findingDulcinea

After Folsom Prison: Glen Sherley’s Story

Johnny Cash’s concert at Folsom Prison on January 13, 1968, wasn’t his first break, but without the album recorded there, he might never have managed a comeback. After falling out of favor with the country music community because of his brash attitude and drug addictions, Cash decided to connect with fans who understood his troubles: prisoners.

The night before what would be his second concert at Folsom Prison (the first one wasn't recorded), Cash was given a tape recorded by an inmate and songwriter named Glen Sherley. He listened to the tape, and at the concert the following day, Cash addressed Sherley in the crowd, saying, “I hope I do your song justice.”

When Cash began playing “Greystone Chapel,” an excited Sherley " jumped out of his front-row chair with a smile I will never forget,” Glen Beley, a writer for the Virginia Quarterly Review, recalled.

Cash helped Sherley record his own album, “Live at Vacaville,” while still an inmate, and was also able to persuade the governor of California to release him early. (Hear Sherley's recording on Lastfm.com). Cash even brought him on tour, but Sherley slipped back into drug addiction, left the stage and took his own life in 1978. 

"In prison I guess he was one of the top dogs in the pecking order, but he found it hard to adjust to the outside world," said Lou Robin, Cash's manager. Cash paid for Sherley’s funeral, but he soon discontinued his prison outreach, turning his focus to helping American Indians.

According to Roseanne, his daughter, Johnny Cash’s life changed dramatically after the success of his Folsom concert and album. "The affirmation helped transform his personal life. It took him away from the heavy drug use and turned him back to religion," biographer Michael Streissguth told the Rocky Mountain News.

Johnny Cash died on Sept. 12, 2003, a few months after his wife June Carter Cash.

Shannon Firth
Senior Writer and Audience Development Coordinator

Sweet Sites | Don't Know Much About Music?

In the research section of our Web Guide to Music we’ve touted allmusic, an underrated encyclopedic resource of artist biographies and album reviews. If you’re reading a review of an album on Answers.com or in the iTunes Music Store, it often originates at allmusic.

Stream through your favorites in dozens of genres with Lala, a site that lets you both stream and download music. In a companion piece to this blog post on findingDulcinea, “Enjoying Music on the Web—Legally,” we discussed Lala and a few comparable sites. Lala stands out because of its extensive archive of 7 million songs, including classical, country, classic rock, pop, jazz and indie rock. Artist pages on Lala often include bios, as well as links to similar artists and Lala users who streamed or bought the artist.

Essentials of Music is a classical music destination with composer biographies, MP3 samples of their work and articles on major eras in classical music. The site is based on the W. W. Norton book title, “Essential Classics.”

Parents, get your children educated about classical music with Cincinnati Public Radio’s Classics for Kids, a site with radio shows, audio samples, articles on periods and composers, special features and games.

Mainstream and indie music fans alike will appreciate the new Billboard. The site used to be a hard-to-access database of music charts and news. Now it’s a glossy, colorful, multimedia-filled publisher with interactive music charts, news, interviews, concert coverage and more.

If you like Billboard, be sure to check out “5 Must-Book Music Sites,” a must-read for indie music fans that are just getting their feet wet online. It features five top sites in five categories—concert listings, MP3 blog, music magazine, lyric database and video site—as well as five runners-up.

Liz Colville
Senior Writer
Audience Development

Getting Acquainted With Blake Harrison of Flocabulary

Remember watching “Sesame Street” and learning the alphabet and some basic math skills? How about “Schoolhouse Rock” and learning the difference between an interjection and a conjunction, or how a bill becomes law? Did you forget how much fun learning could be?

Blake Harrison didn’t forget. Harrison, along with Alex Rappaport, founded Flocabulary, a teaching curriculum that uses educational hip-hop music to teach reading, vocabulary, math, science and social studies. The duo has taken their music on the road, held teaching workshops and created a current events series called The Week in Rap.

FindingEducation, a new tool that helps teachers save and share their favorite Web sites and assignments, spoke with Harrison about his inspiration for Flocabulary, how music enhances education and why teachers are seeing value in this unique approach. Read the full interview with Blake Harrison at findingEducation’s blog, Digital Teachers’ Lounge.

Sweet Sites | Name That Tune: Nailing Down Music & Lyrics on the Web

It’s a universal experience: there’s a song, or part of a song, that you just can’t get out of your head. Unfortunately, you can’t remember the name of the song or the band who sang it. But fear not: the Internet was invented to solve agonizing conundrums like this. (Okay, maybe the Internet wasn’t specifically designed to help you cope with your earworm problem, but it seems like it might have been.)

Did you first hear the song a few weeks ago as Dr. Gregory House moodily limped/stomped through the hospital or when, for the millionth time, Chuck failed to listen to Sarah and Casey’s instructions to stay in the car and got captured by Fulcrum agents? Then pay a visit to TuneFind, which catalogs the songs used in recent TV shows and new movies. If the song is available on iTunes, the site will direct you there to buy it.

If it’s an older song that’s lodged in your brain, type whatever you remember of the lyrics into Lyrster, a lyrics search engine that indexes more than 350 lyric-hunting sites in English and French. Some of the sites also lead to audio or video clips of the song in question. (I personally was thrilled to find a cheesy video of “Disparue,” a French rock song from 1982 that I encountered during a high-school summer spent in France.)

If you’ve used the two sites above to successfully identify your song, head on over to just hear it, which searches the Web for audio and video of your chosen song. If you’re looking for multiple songs, you can drag each one to the right of the screen and create a playlist.

Just hear it has acquired all the appropriate licenses to ensure that artists receive royalties for their work when you stream their songs; that means you can root out that earworm and feel virtuous at the same time. The site is currently in private beta; you need an invitation to gain membership privileges that allow you to save playlists between visits. However, you can e-mail them and request one.

Amy Goldschlager
Editor

Find your own "eureka!" sites using SweetSearch.

All Susan Boyle, All the Time (and All in One Place)

Photo: Andrew Milligan/AP

Susan Boyle, the 47-year-old “spinster” singing sensation from Scotland, was clearly the Internet star of the week and will likely continue to fascinate people until she is eliminated—or far more likely wins—season three of “Britain’s Got Talent.” The media coverage of Boyle will likely keep racing ahead. But we’ve pieced together the best multimedia and most interesting aspects of Boyle’s ascent—so far.

Boyle, a self-deprecatingly funny woman who’s never been kissed, hails from West Lothian, a village community in Scotland. She’s so far spent most of her adult life caring for her mother, who recently died. Her mother loved “Britain’s Got Talent” and wanted her daughter to audition for the show. As is often the case in middle age, the death of Boyle’s mother actually inspired her to finally take the plunge, singing “I Dreamed A Dream” from “Les Miserables" in front of a tough crowd that included judge Simon Cowell.

Boyle proved that age is no obstacle in the pursuit of a lifelong dream, namely to become a professional singer. She also gave the audience a “wake-up call,” as one “BGT” judge put it: Her humble appearance prompted many people to assume she wouldn’t be a good singer at all.

Of course, there’s plenty of precedent for wacky auditions. Season one winner Paul Potts was rather insensitively described by that same judge as “a lump of coal,” clearly no indication of his (what she went on to call) “diamond”-like talent: Potts has gone on to sell upwards of four million copies of his debut opera album.

Boyle performed “I Dreamed A Dream” again for U.S. audiences via satellite on “The CBS Early Show” on April 16. The nice thing about this recording is that there isn’t the background noise of “BGT”’s enthusiastic audience.

A 1999 recording of Boyle performing “Cry Me A River” has also turned up on YouTube. It’s only the audio version, but it’s stunning just the same:

Liz Colville
Senior Writer
Audience Development