Johnny Cash turned 70 this past Tuesday, and with his birthday came the usual tide of accolades. Everyone from Al Gore to #6 from Slipknot had something nice to say about him. After all, Cash is a great artist. He has a poet’s eye for the elemental details not only of the American South and West that are home to many of his songs, but of human nature. Then there’s his voice: a bass instrument that sings with rumbling authority. Yet those who so often compare that voice to the Deity’s seem not to notice that it’s riddled with cracks and pits and broken notes that echo the imperfections of Man.
Within that pocked and splintered territory lies the very heart of Johnny Cash as an artist and a person. It’s just that it’s become hard to see under the mountain of his accomplishments — rock and country-music innovator; hitmaker; star of TV, film, and stage; champion of great songwriters like Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson — and through the hype that’s swirled around him in his senior years.
Since the 1994 release of Cash’s American Recordings, which was produced by American-label honcho and metal/rap knob tweaker Rick Rubin, we’ve been hard-sold two myths about Cash. Depending on which record company is doing the pimping — Sony, which holds most of his catalogue, or American, which releases his contemporary albums — Johnny has been pushed to us as either an American hero or an American bad-ass. Neither label holds. Like all marketing tags, both are writ too bold to be true, and at the same time they undersell the simple truth about Cash that makes him loved the world over. Since the two-CD set The Essential Johnny Cash has just been released by Sony’s Columbia/Legacy imprint, the hero hype is currently on. The label preceded Cash’s birthday by sending out a press release with 34 celebrity birthday commemorations representing everyone from his wife, June Carter Cash, to Metallica’s Kirk Hammett and actor Tim Robbins. Expect more drum beating as the label raids its vaults to reissue Cash’s first two post–Sun Records albums for Columbia, The Fabulous Johnny Cash and Hymns by Johnny Cash, as well as 1960’s Ride This Train, ’65’s Orange Blossom Special, and 1967’s Carryin’ On with Johnny Cash and June Carter on March 19.
Sure these discs are full of gunfighter ballads and train songs and even, on Ride This Train, a musical setting for an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem called "The Ballad of the Harpweaver" — all grist for the Americana mill. But Cash can be considered an American hero only if your definition of that role can stretch to include a man who:
1) was a speed freak and a lush from 1957 to ’67 and has suffered occasional lapses back into addiction.
2) abandoned his first marriage for a life of excess on the road.
3) stole his girlfriend’s clothes and locked her in a hotel room when she threatened to leave him.
4) blew a ’58 Cadillac out from under himself in an incident involving pills and an open tank of propane.
5) burned the foliage of three mountains in California’s Los Padres National Wildlife Refuge in 1964, killing 49 of the 53 remaining endangered condors there. (Then Cash told the judge, "I don’t give a damn about your yellow buzzards" before being slapped with a $125,000 fine — the equivalent of about a million today.)
Not exactly the stuff Frank Capra movies were made of. But the bad-ass tag doesn’t hold up either. Sure, Cash admits to all of the above. He even sings about shooting people in "Delia’s Gone" and "Folsom Prison Blues." But unlike his Sun-studios contemporary Jerry Lee Lewis, he’s never actually fired a bullet into another person (or for that matter married his cousin). And no matter how many songs like Nick Lowe’s "The Beast in Me" and Glenn Danzig’s "Thirteen" producer Rubin has brought him, or how cool these cuts have made him in the eyes of marginalized rockers and music journalists who mistake songs for real life, he’s remained a devout Christian and charity fundraiser and reformed family man. Even Charles Williams & Bobby George’s bloody bad-guy ballad "I Never Picked Cotton," which reappeared on Cash’s American Recordings sequel Unchained after decades in his repertoire, is as much about escape from the early death and despair of cotton- or coal-town poverty as it is about the murder-and-robbing exploits of its gallows-bound narrator. It’s not a celebration of badness but a cautionary tale of how the bad are bred by a lack of opportunities. The tune applies as much to today’s inner-city gangsters as it did to the Depression-era exploits of the Dillingers and the Bonnie and Clydes who inspired it.
In fact, it’s Cash’s songs that keep undercutting his mythology as American hero or bad-ass and making him into something greater and more real. Nestled among the 36 tunes spanning 1955 to 1983 on The Essential Johnny Cash is "Don’t Take Your Guns to Town." Cloaked as a gunfighter ballad, the song is really about the trembling uncertainty of a young man’s transition to manhood. Then there’s "Five Feet High and Rising," in which a family inch by inch lose their home and their livelihood to rising floodwaters and are finally cast adrift in a "homemade boat/’Cause that’s the only thing we got left that’ll float." Defeated by the elements, and uncertain as Noah, they must simply move along. It’s a matter of endurance, not heroism.
In "I Still Miss Someone," one of Cash’s touchingly sad love songs, his lonely narrator laments, "I never got over those blue eyes/I see them everywhere/I miss those arms that held me/When all the love was there." He sings about going to parties only to end up sitting alone in darkened corners, or feeling a sting as he watches lovers stroll through the autumn leaves. The hurt tone of his voice and the accumulation of crippling arrows he suffers through his broken heart make you wonder whether his character will even survive. Then there’s "I Walk the Line," his powerful 1956 pop and country hit. More than a song of devotion, it’s a song about temptation. Cash’s everyman in black needs to "keep a close watch" on his heart, despite claiming it’s "very very easy to be true." And the notion that he needs to "walk the line" to stay faithful bespeaks his constant awareness that he could step over it and into cheating.
None of this is very heroic, but it’s all very human and vulnerable. And these themes don’t apply just to Americans but to people everywhere. The issues Cash deals with in his songs are universal and primal. Is this woman right for me? How do I go on after I’ve been crushed by love? How do I become a man? Can I stay faithful? How do I feed my family when the crops have failed and the flood has taken away our land and the factories have shut their doors? And then there are the spirituals, the questioning and praising songs that Cash — like billions of other seekers of salvation and solace — has launched to the skies in an effort to try to find a place with God.
