John Cash, RIP

Johnny Cash sang that he wore black for the wretched of the earth: hungry children, victims of injustice, victims of hate, and all of those without a defender. He was recording songs by Nine-Inch Nails at the end of his career. He sang Gospel. He sang Country. He sang Folk. He sang in a unique way. There was not another like him. He walked the line. If this be (fair & balanced) tribute, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
September 14, 2003
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Everyman, With a Voice
By PETER GURALNICK

Only those who were there at the beginning can remember how different he really was. The records, when they first started coming out on the Sun label in 1955, in the immediate wake of Elvis Presley's success, sounded "so unusual," said the Sun session guitarist, Roland Janes, "that I never would have dreamed he could have even gotten a record played on the radio. But he set country music on its ear."

It was the voice that compelled attention from the start. It was a voice that the founder of Sun Records, Sam Phillips, compared to the blues singer Howlin' Wolf's in its uniqueness, the unimpeachable integrity and originality of its sound — but it was the conviction behind the voice that allowed Johnny Cash to create a body of work as ambitious in its scope as it was homespun in its sound.

He carried that conviction with him from the time he first entered the tiny Sun studio in Memphis in the fall of 1954. He was just out of the Army, selling home appliances door to door, and playing with a trio of musicians barely conversant with their instruments: a guitarist who played one note at a time because he didn't know any other way to do it; a bass player who had just switched over from guitar and had not yet learned to tune his instrument; and a steel guitar player who would drop out of the picture altogether before they even made a record. They worked and worked until, after nearly six months, they finally came up with something that reflected the honesty, originality, above all the kind of spontaneity and emotional truth (as opposed to technical, or even musical, perfection) that both Phillips and Cash particularly prized. This "low-tech" approach was the perfect vehicle, certainly, for the plain-spoken quality of Johnny Cash's message. But the method of delivery doesn't come close to explaining the majesty, or ambition, of his art.

To understand that, one has to factor in the power of imagination. John Cash ("Johnny" was Sam Phillips's bow to the marketplace) grew up in the federal "colony" of Dyess, Ark., "a social experiment with a socialist set-up, really," as Cash described it, "that was done by President Roosevelt for farmers that had lost out during the Depression." One of his most vivid memories of Dyess was the day that Eleanor Roosevelt came to town to dedicate the library, a momentous occasion not simply for the glimpse it afforded of Mrs. Roosevelt but for the opportunity it subsequently afforded him to indulge in what would become a lifelong passion for reading. He read James Fenimore Cooper and Sir Walter Scott in particular at that time, and everything he could find on the American Indian — not so much to escape as in the spirit of discovery. And he carried this exploratory spirit with him into the world, a world in which he achieved a degree of celebrity and fame far beyond anything that he might ever have imagined, and long past the point that most people would gladly have settled for the simple definition of success.

He used his success, in fact, to provide a voice for the downtrodden, for lost souls and lost causes that might otherwise have found no place in the American Dream. He used his knowledge and passion for every sort of music — for the blues of Robert Johnson, the gospel music of his fellow Arkansan, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Texas folk songs collected by J. Frank Dobie — to set out in new and inventive directions of his own. And when he got a network television show in the late 60's, he not only presented such unlikely countercultural figures as Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger to a predominantly country audience, he also regularly incorporated a vivid lesson in musical and social history in a filmed sequence called "Ride This Train."

His imagination took him along widely divergent paths. There was, as he often remarked, no safe harbor for the creative soul. He was tormented by demons that he could not always control, but he never sought excuses. He simply sought truth.

This was what continued to give Johnny Cash's music relevance over the years. Through imagination he possessed a gift for empathetic transference; unlike many artists he was able to take on other voices and make them his own. His music celebrated the power of the individual, but his emphasis on directness and simplicity made a complex, and sometimes contradictory, message accessible to all. His, as Sam Phillips once said, was the truest voice, because it was so irremediably his own — but it was a universal voice, too, for the very way in which it incorporated a constant sense of striving and struggle, an irreducible awareness, and embrace, of the human stain.

Peter Guralnick — author of an acclaimed two-volume biography of Elvis Presley — is working on a biography of Sam Cooke.

Copyright © 2003 The New York Times Company