I hear the train a-comin"

On this day in 1968 Johnny Cash performed two concerts at Folsom Prison in California, one at 9:40 AM, the other at 12:40 PM. The album recorded from the two sets was released in May of that year and helped resuscitate the singer's flagging career. He was 35.

Cash wrote "Folsom Prison Blues" in 1955. It's about a man stuck in Folsom Prison for not listening to his mother. (She'd urged him not to play with guns, but he subsequently shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.) Johnny Cash appears three times in A Book of Ages. The most poignant anecdote is about the time he met June Carter. It was love at first sight, but as so often happens in country music, Miss Cash was already married.

Tea Party

On August 16, 1773, Paul Revere dressed up like an Indian and took part in the violent takeover and looting of a commercial merchant vessel sitting in Boston harbor. He was 38, a successful silversmith, engraver and part-time dentist, a businessman with a family to support and plenty to lose if he were caught and tried for this kind of hooliganism. But he did it anyway. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Paul Revere appears four times in A Book of Ages.