JOHNNY CASH
Cash’s persuasive power helps explain his status as only the second country-and-western artist (Hank Williams was the first) ever to cross over to the pop charts. It also explains why he’s one of my favorite singers even though I don’t usually listen to much country music–and why I can even listen to him sing about Jesus without feeling annoyed. Like Thoreau, Robert Johnson, and Muddy Waters, Cash is one of those you can turn to when you need to be reminded that there just might, after all, be something about American traditions that’s worth a shit, and that the USA might be more than just a bunch of traveling salespeople, armchair generals, and closet Klansmen.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In preindustrial societies the poet’s job was to explore life, pass on pieces of history and moral lessons, and ask tough critical questions. Cash comes closer to fulfilling this role in 20th-century America than anyone else I can think of who’s achieved his level of popularity. At their best, he and his guitar play a role analogous to that of Homer and Sappho with their tortoise-shell lyres or the Gambian griot with his 21-string kora. That tunes like “Cry, Cry, Cry” are virtual rewrites of Elizabethan ballads serves to remind us that the roots of poetic tradition do lie, after all, in song. And quasi-historical pieces like “Rock Island Line” or “Five Feet High and Rising” transmit important bits of the American experience to segments of Cash’s audience that will never encounter such events firsthand. While Cash’s recordings may be pegged in some quarters as folk art–and hence “unsophisticated”–they’re actually the work of an artist of great craft and subtlety who’s motivated by purposes much higher than those of your average pop or country singer.
After decades in Nashville, Cash had grown pretty much disgusted with a country-music machine primarily committed to cranking out cookie-cutter releases by the likes of Garth Brooks and Vince Gill. Then last year Cash was approached by Rick Rubin, whose American Recordings (formerly Def American) label was known for its controversy-heavy roster (the Red Hot Chili Peppers, hard-rock satanists Slayer, pumped-up metalhead Glenn Danzig, and stand-up monologuist Andrew Dice Clay) and who felt that if produced and promoted correctly Johnny Cash could hit with the “alternative” rock audience. Cash later said of Rubin, “I liked the way he talked about how he’d like to sit me in front of a microphone with my guitar and let me sing what I wanted to sing–much like at Sun Records.”
First time I shot her
In his talking blues “Drive On,” Cash gives us a Vietnam veteran plodding doggedly through the paces of everyday life, still haunted by the memory of his buddy’s death in the jungle. Here Cash is concerned not so much with condemning the wrongs of U.S. policy–something relatively easy to do at this late date–as with exploring the confused feelings of a vet who still isn’t sure what he was even doing overseas. We’re asked to set aside our political opinions and contemplate what life is like for someone who’s strayed so close to death and been scarred by the experience.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Andy Earl.
