A man in Reno

Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” was one of his signature songs and one of its lines has long fostered comment in this community (“I shot a man in Reno,” RN&R, July 3, 2008).

The Toronto Sun reports it has now been put to political use. In the Sept. 13 debate among Republican presidential candidates, the tea party-heavy audience was aggressive in its comments. When moderator Wolf Blitzer asked whether an uninsured citizen with a preventable malady should be left to die, an audience member called out, “Let him die,” a comment that generated considerable online comment—including an anonymous rewriting of Cash’s song that showed up on YouTube: “I uninsured a man in Reno/Just to watch him die.”

The new lyric got almost a thousand hits on Google last week. This week it is over 3,000.