Folsom

30"H x 24"W

The mugshot at Folsom prison in 1966 was meant to be a funny photo op, but it became an iconic picture in history. The black and white photo somehow captured the colorful life of Johnny Cash. The slicked-back hair. The defiant eyes and the ghost of a smirk. It was a picture without words–capturing a man caught somewhere between sin and salvation.

The image told the truth of a man who had walked through darkness and found Light waiting on the other side. Two years later, he walked back through the gates of Folsom Prison—not as a celebrity, but as a man who understood what it meant to be lost. He came not to perform, but to remind the forgotten they weren’t beyond forgiveness.

The night before the show, a prison chaplain slipped Johnny a tape of a song written by an inmate named Glen Sherley. Cash listened to it once, learned it overnight, and performed “Greystone Chapel” the next morning before those prisoners and the very man who wrote it. A man in chains heard his own song set free.

Something sacred happened that day in that gray cafeteria. His voice cracked open the walls–steel and sorrow made room for more. Chains rattled to the rhythm of grace. When he sang “Folsom Prison Blues,” the walls shook. And the words resonated. He sang for the sinner because he knew the song by heart.

Johnny Cash didn’t hide his darkness—he staged it and brought it into light. And maybe that’s why we still feel his story so deeply: because we all have our own kind of Folsom.
But as he proved that day, even in the deepest cell, a song can rise, a soul can be washed clean—and even a Man in Black can be made white as snow.

Johnny was right: “All truth leads to God.” And through His grace, what looks like a mugshot of our life, is really a mirror of mercy.