The read
The analysed stretch is Cash telling the story of playing Folsom Prison — and he tells it in the voice the story deserves. The register anchors exactly where the songs live: chest resonance at seventy-four percent, optimal, over an optimal average pitch whose median dips toward 99 hertz. The gait is boxcar-slow: one hundred and sixteen words a minute, stops averaging three-quarters of a second, one running past two — pause length optimal, nothing hurried, nothing wasted. The gravel shows up as a clarity reading below the band, though a 1997 radio encode takes some of that blame. The Man in Black talks the way the songs walk: low, steady, and in no hurry at all.