‘The greatest audience in the world': Photos from decades of epic concerts at San Quentin

"San Quentin may you rot and burn in hell!"

Johnny Cash, looking resolute and a bit nervous on a stool with his guitar, sang those words for the first time on Feb. 24, 1969, to a raucous crowd of denim-clad men inside San Quentin State Penitentiary, pausing to strum an extra bar until the cheers died down. "San Quentin," written for an album recorded that day, is a high point in live albums, prison music and sticking it to the man. The record went triple platinum and marked a peak in Cash's career.

But Cash was not the first, or close to the last, musician to play San Quentin.

A search in the San Francisco Chronicle archive failed to uncover photos of Cash's famed concert, but we discovered a fascinating performance history that preceded Cash by decades and dozens more images of artists ranging from B.B. King to Carlos Santana to Metallica.

Long before Cash arrived, San Quentin officials embraced music as an avenue toward rehabilitation. A "warden's band" that formed in the early 1960s included incarcerated jazz greats Frank Morgan and Art Pepper. The San Quentin Music Festival started in 1955 "in a parking lot across from the gas chamber," the Chronicle reported. The jazz and classical music festival with incarcerated performers became so successful that their wives and children were allowed to attend.

But a watershed moment arrived at Folsom Prison on Nov. 12, 1961, when Rat Pack member Sammy Davis Jr. appeared at the facility east of Sacramento, invited by Governor Pat Brown. Expected to perform a song or two solo, he brought a full band, tap-danced for a crowd of 3,000 inmates, toured the prison, recorded an interview for a prison radio show and left, encouraging other entertainers to do the same.

"This is something that ought to be done," Davis Jr. reportedly told Jet magazine. "We should be ashamed of ourselves for not doing it before."

The media coverage lured other artists to consider prison performances. But progressive San Quentin - which by the early 1960s fostered bands, theater programs and was building a television studio - was the ideal venue. The Chronicle reported visits from comedians Phyllis Diller and Don Rickles. ("If I insult you," Rickles said during his stand-up set, "just consider it part of your punishment.")

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In 1962, country artist Tennessee Ernie Ford set the next standard: recording inside San Quentin's walls. The "Sixteen Tons" singer recorded a gospel album, his rich baritone paired movingly with the San Quentin Prison Choir. Like Davis Jr., he shared a deeply personal experience.

"When I was a kid I used to sing at the city jail," Ford told the Chronicle. "My dad was a postman - a good man - and he would take the family, friends and usually a minister to the jails to sing religious songs for the inmates."

Frank Sinatra showed up in 1965 with the entire Count Basie Orchestra, and Mimi Fariña in 1974 formed Bread & Roses, bringing a steady stream of performers inside the penitentiary, including her sister Joan Baez, Boz Scaggs, Eartha Kitt, Maria Muldaur and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Chronicle photos show incarcerated people wearing sunglasses and giving spontaneous ovations to Muldaur in a chapel, which looks more like a nightclub than a house of God.

Cash had already played San Quentin three times and recorded an album at Folsom when he returned to the Bay Area prison in 1969. But he brought defiant surprises for the live recording, debuting "A Boy Named Sue" and "San Quentin," a playfully insubordinate track that starts with the words "San Quentin you've been living hell to me …"

Chronicle columnist Ralph Gleason covered the concert, offering amazing detail of the scene: "Over on the side above one of the small loudspeakers," he wrote, "a fork, thrown in some mess hall demonstration, was embedded in the stucco block fifteen feet above the floor."

Gleason wrote that Cash performed for about 800 medium- and minimum-security incarcerated people, with the concert piped into the higher-security cells.

"Prison audiences are the greatest audience in the world," Cash told Gleason backstage.

I've searched multiple times over the last two decades for Chronicle photos of Cash's performance and came up empty. (Still not giving up hope; it took 40 years to find our "The Last Waltz" photos.) But a search through the Chronicle archive unearthed a trove of San Quentin concert images, including a 1986 visit by blues legend B.B. King and a 1988 performance by Santana.

Those photos by the Chronicle's Steve Ringman and Deanne Fitzmaurice showcase the sheer joy the performers are experiencing. King is all smiles when he's not singing, raising his arms as Ringman captures rifle-wielding prison guards in the background. Santana is seen mingling in the crowd, signing mug shots.

"What we're doing here is trying to accentuate the positive side of life and encourage them to live a more positive life," Santana said. "Like fingers on one hand, we can all coexist, we can all get along."

"This is a treat," audience member William Randolph Capps told the Chronicle after hearing Santana. "Punish me, if this is punishment."

More performances are documented by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Actor Lee Marvin, in the 1960s, directed a play at the penitentiary using incarcerated actors. Merle Haggard, a former San Quentin inmate, performed in 1979. The circus came multiple times, bringing acrobats and elephants inside San Quentin's walls.

Meanwhile, San Quentin has become even more renowned for its innovative programs. The penitentiary has an online newspaper San Quentin News (used to help research this article), a new film festival and an annual marathon around the prison yard. The popular podcast Ear Hustle was started by prison volunteer Nigel Poor and her since-released incarcerated student Earlonne Woods.

Live concerts continued as well. The most storied one in the 21st century was a 2003 visit by Metallica, which recorded their video for "St. Anger" inside San Quentin, then staged an hour-long concert.

"My first gig with them was at San Quentin State Penitentiary," Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo told the Chronicle years later. "It's like, ‘Welcome to Metallica! '"

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