When Melissa Etheridge was 9 years old, Johnny Cash came to her hometown and performed at the local prison. During his concert at the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas, Cash performed favorites like “A Boy Named Sue,” “The Prison Song,” and “Peace in the Valley” for a crowd of 1,200 inmates, quipping, “This is the same show we did for President Nixon, but we’re going to try a little harder here.” “They got to see him, but we didn’t,” Etheridge tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, laughing.
“I thought, hey, maybe performing at prisons is a great entertainment gig.” It wouldn’t be long before Etheridge would follow in Cash’s bootsteps. When she was 12, Etheridge began performing in the “Bob Hammill Variety Show,” which marked the first time she performed in a prison.
Decades later, just last year, Etheridge played what she calls one of the most important concerts of her career, a show for the female inmates at the Topeka Correctional Facility, less than an hour from where she grew up. That performance and Etheridge’s months-long correspondence and meetings with the inmates she played for are the subject of the moving new docuseries Melissa Etheridge: I’m Not Broken , which premieres July 9 on Paramount+. The “I’m the Only One” singer first started talking about staging a concert at a prison in the ’90s, originally planned as a double-bill with her friend, Tammy Wynette .
The project sat on the backburner for years, and Wyn.
