With His Hot and Blue Guitar

Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar! arrived on October 11, 1957, as the first full-length LP Sun Records ever issued. Producer Sam Phillips assembled the album from sessions stretching back to 1954, gathering together the spare, rhythmic sound Cash had built with guitarist Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant.

Four of its tracks, including "I Walk the Line," "Cry! Cry! Cry!," "So Doggone Lonesome," and "Folsom Prison Blues," had already climbed the country charts as singles before the album's release. That gave listeners a full-length introduction to a sound later described as folkloric and traditional, spare in its accompaniment yet edging toward a rockabilly bounce.

"Folsom Prison Blues," recorded at Sun Studio in Memphis on July 30, 1955, anchors the record's darkest material, a prisoner's-eye view of confinement that Cash had begun writing three years earlier while serving in the Air Force in West Germany. Alongside train songs, gospel numbers, and heartbreak ballads, it set a template Cash would return to for the rest of his career: plainspoken narratives sung from the perspective of people on society's margins.