Singer-songwriter Glen Sherley was born in Oklahoma on March 9, 1936. Between his birth and his self-inflicted death in Gonzales, California on May 11, 1978 at the age of 42, Sherley’s life had several highs and lows. He is most known for his brief brush with fame when Johnny Cash performed one of Sherley’s songs during his famous 1968 concert at Folsom Prison.
When Cash performed the song, Sherley sat in the audience. He was serving time for armed robbery.
Greystone Chapel
Sherley wrote songs while in prison. He and his wife had had a son, Bruce, and a daughter Ronda. And his extended family often visited him, giving him tapes to record his songs. One of those tapes made it to Johnny Cash.
Prior to Johnny Cash’s 1968 performance at Folsom Prison, Floyd Gressett, a Folsom preacher and friend of Cash’s, gave Cash a copy of Sherley’s song “Greystone Chapel.” Cash liked the song about the chapel at Folsom, and he decided to perform it at the show. On January 11. with Sherley in the front row, Cash surprised the inmate by introducing him and singing his song. Cash later recognized it was a “terrible thing” to single out Sherley in such a setting, but the other inmates cheered.
The recording of the show was released as the album At Folsom Prison (1968) was a crossover hit for Cash, resurrecting his career. And as singer-songwriter Marty Stuart explained, the Sherley’s song “was kind of the heart of that record.”
Cash was not Sherleys’ only encounter with fame while in prison. After being transferred to Vacaville Prison in California, Sherley befriended country singer and former television personality Spade Cooley, who was serving life in prison for the murder of his wife. Sherley and Cooley even wrote a song together in 1969 called “Big Steel Prison Gate.”
And in 1971, another one of Sherley’s songs was recorded by a country star. Eddy Arnold recorded Sherley’s “Portrait Of My Woman.”
And then Sherley was given the chance to record his own album live while still in prison in 1971. The record company originally released the album as entitled Glen Sherley, and later it was re-released as Glen Sherley Live at Vacaville California (Bear Records).
Also in 1971, an episode of This Is Your Life was devoted to Johnny Cash. The show featured a video of Sherley in prison thanking Cash. You can see Cash’s jaw drop when the announcer introduces Sherley. And then Cash tears up at the warm tribute (starting around the 6-minute mark in the video below).
Release from Prison
Sherley was paroled from prison later in 1971. Johnny Cash welcomed him to freedom at the gates of the prison. Cash began a mentorship trying to help Sherley on the outside with his career and life.
The former country star who had befriended Sherley in prison, Spade Cooley, however, was not around to provide additional support. Although Cooley had been granted parole effective a year earlier, he died of a heart attack in late 1969 while giving a concert on furlough before he could be released.
Sherley remarried in 1972. Cash took Sherley on tour. Sherley’s children Bruce, 14, and Ronda, 11, for the first time saw their dad perform, not in a club, but at the Los Angeles Forum with an audience of 17,000 people.
Later that year, Ronda moved from California to Nashville to live with her dad. But she saw him struggling with the change from prison to the musician’s life. She later explained that although he knew how to be in prison, “he didn’t know how to be the person people wanted him to be out here.”
A Flower Out of Place
In 1974, Sherley, apparently with support from Johnny Cash, hosted a TV special recorded at Tennessee State Prison called A Flower Out of Place. Sherley performed some songs, alone and with Johnny Cash, while introducing other acts like comedian Foster Brooks, Linda Ronstadt, and Roy Clark.
In watching the special, one may wonder whether Sherley was nervous or maybe back on drugs. Though his song performances are still very good, the title of the special captured an aspect of Sherley’s life outside the joint.
Out of prison, Sherley could not escape whatever demons haunted him from his past. Sherley, whose migrant farmer family moved from Oklahoma to California when he was young, was apparently in trouble often since a young age, often while drunk. In the 1950s, he committed crimes with little planning, such as robbing a man of a cash roll of one-dollar bills or holding up an ice cream company for $28 with a toy gun. By the time Cash met Sherley at Folsom, his armed robbery career had sent him to serve time in several penal institutions.
And once out of prison, Sherley again had behavior issues, carrying a gun and finding solace in drugs and alcohol. Eventually, reportedly he threatened to kill Johnny Cash’s bass player and road manager Marshall Grant (“I love you but what I’d really like to do to you, I’d like to get a butcher knife and start cutting you all to hell”).
So, reluctantly, Johnny Cash, who had turned his own life around to become sober, dismissed Sherley from his performing group. The setback for Sherley preceded other problems such as more drugs, alcohol, and Pall Malls, eventually becoming estranged from his wife and kids.
Sherley’s Downward Spiral
And despite great talent and a taste of fame, Glen Sherley ended up losing his star. He worked other non-music jobs, including feeding cattle at a cattle farm. Like many who struggle after life in prison, his use of drugs and alcohol contributed to the downward spiral.
According to Wikipedia, in May 1978, while high on drugs, Sherley shot another man in California. But it is hard to find any details about that shooting anywhere else, so I am not sure if that is true.
But we do know that on May 11, 1978, Sherley, who did not want to go back to prison, stood on his brother’s porch and committed suicide by shooting himself with a gun to his head.
Johnny Cash paid for Sherley’s funeral. Sherley was buried outside Bakersfield, California, a place made famous by another singer-songwriter who had attended a Johnny Cash concert while in San Quentin prison, Merle Haggard.
Sherley’s Legacy
Knowing Sherley’s story, it is hard to separate the man’s life (as well as his incarceration at the time) from the music while listening to Glen Sherley Live at Vacaville California (or the re-released version with bonus tracks Glen Sherley: Released Again). The narration and lyrics to the live performances often remind the listener of the singer’s situation.
But it is also hard to ignore that Glen Sherley was a great talent who showed much potential. With a booming voice, he sounds great, and his songs at their best show flashes of Cash, Haggard, Paycheck, and Jones. For example, his version of “Portrait of My Woman” illustrates a tenderness that outshines Eddy Arnold’s cover.
In his live performances, perhaps he understandably at times tries a little too much to copy Johnny Cash’s swagger. And maybe that swagger, trying to copy Cash’s bravado without understanding how Cash eventually embraced his vulnerability too, helped keep Sherley playing the tough guy in his life even when he needed help.
And of course, in the 1970s, there was not the type of understanding or mental health support that someone getting out of prison would need. Despite all Johnny Cash tried to do for Sherley, he could not have understood that Sherley needed much more than a guitar and an audience to adjust to life and freedom.
Sherley largely remains a footnote to the Johnny Cash story, unfortunately. Even his hosting and performing in the A Flower Out of Place TV special was later edited to completely exclude Sherley in a DVD release as well as scrubbed from a Johnny Cash album called A Concert: Behind Prison Walls (2003) (even while it includes the drunk comedy routine of Foster Brooks).
There exists more music that Sherley wrote and recorded as demos while in prison. His family has talked of releasing some of it, although so far the only additional music are three extra bonus tracks added to the Bear Records release of Glen Sherley Live at Vacaville California. And below, his daughter plays one of the tapes. She introduces the unreleased song “My Last Day,” a song about a man on death row. If there are more songs like these recent releases, I hope some day we get to hear more of Sherley’s music stored on cassette tapes in a box.
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