Jailhouse Rocked

Since then, Streissguth naturally
gravitated toward Cash due to his personal interest in country
musicians. “I’ve done a lot of writing on country music and
rhythm’n’blues people and performers,” he says. “Sooner or later, if
you’re writing about country music, you’re going to get around to
Johnny Cash, a major figure in pop music, really.” 

Streissguth has always been intrigued by
Cash, due to a gig he’d witnessed in Johnstown, Penn., in the 1980s.
“Security was lax, so I easily slipped back stage and I walked around
the corner, and there was Cash standing with this old man who I assumed
to be a retired steel worker or a coal miner,” Streissguth explains.
“Cash was holding this man’s hand in his own, and he was examining the
man’s callouses and wrinkles and he said, ‘These are working man’s
hands: choppin’ wood hands.’ That still sums up, in my mind, Cash’s
interest in the common man, and by extension even those on the fringes
of society.”

Streissguth met Cram, 63, at a 2005
Johnny Cash convention in Memphis, Tenn., and their mutual interests
soon began to concentrate on Cash’s ground-breaking performances at
California’s Folsom State Prison on Jan. 13, 1968. Cram thought that
Streissguth’s academic discipline helped to serve the topic of the
Folsom concerts well. “It was a breath of fresh air to meet Michael,
who has a scholar’s approach toward thinking about things, without the
stuffiness of someone who does the research without getting into the
real world,” Cram says.

With their plan to write and compile a
documentary of the day in Cash’s history, however, there remained only
one problem: No motion picture cameras were allowed in to the
California institution during the concert, and hence no live footage
exists. As a result, Streissguth and Cram got creative. “We rely very
heavily on the photography of Jim Marshall, a legendary rock’n’roll
{still} photographer who took over 25 rolls of film that day,”
Streissguth says. “And we talked to eyewitnesses to the show: people
who were in Cash’s band, inmates who were there and who remembered the
show.” 

Both Streissguth and Cram feel that the
resulting product, which focuses largely on the lives of Glen Sherley
and Millard Dedmon, two inmates who witnessed the gig and who also, in
the minds of the filmmakers, serve as examples of the compassion Cash
had for prisons, which they believe was apparent in the performer’s
demeanor during the concert.

“The title of the film doesn’t suggest
that it’s about social issues, but it’s very much a documentary that
understands how important that one day was in Johnny Cash’s life. It
gives us an opportunity to think hard about the criminal justice system
and what we expect those places to be,” says Cram. “It’s in the
personal pain he struggled with himself, which shows Cash was trying to
reconcile his own identity and recklessness in an ordered society.”

Admission will be free for the Palace
screening, although donations to Syracuse Habitat for Humanity will be
accepted. For information, call 463-9240. 

Johnny Cash: A new documentary by local author Michael Streissguth and Boston-based filmmaker Bestor Cram screens Friday at Eastwood’s Palace Theatre.