When Melissa Etheridge was 9 years old, Johnny Cash came to her hometown and performed at the local prison. During his concert at the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas, Cash performed favorites like “A Boy Named Sue,” “The Prison Song,” and “Peace in the Valley” for a crowd of 1,200 inmates, quipping, “This is the same show we did for President Nixon, but we’re going to try a little harder here.”
“They got to see him, but we didn’t,” Etheridge tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, laughing. “I thought, hey, maybe performing at prisons is a great entertainment gig.”
It wouldn’t be long before Etheridge would follow in Cash’s bootsteps.
