Cash crop

A country legend speaks to everyone

by Ted Drozdowski

Johnny Cash has a song on his new Unchained (American) called "I Never Picked Cotton." I first heard it in the '60s, snuggled in my Doctor Dentons while watching Cash's TV show -- the program that broke songwriters Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Kris Kristofferson to the American mainstream. That song chilled and fascinated me. It's the story of a wild young bad-ass driven by his dirt-farm-poor childhood to a life of babes, cars, and crime. Each verse ups the ante until he kills a man and awaits his fate on the gallows. The chorus packs the iron fist of a punch line, his last words: "But I never picked cotton/Like my mother did/And my brother did/And my sister did/And my daddy died young/Workin' in a coal mine."

I'm not sure what part of my white-trash genealogy this appealed to. My dad was a factory worker, not a cotton picker. I was too young for girls but loved my Matchbox cars and thought -- like most very young Americans -- that there was something glamorous and cool about gangsters. Maybe it was because both of my grandfathers had died young working in coalmines. And my family was living in a two-room apartment, so we weren't exactly breaking bread with the Kennedys. For whatever reason, I've carried this song in my craw for some 30 years -- as I have so many of Cash's numbers that I first heard in childhood. And as so many other people who heard his work at an early age do too.

It's by now a truism that Cash's plainspoken songs, delivered in his unglamorous baritone, boast the clarity and resilience of great American folktales. Cash's stories are libations from the richest wellsprings of country music tradition, as memorable as the legends of John Henry and Harriet Tubman and Jesse James and Daniel Boone. Both real and imagined, his heroes and villains are immediately recognizable and understood by anyone who's willing to listen with an open mind. (If you don't get Johnny Cash, you got a hole in your soul.) And it doesn't matter whether he's written a song or adopted it -- as is the case with numbers by Beck, Tom Petty, Soundgarden, the Louvin Brothers, and even Dean Martin on Unchained. Once he gets his teeth into a tune, it's his. No arguments. In that respect, you could compare him to Billie Holiday, though Cash still prefers to dress in darker colors.

What's cool and profound about Unchained is what's always made his best work resonate. The conflict -- and the connections -- between right and wrong, between the spiritual and the material, that's distinctly American . .  well, distinctly human . . . is shot all through it. So finding "Unchained," a prayer for inner peace, just after the protagonist of "I Never Picked Cotton" is left ready to twist in the wind feels right. As does his hymn to the road, "I've Been Everywhere," after "Unchained." After all, our gods are where we find them -- in liquor or dope, in the church or on the politician's podium, or hitchhiking to Tulsa with the breeze at one's back and no responsibilities on one's shoulders.

Although 1994's American Recordings, Cash's first collaboration with the wickedly wise producer/label owner Rick Rubin, resurrected the 64-year-old performer's career in the pop mainstream, it was an acoustic album -- atypical of his great band recordings of the '50s and '60s. Unchained returns to arrangements that bear more of the Cash trademark: simple 2/4 rhythms, acoustic guitar and piano twined 'round a stiff spine of bass and drums, and occasional killer guitar licks and riffs adding punctuation to his meat-and-potatoes vocals (which Rubin mixed dry and way up front, just like they're meant to be, to keep everything else out of the way).

The twist is that the players are Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The rub is that these Southern-rock modernists know every twist of Cash's musical topography like they know their own hairy butts. The touches of phase-shifted guitar on Beck's "Rowboat" are comparable to effects like what the stutter-picking Luther Perkins would inject back when he and the Tennessee Three were backing Cash; the grunge-guitar rhythm beneath the coda of "Rusty Cage" growls, but at the same tempo and respectful volume Cash's voice has always demanded from its accomplices.

Unchained lives up to the old saw "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Left in the dust by country's late-'70s/'80s ever-slickening pop inclinations, Cash found his career broke. Rubin fixed it by sharing his patina of hipness, which was glowing bright after decades of success with everyone from the Beastie Boys and Run-D.M.C. to ZZ Top, Danzig, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Suddenly a new young audience has become hip to Cash, and since his music -- and musical wisdom -- is timeless, he was already hip to them. Even if they never did pick cotton.