Sherry Chandler

Johnny Cash

Somehow I never really connect Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash in my mind, and yet there they both were at Sun Records and in my 1950s pre-teen psyche, the fake outlaw and the real one. I’d say, in the course, of my life, I’ve leaned more toward the Elvis side but Johnny Cash has always been there (like Hank Williams before either) and they both sort of come together in my real idol, Bob Dylan, who once said “it’s all music.”

I don’t know what any of that has to do with anything except that Johnny Cash seems to be turning up everywhere lately, I suppose because of the new biopic. I even heard an interview with him on Fresh Air this week, which gave me a bit of a frisson (neither Johnny nor Elvis would ever use that word but Dylan might if he needed a rhyme). Terry Gross did a two-day tribute. All Things Considered featured a recording of the Folsom Prison concert done from the audience by a young reporter named Gene Beley.

Rox Populi featured a picture of Cash flipping the bird that disturbed me precisely because it is a cheapened gesture and, while I know Cash was of the people, I never thought of him as vulgar. I guess that’s where I show my Mrs. Grundyism, though I live in a house where birds are flipped as casually as tv channels.

All of this leads me to the recommendation that you read Johnny Cash’s Journey Through the Other Side of Virtue , an appreciation by Nicholas Kulish in today’s NYTimes. In it, I think Kulish may have captured Cash’s importance in American pop culture — his willingness to admit his own guilt:

If all Johnny Cash brought to the stage were his demons, we wouldn’t need to remember him. Marilyn Manson, the shock rocker, proved far more grotesque than a man in a black suit singing a few country murder ballads. Cash’s drug addiction and light brushes with the law pale beside the rapper 50 Cent’s drug deals and bullet scars.

It is the angel on Johnny Cash’s other shoulder that gives his music its depth and profundity… Johnny Cash merges our seemingly contradictory American traditions of outlaws prone to wild gunplay and pious Christians singing hymns, without stopping to explain how you can be both at once.

In a world increasingly reduced to good and evil, to us versus them, Johnny Cash was a man unafraid to admit that he was both. We’ve somehow lost sight of the truth that there can be no redemption without sin. It’s this kind of reductive thinking that makes it easy to reduce swaths of the country to color codes and political parties; to lock millions away in jails and prisons, then toss the keys without guilt.

Johnny Cash sang that he wore black “for the poor and beaten down, livin’ on the hopeless, hungry side of town.” With hundreds of thousands displaced by Hurricane Katrina, layoff announcements dangling over the heads of 98,000 American auto workers, and 2.1 million men and women in prisons and jails across the country, we still need him

Possibly related posts:

Girl from the North Country

War on Drugs®

A Revenant, Perhaps?

I go out walkin’…

One more weekend

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