

I can't wait until that baby hits the p2p networks.

[Kooperman]

I've never seen Trio network....

[Shawn]

I've never even heard of it. That's why I'll depend on p2p.