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a comin'
Artwork created by Cumbersome Multiples output as 8ft tall posters to hang in prison spaces during concerts and included in the pages of playbill for the adults in custody.
dark as a dungeon
Artwork created by Cumbersome Multiples output as 8ft tall posters to hang in prison spaces during concerts and included in the pages of playbill for the adults in custody.
south fork forest camp
Photographer Steve Steckly joined Luther’s Boots for a show deep in the Tillamook Forest at South Fork Forest Camp. Adults in custody do important forest restoration work in the winters, and fight wild fires in the summer.
Playbills made by Cumbersome Multiples with letterpress covers and an essay about the history of Johnny Cash’s “At Folsom Prison” album helps contextualize the concert for adults in custody. During 2018, Cumbersome Multiples produced 2500 of these books to give away during the shows.
photo: Steve Steckly
connect and conversation
Playbills are left with each audience member. The band takes time at the end of the show to talk to adults in custody, sign playbills, and to share stories. The best part of the show is meeting adults in custody.
photo: Steve Steckly
folsom50
ONLY THE FIRST ACT
Danny Wilson and Tracy Schlapp created FOLSOM50 with their band Luther's Boots to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of Johnny Cash’s prison concerts. Rather than replicating the shows, Luther’s Boots reinterpreted Cash’s music and styling by drawing from Cash’s ability to transmit the emotional complexity of hillbilly music. The FOLSOM50 performance resonated with Cash’s belief in reinvention, his own redemption — a biographical thread that ran through all of Cash’s catalog. The songs from the “At Folsom Prison” recording were styled by the band with an ear to contemporary audiences. During 2018, Luther’s Boots performed a series of concerts statewide in Oregon prisons.
FOLSOM50 took root and has since morphed into a full bill of programs for folks incarcerated in Oregon and across the country. Danny Wilson and Tracy Schlapp formed the nonprofit Bridgeworks Oregon to incubate the work. Cumbersome Multiples continues to print and design all of the ephemera for Bridgeworks.