The rumbling voice of American dreams, fears and contradictions, Johnny Cash’s music will forever stand as one of the crowning canons in cultural achievement, music that is less a series of songs or albums than a collection of musings on the human condition, from the dark to the light, the carnal to the supernatural.
With a sage presence and rich musical talents, Cash’s work and influence has spanned the last half-century of American music with a resonance and importance that few have matched in this time or any other. From his beginnings as a Sun Records rockabilly, through his Nashville heyday and up to the present, Cash laid a foundation and provided a touchstone (even if it was just in symbolic terms) for nearly every form of white popular music that has emerged since his arrival. In recent days, Ice-T, Chuck D and others have also attested to his connections to the world of hip-hop. He’s one of the few musicians that everybody seems to respect.
More than a musician, though, Cash was something of a dark national conscience, reminding us of how far we had come and how far we yet had to go. He “wore the black” for the downtrodden and the oppressed, and he wished to speak for those whose voices were muted. God, the devil, love and desperation intermingled within the reeds of his distinctive voice, allowing the listener to join “The Man In Black” on his journey through the darkness, searching for redemption while clinging to earthly pleasures and securities.
Drawing equally from country, blues and gospel (both black and white) for his inspiration, Cash wrote a series of songs rich in both uniquely American and more universal imagery. He sang gently of love and happiness, brooded on death and suffering, raged against injustice, and praised God with fervor and eloquence.
His murder ballads — like “Cocaine Blues,” “Give My Love To Rose” and “Folsom Prison Blues” — are masterful character studies, in which Cash forces listeners to reckon with the frank brutality of violence and violent people while also forcing an engagement with the fractured humanity of the desperate individual.
It is this relationship — one that allows for violence and trouble to be discussed graphically while never celebrating it — that has created such an obvious and real bond between Cash and many gangster rappers. Cash, like the gangsters, understands and confronts the blues identity of his songs’ subjects.
He stood up for the poor, the prisoner, and the Native American, and came to the defense of young anti-war activists when many of his contemporaries (and audience) were condemning them. Cash’s young fans rewarded him by keeping him relevant.
A man who is both of his time and utterly timeless, Cash fully understood the importance of maintaining connections with the past, though he never lost focus on the present.
When he married June Carter Cash, who died last May, he joined the founding legacy of country music, and together they helped gather a clan arguably as talented and brilliant as that which he was so proud to join. At the same time as he reveled in the past, he also never failed to support younger songwriters whose lives he and his music had touched.
His friendship with Bob Dylan is a particularly poignant example, especially since Cash’s embrace of Dylan became so important to the careers of both. Cash also nurtured — almost literally — Rodney Crowell and Nick Lowe, two talented songwriters who married into the Cash family. His family and his music seemed inexorable, one incapable of existing without the other.
June Carter, who pulled Johnny from a debilitating drug addiction in the mid-1960s, was a partner, muse and life force for Cash. It is not hard to think that the loss of his wife was a final blow to Cash’s strong resolve.
Rather than fading away in the past decade, Johnny Cash has instead made some of the best music of his career. The four albums he made with producer Rick Rubin (dubbed the “American recordings,” after the label that produced them) have once again centered Cash at the forefront of musical experimentation and content. Mixing songs old and current, all four albums are essential chapters in his life’s work.
From his most recent effort, he garnered much acclaim for his version of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” and its incredible music video, which was unfairly shut out of major awards at the recent MTV awards. In it, as in the best of his work, Cash faces head-on the jagged realities of life and death, unflinchingly and unrepentantly.
A boxed set of previously unreleased material from these sessions is planned for a December release. On the box is said to be a version of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” performed by Cash, The Clash’s Joe Strummer and Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello.
The American soul is a complicated thing, and it is very rarely encapsulated in a single artist in the way that it was in Johnny Cash. Although no one figure can truly represent a culture as multi-faceted as that of the U.S., he comes as close as anyone. More than being a national figure, he was a documenter of all humanity: our troubles and our hopes, our desires and our burdens. The first were last and the last were first; the voiceless were almost privileged. Cash used to say that he would wear the black until things got better for all humanity. He never changed his colors.
With Johnny Cash dies one of the truly giant figures in American life, an icon likely never to be duplicated. Luckily, his music will forever be with us, challenging us to seek a better way, promising that even in our darkest hour, “The Man In Black” will be by our side, ready to fight with us through our personal, collective and societal struggles.
Goodbye to an American voice.
FURTHER LISTENING
“Live At Folsom Prison” (1968, Columbia Records)
The “American Recordings”
“American Recordings”(1994)/ “Unchained”(1996)/ “American III: Solitary Man”(2000)/
“American IV: The Man Comes Around” (2003) (American Records)
“Love God Murder” (2000, Columbia Records)
“The Essential Johnny Cash” (2002, Columbia Records)
