From:
http://steelbrassnwood.livejournal.com/75673.html
" In his book, Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison: The Making of a Masterpiece, Michael Streissguth mentions that Cash's famous song "Folsom Prison Blues" was largely plagiarized from an earlier song by a man named Gordon Jenkins, who won a considerable settlement from Cash in 1969 after the Live at Folsom Prison album was released.
I went in search of the original, which turns out to be very hard to find. It was part of a very strange concept album that Jenkins -- an arranger and bandleader who worked with Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong and others -- recorded in the early 50s. The original is an "album" in the true sense of the word, a four-disc collection of seven-inch 45s called Seven Dreams. It's a schmaltzy and portentous set, narrated by Spike Lee's father, the bass player Bill Lee, in which the "dreamer" has a sequence of seven dreams, in which he finds himself on a boat, on a train, with a beautiful girl in a meadow, and so on. The narration is embarrassing, the tunes are mostly awful, and it's quite clear why no one has ever bothered to release this on CD -- it's a heavy-handed concept album that makes the worst rock opera sound like Mozart.
The song in question is part of "The Second Dream: The Conductor," in which the dreamer finds himself the conductor on a train. There are three songs in this segment, interwoven with narration, and in the last one, the train comes to a stop and he steps out onto the back of the caboose to smoke a cigarette. From a shack beside the tracks, he hears a song."
I have the Seven Dreams LP. The similarities are shocking.