The story she speaks of comes from the Hebrew bible, specifically the book of Genesis.

Joseph’s father Jacob favored him and gave Joseph the coat as a gift; as a result, he was envied by his brothers, who saw the special coat as an indication that Joseph would assume family leadership. His brothers' suspicion grew when Joseph told them of his two dreams (Genesis 37:11) in which all the brothers bowed down to him. The narrative tells that his brothers plotted against him when he was 17, and would have killed him had not the eldest brother Reuben interposed. He persuaded them instead to throw Joseph into a pit and secretly planned to rescue him later. However, while Reuben was absent, the others planned to sell him to a company of Ishmaelite merchants. When the passing Midianites arrived, the brothers dragged Joseph up and sold him to the merchants for 20 pieces of silver. The brothers then dipped Joseph’s coat in goat blood and showed it to their father, saying that Joseph had been torn apart by wild beasts.

Folsom prison is the second oldest prison in the state of California, located just 20 miles northeast of Sacramento.

Cash would go on to record his 27th overall album At Folsom Prison at this location in 1968.

Incorporating elements of the folk train song- Cash depicts the conditions of a luxurious dining car, a place he would prefer to be over prison.
Dining cars are railroad passenger cars that serve meals in the manner of a full-service sit down restaurant. They rose to popularity during the mid 1880’s.

Iconic lines like these helped solidify Cash’s outlaw image once his career took off in the late ‘50s, however let it be known that Cash did not serve a prison sentence in his life, only minor one-night-in-jail infractions.
“I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”, the most iconic line, is almost a straight lift from a traditional murder ballad, “Duncan and Brady”, recorded by Leadbelly in 1947.

The inspiration behind this song came from Johnny’s viewing of Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison, a 1951 drama film. Cash saw the film while serving the US Air Force in West Germany.

Although many believe “Ring of Fire” to be about falling in love, Johnny Cash’s first wife, Vivian Liberto, offers a different perspective. In her book I Walked The Line she contends that June (Cash’s second wife) didn’t co-write the song as credited. Vivian writes:

To this day, it confounds me to hear the elaborate details June told of writing that song for Johnny. She didn’t write that song any more than I did. The truth is, Johnny wrote that song, while pilled up and drunk, about a certain private female body part. All those years of her claiming she wrote it herself, and she probably never knew what the song was really about.

Although the bombshell she’s referring to here is the revelation that she’s been lying, one may have also noted that Miranda Lambert is a bombshell herself.

In an interview with AOL, Hillary Scott explained: “We wanted to do something fun and light-hearted and not take ourselves too seriously. Something flirty that Charles and I would have a blast performing on stage. We thought, ‘Let’s talk about something that is a reality for so many people’ — and that is going out on the town. And whether or not you go out with the intention of meeting people, a lot of times you do. In this case, in the song you were just looking for someone.”

From a 2008 interview listed on the band website, Charles Kelley with regards to this song stated: “I really felt like we found our sound on this song, and I was really proud that it became our first single since it was one of the first songs that the three of us wrote together.”

Lambert wrote this song with Natalie Hemby. It is about a woman confronting her man for cheating, who calls him a “white liar” for deceiving her, then admits in the song’s bridge that she has been telling white lies to him as well. Lambert said in publicity materials: “I just had been listening to tons of Buddy and Julie Miller and the Steeldrivers, that rockin' bluegrass music. Cheatin' in a small town basically is what it’s about.”