Folsom State Prison

Folsom State Prison is the prison that sang — the 1880 granite fortress on the American River where Johnny Cash recorded the album that made the name mean something. But the prison predates the song by three-quarters of a century: California built it on the Stony Bar mining camp's granite, the first cells going up in 1878, the first forty-four prisoners transferred from San Quentin in July 1880 into stone cells four feet by eight with six-inch eye slots.

Folsom's record is firsts — the first prison in America with electric lights (1893, off the river's hydroelectric), one of the first maximum-security prisons, ninety-three executions carried out inside. The cells from 1878 are still in use — boiler-plate doors that didn't get air holes drilled until the 1940s, holding inmates into the 21st century in the same stone boxes the Gold Rush built.

The Cash concert is the file's hinge — 'Folsom Prison Blues' was written in 1955 after Cash saw the film Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison in Germany; he never served time, but the January 13, 1968 cafeteria shows became At Folsom Prison, and the inmates were, he said, 'the most enthusiastic audience I ever played.' The file keeps the double record: the prison's own century of granite and executions, and the album that made Folsom the most famous prison in American music.

Folsom State Prison is the archive's recorded file — the 1880 granite prison where Cash played to the most enthusiastic audience he ever had, the first electrified prison in America, its 1878 cells still in use.