When Johnny Cash stepped onstage at Folsom State Prison on Jan. 13, 1968, for the concerts that would change his life, he was in rough shape.

His record label had threatened to drop him, his addiction to pills was increasingly out of control, his personal life was in tatters and he had recently contemplated suicide.

The success of the shows, and the best-selling record they spawned, would spark one of the most successful runs of his career. Cash entered the gates of Folsom a fading and troubled country singer — and came out a mainstream superstar who would use his newfound celebrity to advance the cause of prison reform for more than a decade.

Then everything fell apart, in spectacular fashion.

Cash first played Folsom, a maximum-security facility outside Sacramento, in November 1966 — at the urging of the Rev. Floyd Gressett, who preached at a church in Ventura that Cash sometimes attended, and also did outreach at the prison.

Cash returned in 1968 for the live tapings of two shows, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, after battling his skeptical label, Columbia Records, which had been reluctant to fund the recordings. Cash, his girlfriend, June Carter, his band and his entourage all settled in at the nearby El Rancho motel. Gov. Ronald Reagan (R), in town for a fundraiser, came by to chat. Gressett played Cash a tape of “Greystone Chapel,” an uplifting ballad about finding God in the chapel at Folsom. It was written by Glen Sherley, a career criminal locked up there on an armed robbery charge. Cash, moved by the song, wrote the lyrics down in his notebook. Among them: “Inside the walls of prison my body may be/But the Lord has set my soul free.” He stayed up late into the night rehearsing, vowing to play the song the next day.

At Folsom the next morning, things were unusually fraught. A guard had recently been taken hostage, and the inmates were warned not to stand up during the show. “There were guards walking around with guns on ramps above the audience,” said Robert Hilburn, author of “Johnny Cash: The Life,” who attended while working as a freelance reporter for the Los Angeles Times. “It was tense.”

A stage had been set up in the cafeteria, behind death row. As Cash stood at the side of it, sizing up the audience, Hilburn watched Cash. He looked calm. “He really felt that he had made the right decision, that he had something that audience wanted,” Hilburn said. “He didn’t just do a greatest-hits show that day; he designed every song for that audience and their emotional needs.”

Many in the audience wrongly assumed that Cash had done hard time himself, perhaps taking literally the famous couplet in “Folsom Prison Blues,” his 1955 hit: “But I shot a man in Reno/Just to watch him die.” Cash had done overnight stints in jail, mostly to dry out, and had once been arrested after picking flowers on a stranger’s lawn, but that was the extent of it. Prisoners “related to him as being one of them more than anything else,” said W.S. Holland, Cash’s longtime drummer, who was at Folsom that day.

Cash had never been incarcerated at Folsom — he wrote “Folsom Prison Blues” after watching the 1951 crime drama “Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison” — but he saw himself in the inmates, too. “He realized how it could have been if the stories was true,” Holland said. “He could’ve been out there, looking at somebody doing a show.”

Cash took the stage wearing a black suit with a white dress shirt and his usual grave expression. “Once the music started, you could see people were eating out of his hand,” Hilburn said.

The first Folsom show was electric. The second, with Cash and his band half-exhausted, was more subdued, mostly recorded in case something happened to the first tape.

The crowd was adoring but constrained, said Michael Streissguth, author of “Johnny Cash: The Biography.” The inmates had been warned not to stand, although they sometimes did anyway, and Cash shook hands with some in the front row. Many in the crowd feared that cheering at the wrong moment might anger the guards; according to Streissguth, the cheers that greeted “I shot a man in Reno” were amplified on the recording in post-production.

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