WHOSE COUNTRY?

HE WAS FALLING APART. BRILLIANT AND TORtured, devout and driven, Johnny Cash had been discovered in the Memphis of Sun Records—the musical milieu that gave America Elvis Presley—and had built a career that, by the late 1960s, he seemed determined to destroy through an addiction to pills. Lost in a fog of speed and drink, Cash missed shows and was exiled from the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville after he kicked out the footlights of the stage at the fabled Ryman Auditorium. His first marriage in tatters, Cash was in love with June Carter, of country music’s iconic Carter Family, but June refused to marry him until he sobered up. At last, June and her parents isolated Cash at his house near Nashville to dry him out and get him right.

After white-knuckling his way to sobriety, Cash accepted a January 1968 gig at Folsom State Prison in California, the setting for his legendary “Folsom Prison Blues.” “I knew this was it,” Cash recalled, “my chance