Life Is The Question And

By The Time I Actually Recorded Bitter Tears I Carried A Heavy Load Of Sadness And Outrage; I Felt Every Word Of Those Songs... I Expected There To Be Trouble With That Album, And There Was.... When It Was Released, Many Radio Stations Wouldn't Play It.... The Very Idea Of Unconventional Or Even Original Ideas Ending Up On "country" Radio In The Late 1990s Is Absurd.

If You Have Political Convictions... Keep 'em To Yourself

Because You're Mine, I Walk The Line.

This Business I'm In Is Different. It's Special. The People Around Me Feel Like Brothers And Sisters. We Hardly Know Each Other, But We're That Close; Somehow There's Been An Immediate Bonding Between Total Strangers. We Share Each Other's Triumphs, And When One Of Us Gets Hurt, We All Bleed - It's Corny, I Know, But It's True. I've Never Experienced Anything Like This Before. It's Great. It Turns Up The Heat In Life.

The Requests Started Coming In From Other Prisoners All Over The United States. And Then The Word Got Around. So I Always Wanted To Record That, You Know, To Record A Show Because Of The Reaction I Got. It Was Far And Above Anything I Had Ever Had In My Life, The Complete Explosion Of Noise And Reaction That They Gave Me With Every Song. So Then I Came Back The Next Year And Played The Prison Again, The New Year's Day Show, Came Back Again A Third Year And Did The Show.