The man in the black: Johnny Cash

Christian Century, Oct 4, 2003 by C. Clifton Black

JOHNNY CASH IS considered a pioneer of "outlaw music," yet even his secular compositions beat with moral and religious heart. Cash's childwood was stamped by country music and his mother's devotion to the Pentecostal Church of God. When J. R. Cash was 12, several months after he accepted Christ, his older brother Jack--a preacher--was killed in a farming accident. Thirty-five years later, Cash's instantly recognizable stage costume was not the sequin-spangled eye-poppers of his Grand Ole Opry colleagues, but the black frock coat of a 1920s circuit rider or undertaker.

In 1954, after his discharge from the U.S. Air Force, Cash signed with Sam Phillips, the legendary producer of Sun Records in Memphis who also mentored the fledgling career of Elvis Presley. Three years and 40 hit singles later, Cash left Sun for a new contract with Columbia--never, he maintained, for better money but because he wanted to record spiritual songs that Phillips prohibited, claiming he didn't know how to market them. True to its word, Columbia released as the second LP by their new artist Hymns by Johnny Cash (1959), followed by Hymns from the Heart (1961). What's notable about all his religious recordings is their manifest genesis in Cash's own convictions, not in some agent's decision that the requisite Christmas album would burnish his image.

The song that consolidated Cash's "outlaw" reputation is "Folsom Prison Blues" (1956), sung from the point of view of a jailed killer listening to a distant train whistle. The climax comes in the second stanza:

   When I was just a baby;
   My momma told me, "Son,
   "Always be a good boy; don't ever
   play with guns."
   But I shot a man in Reno just to
   watch him die.
   When I hear that whistle blowin',
   I hang my head and cry.

The convict weeps not merely because he's in prison, but because he's imprisoned to sin: the sheer meanness of gunning down someone in cold blood just for the hell of it. A later stanza nails it down:

   But I know'd I had it comin',
   I know I can't be free.
   But those people keep on movin',
   And that's what tortures me.

Music critic Neil Strauss puts his finger on a crucial difference between the sinners in Cash's songs and most of the protagonists in today's gangsta rap. The latter are often vicious, with no center but nihilism. Those locked away in Folsom are guilt-racked, famished for real redemption from real misery.

Cash's musical persona had some basis in fact. During his 30s he seemed bent on destroying himself with painkillers, amphetamines and barbiturates, which decimated his body and his first marriage. When out of control--which was much too often--Cash wrecked property, nearly killed himself in a borrowed car, and was arrested seven times. A sheriff in Lafayette, Georgia, released him, even offering him back his dope: "You've got free will: Kill yourself or save your life." After a half-hearted suicide attempt, Cash quit drugs cold turkey, upheld by the Christian conviction of a woman who in 1968 would become his second wife: June Carter. They remained married until a heart attack claimed her life in May of this year.

Three months after kicking his habit, he recorded Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison (1968), regarded by many as his best and by some as the finest live concert by any popular performer on record. By then he had done shows in many prisons, perfecting a repertoire peppered with his own hits ("I Walk the Line," "Ring of Fire"), rock, ballads, comic novelties and spirituals. Cash knew his listeners:

   Prisoners are the greatest audience
   that an entertainer can perform
   for. We bring them a ray of
   sunshine in their dungeon and
   they're not ashamed to respond, and
   show their appreciation.... The culture
   of a thousand years is shattered
   with the clanging of the cell door behind
   you.... You sit on your cold,
   steel mattressless bunk and watch a
   cock roach crawl out from under the
   filthy commode, and you don't kill it.
   You envy the roach as you watch it
   crawl out under the cell door....
   Your big accomplishment for the
   day is a mathematical deduction.
   You are positive of this, and only
   this: There are nine vertical and sixteen
   horizontal bars on your door.

Folsom Prison still sounds fresh. It conveys the electricity of 2,000 inmates, under tight guards, with intermittent anouncements over a warden's loudspeaker and Cash chuckling obscenities to the delight of his listeners and the dismay of his producer. For all its up-tempo numbers, the concert is shot through with deep melancholy that seems to have clicked with a literally captive audience. Cash's humor is outright gallows ("25 Minutes to Go"--before a noose snaps the narrator's neck) or brokenhearted goofy ("Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart"). The songs are filled with pitch-black mines, deadly walls, orphans, adulterous wives, scoundrels hanged for the one crime they didn't commit, even ghosts ("The Long Black Veil").

And yet, there's redemption. The last number, "Greystone Chapel," written by Glen Sherley, an inmate in the audience, thanks God for the only place at the prison whose door was never locked: