In the 2005 biopic “Walk the Line,” a record executive upbraids Johnny Cash for insisting on doing live shows in prisons: “Your fans are church folk, Johnny. Christians. They don’t wanna hear you singing to a bunch of murderers and rapists, trying to cheer ’em up.” The Man in Black pauses, breathes out cigarette smoke and responds simply: “Well, they’re not Christians then.”
Throughout his career, Cash recorded no less than four live albums behind the walls of correctional facilities, including the famous “At Folsom Prison” in 1968. The singer clearly took seriously the command of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew: “I was in prison and you visited me” (Mt 25:36). And he didn’t visit criminals as one unacquainted with the awful things they had done and faced—or as one unwilling to make music about it. “I wouldn’t let anybody influence me into thinking I was doing the wrong thing by singing about death, hell and drugs,” he said in his last interview. “Cause I’ve always done that. And I always will.”
Jelly Roll, born Jason Bradley DeFord—a rapper, singer and songwriter who spent 10 years in and out of prison—seems to be following in Cash’s footsteps. In a recently released music video for “Hands Up,” the Tennessee native ventures inside the walls of San Quentin in California to lift up the incarcerated with both his music and the hope of the Gospel.
Although this is where Cash recorded one of his prison albums, what was once San Quentin State Prison is now, thanks to the California Model, the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center. “The last four years at San Quentin have been amazing,” George Williams, S.J., the Catholic chaplain at the prison, told me in an interview. “It is far from the ‘notorious’ San Quentin of the past. While still prison, there is palpable hope here.”
Father Williams noted that this wasn’t Jelly Roll’s first visit to San Quentin; the star had been there a few other times, “performing in the prison yard and touring and meeting with the prisoners here.” And to Father Williams’s mind, it made perfect sense that Jelly Roll would choose to do a Cash-type concert there. “Both the incarcerated men—we try not to call them inmates anymore—and the staff were delighted to see him,” he remembered. “He’s literally a rock star for them.”
The video begins, though, with a prayer: “Dear heavenly Father God, thank you for this day Lord,” Jelly Roll prays from the center of a circle of incarcerated men. “Forgive us of our sins and help us to forgive those who have sinned against us.” Freedom, he goes on, is his focus—“the freedom that we find with you, especially in these walls right here, where freedom doesn’t feel very free.”
Like Cash, Jelly Roll had a rough, working-class childhood, and his main struggles after coming of age were with drugs and alcohol. But not only was he personally addicted; he also sold drugs, landing in prison for both possession and aggravated robbery.
Again like Cash, the singer had a religious awakening later in life—and he hasn’t been shy about sharing his faith. He went viral earlier this year for an emotional moment on Netflix’s “Star Search” after another singer’s live performance of “Hard Fought Hallelujah”: “What I just seen,” a choked-up Jelly Roll explained, “was a room full of people that might not have ever felt it before, but that is called the Holy Spirit of God. And let me tell you something about the Holy Spirit of God. He don’t care anything about your past. He doesn’t care what you’ve been through. He doesn’t care about your drug addiction…. Jesus is for everybody. He doesn’t hate anybody. He loves everybody.”
Later, when receiving the award for best contemporary country album at the Grammys, he prayed, “Jesus, I hear you, and I am listening, Lord.” Reflecting on his “broken” past, he added, “I believed that music had the power to change my life, and God had the power to change my life.”
In “Hands Up,” Jelly Roll looks to bring that same dual transformation to the prisoners at San Quentin. The music itself is unapologetically upbeat and breezy, hinging on a chorus of “Everybody put your hands up.” But the lyrics detail a profound movement of descent and then resurrection. In the first verse, his “hands up” is a remembrance of a Rage Against the Machine concert in 1999; in the second, of the robbery that landed him in jail (“Cops told me what I told them”); and the third, of a transformation in Christ: “Our last stop’s that little cross I came across some years ago…. I never did believe in ghosts ’til the Holy one told me to throw my hands up.”
And the hands of the men at San Quentin fly up with his. “I think what makes the chemistry work so well between Jelly Roll and the incarcerated,” Father Williams reflected, “is that he was once where they are now. I only had a chance to chat with him briefly, but I was deeply impressed at how genuine he is. He clearly has great compassion for people in prison, a compassion based on his own suffering. His Christian faith is evident. Like Johnny Cash, whom he clearly admires, Jelly Roll gets what Jesus is talking about in Matthew 25.”
Indeed, in the course of the video, Jelly Roll encounters his younger self at San Quentin, bringing to him, too, this message of being raised up again in God—a God, as he proclaims in the video’s opening prayer, “of second chances.” The hands baptizing the actor playing the young Jelly Roll are those of Father Williams, who noted that this was, in fact, a valid baptism: “He had never been baptized,” he remembered, “and asked me before if this one would count. I said ‘Sure!’”
“Hands Up” taps into two rival visions of freedom—what St. Augustine called the City of Man and the City of God. In the first, freedom is “love of self, even to the contempt of God,” to quote Augustine; it is freedom as license, indulgence and using people as means to one’s own ends. In the second, freedom is “love of God, even to the contempt of self;” it is freedom as self-gift, surrender and the love of others—which means willing their good—as ends in themselves.
Jelly Roll is clearly a man who has experienced the darkness of ersatz freedom and its snares of death and hell—and who thus knows, in a unique way, the light of true freedom and its gifts of peace and joy, pointing the way to eternal life. In “Hands Up,” he sings:
If you ain’t perfect but you try
Put ‘em way up to the sky
Touchin’ heaven kinda high
Ain’t that where we wanna go when we die
And prisons—whether figurative or literal—are spiritually charged atmospheres for such reorientations of the soul by grace. “I’ve been doing this work for over 30 years,” Father Williams said, “and I never tire of it because I constantly see the spiritual transformations at work in the prison. Prison ministry has been the clearest spring of my own spiritual life as a Jesuit from the time I began volunteering as a novice.”
People cynically dismiss expressions of faith behind bars as manipulative, he added, but they’re wrong: “Sure, sometimes people are not sincere. How many people going to your local parish are free from selfish motivations? But as Christians, we serve a God who was arrested, tortured, put on trial, convicted and executed. You can’t get much closer to Christ himself than in a jail or prison.”
In one scene, Jelly Roll stops to pray at the dedicated Catholic chapel in San Quentin. It’s a fitting moment—not only because of the depths of faith expressed in the song but also because of the fullness of freedom opened up on the altar. In a 2022 article—one featuring a shot of that same altar decorated for Christmas—Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, the archbishop of San Francisco, reflected on his twice-a-year visits to San Quentin to celebrate Mass, his participation in “an essential activity of the Church”: “My visits to San Quentin have been a gift to me,” he wrote, “enriching my faith and prayer life.” (As my father, reflecting on his own prison ministry visits after watching “Hands Up,” put it, “Going into the prisons, you always walk away getting more than you gave!”)
He’s always struck, the archbishop added, by “how the inmates worship our Lord so well”:
It always inspires me to see how they pour their whole heart and soul into their worship, given their difficult situation in life. Perhaps a bit ironically from the human point of view, they even seem to feel a certain kind of freedom in a most intense way at our celebrations of the Holy Eucharist.
The same Christ who “lovingly and intentionally identifies himself with those held in prison,” he added, “identifies himself with them in the Eucharist.” For Catholics, Communion is a flesh-and-blood encounter with the God who never stops going into the depths, offering himself for our salvation, our freedom and ultimately our joy—and inviting us to do the same for others.
At the close of the video, in rugged Man in Black fashion, Jelly Roll riffs, “If nothing else, this afternoon, we were all [expletive] free together, Baby.” The crowd of incarcerated men, thoroughly cheered by his performance, goes wild. And while some professed Christians will object now as they did in Cash’s day, that particular work of mercy—which, like all works of mercy, is fulfilled and fortified in Christ and his altar—sings for itself.
Politics
Faith
Culture
Vatican
Scripture
Podcasts