That is something I always wondered about. He killed a man in Nevada, and ended up in a California prison.
Depending upon the time song takes place in, it could be before Nevada was a State, but California was.
Just a thought.
The thing that most people don’t know about Johnny Cash is that he never spent any real time in prison. A few nights here and there, sure. But he never did any hard time the way that his narratives suggest a relationship with not just prisons, but the minds of people inside. It was all tied to country music’s outlaw image, something that Cash was a natural fit for in the early stages of his career. In 1951, while serving in West Germany for the Air Force, Johnny Cash saw the movie Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison. In the black and white movie, prisoners in Folsom Prison attempt to revolt against the cruel and ruthless prison warden. The warden’s assistant, in attempts to work toward reforming the prison and making it gentler, is eventually forced out. The movie ends in a riot, where prisoners are beaten, bloodied, and left for dead. The central question of the movie is the one that is still asked today: Is prison simply a place of repeated dehumanization and punishment? Or is it a place where personal change can happen?
Someone called a snitch hotline