I've been wanting to find a way to make my longer, more thought-out posts become more frequent for a few months now. And for the past week or so, the addition of the
Mini-review series has cluttered up my blog quite a bit. (It's not that they're taking up time I'd be spending posting other stuff; it's just that they're quite frequent and they started at a time when I was having to direct my creative energies toward preparing sermons.) Also, I have a list of ideas that need require than a few paragraphs to flesh out.
All this has led me to a decision that I want to try to write a "column" every week, a longer topical piece that will come out on Mondays sometime during the workday. For all I know, this idea will fizzle quickly; most of my predictions for what this blog will become have been inaccurate. This is something I really want to do, though, and I do have a number of topics on deck, so it should last for a month or two at least. Without further ado, here is my first Monday Column.
Cash On the Barrelhead
About a month ago, my dad made a special request: he asked for a blog post explaining why I like Johnny Cash. I think he is somewhat baffled by it. Not surprising, since I sure didn't get it from him. Nothing even remotely like Johnny Cash ever made it to the stereo in my house as I was growing up. Oh, no. My father instilled in me a hatred of two great evils: cats, and country music. Come to think of it, this has served me well for the most part.
But that's not really the point, because in spite of the fact that Johnny Cash CDs can be found in the country section of any record store, his music does not sound like country to me. I realize that this indicates I am completely ignorant about country music, but I think we can all agree that what you hear on country stations today—Shania Twain and Toby Keith and all the related nonsense—is from a completely different genre of music than Johnny Cash.
My first exposure to Cash was not any more pleasant than listening to country radio, however. I was working in the music department of the Borders store in Henderson, NV, where my friend Arnold was the music manager. Arnold is a huge Cash fan, and
American III: Solitary Man had just been released. For those unfamiliar with the
American recordings, they are mostly covers of timeless songs, from Leonard Cohen to Tom Petty to Appalachian folk songs to the Beatles. ("American" refers to the record label, not necessarily the national origin of the songs.) One morning, I walked into the music department just as Arnold was cueing up a song that I found to be the most offensive cover tune I had ever heard. It was Johnny Cash singing U2's "One," from the epic 1991 release
Achtung Baby.
Now you have to understand something.
Achtung made my list of the
top 10 CDs of the '90s, and "One" warranted special mention as one of "the most haunting, gorgeous songs recorded during my lifetime." Someday I'll write a list of songs that no one should ever bother singing, songs that are just Done, definitively. U2's "One" will be on this list, along with Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime" and Dusty Springfield's version of "The Look of Love." (Diana Krall, I'm looking in your direction.) So to hear anyone covering this song would have disturbed me, but Johnny Cash's version is so dramatically, even violently different that it actually made me angry. You truly have to listen to it to it to understand what I mean. I once played it for a friend while he was driving, and his reaction almost sent us flying off I-90.
The rest of the album did nothing to atone for this grave sin in my mind. My initial thoughts went something like this: His version of "I Won't Back Down" seemed unmelodic and just weird with Tom Petty singing a
harmony part. Neil Diamond's "Solitary Man," the original version of which I have still never heard and don't care to, sounded weird and lyrically pathetic. The
coup de grace was the Egbert Williams-penned "Nobody," a nearly spoken-word whine job that was a poor excuse for a song—even a sad song. It is safe to say that when it came to Johnny Cash and me, it was not love at first sight. That did not stop Arnold from playing it four or five times every shift.
And soon I found I could not get these songs out of my mind. Granted, that's not always a good thing; I sometimes can't get the theme from "Elmo's World" out of my head. But in this case, I found myself slowly beginning to warm to these songs—especially the Neil Diamond title track, to my great dismay. (Maybe my dad will do us all the great service of leaving a comment that includes the story of the time he met "Mr." Diamond.) Something about Cash's honest, unpretentious vocal interpretation appealed to me. That voice had an arresting presence; it stopped me in my tracks just as Bono's or Ella Fitzgerald's had the first time I heard them, albeit with a dramatically different type of sound. I couldn't resist listening to it.
I wanted to hear more, but I didn't know where to begin. I knew he'd been recording since the '50s, so it was a rather intimidating catalogue to try to wade through unguided. Fortunately, my friend Arnold is, as I've said, a huge Cash fan. I asked him to tell me which albums someone should listen to first in order to understand Johnny Cash better. He told me to start with the prison recordings, 1968's
At Folsom Prison (which became the setting for much of last year's fantastic Cash biopic,
Walk the Line, my thoughts on which are
here) and 1969's
At San Quentin.
Johnny Cash had huge hits with these recordings, but since that happened before I was born, it is difficult for me to comment about their place in American popular music. But I can say that the prison recordings represent what I love most about Johnny Cash; these concerts are little allegories of his own faith and life. He had lived hard, and although he never went to prison (only jail overnight a few times), it is not hard to imagine he might have ended up there if left completely to his own devices. He had great empathy for these prisoners, and what's more, he had a deep, abiding Christian faith that inspired him to reach out to them. Inevitably his critics will point out the crassness of a line like "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die," and it's unfortunate that these same people will never listen to the entire Folsom recording to hear him finish the set with "Greystone Chapel" (lyrics
here).
There is a great scene in
Walk the Line, one that is probably fictionalized but rings true to my understanding of Johnny Cash. Cash is arguing with a record producer, trying to convince him to record a concert at Folsom Prison. The producer argues, "John, the people who listen to your music are good Christian people. They don't want to hear this! They don't want to hear you sympathizing with a bunch of convicted felons." Cash's reply: "Then they're not real Christians." In light of
Matthew 25:31-46, I think his perspective is fairly accurate, no matter how wildly he may have been living at the time.
This is a huge part of what Cash has given to me. His faith was honest and very much imperfect, but he was still one of the faithful. I grew up in a tradition where it is very difficult for people to accept as real the faith statement of a person who shows any outward sign of sin. If the perceived sin involves substance abuse of any type, people are even quicker to draw a heavy black line across the offender's name in their mental list of the saved. It took me several years to stop assuming that if I saw someone smoking a cigarette, they were not a Christian. Seriously! This sounds patently absurd to me now (thankfully—because it is), but that was one effect the Holiness tradition had on me. I promise to delve into this in more detail, probably in a future Monday Column. For now, I will leave the subject except to say that Johnny Cash epitomized the idea that we don't have to have everything All Figured Out in order to be on the journey of faith, following Jesus. In fact, he turned his own raucous life to the advantage of the kingdom of God, using his credibility to gain an audience with hardened criminals so he could sing them gospel songs.
You can say, "Okay, but I think his voice is really terrible." Fair enough. Some people like Neil Young; some people like David Crosby. Some people like Billie Holiday; some people like Ella Fitzgerald. Some people like speed metal; some people like 1950s Broadway standards. As they say, there's no accounting for taste. At least no one can say Cash's voice sounds like everything else. And if you're one of those people who just can't get past the dark, droning timbre of Cash's voice, perhaps you might want to try a little harder. Remember, it took many spins of
American III before it started to grow on me. You might find that like many other great pleasures in life, Johnny Cash is hard to enjoy at first. If it's sweet you want, there's plenty of sugary music to be found on today's pop charts. But none of it matters.
Johnny Cash's music does.
