San Quentin State Prison — Haggard and Cash

San Quentin State Prison on the Marin County waterfront north of San Francisco is the oldest prison in California, opened in 1852, and has a particular place in American country music history. On January 1, 1958, Johnny Cash performed a concert at San Quentin — one of the earliest of what would become his series of prison concerts, including the 1968 Folsom Prison and 1969 San Quentin recordings that rank among the most important live albums in country music. Merle Haggard was in the audience at San Quentin that day, serving time on a burglary conviction.

Haggard has described the Cash performance as the moment that crystallised his commitment to music as a vocation rather than an aspiration. He was twenty years old, two years into a prison sentence, watching a man who had himself been in trouble with the law — Cash had his own well-documented history with amphetamines and police — perform with complete authority for an audience of inmates who responded with the intensity of people for whom the performance meant something that it could not mean for a free audience. Haggard was paroled in 1960 and returned to Bakersfield to build the career that Cash's San Quentin performance had convinced him was possible.

Cash returned to San Quentin in January 1969 to record the At San Quentin album, which includes "San Quentin" — a song he wrote specifically for and partly about the prison, performed twice in the recording session because the audience response to the first version was so intense. San Quentin remains an operational prison and is not open for public visits. Its waterfront location on San Francisco Bay, with views across the water to Marin County's hills, makes it one of the more dramatically situated prisons in America.