The Unlikely Superstar: Johnny Cash, up to Glory

National Review, Oct 13, 2003 by Dave Shiflett

According to the old musical formula, if you want to be a master bluesman you sell your soul to the devil -- or you can sign on with God and play country. Johnny Cash took the latter path and it's safe to say he did pretty well with his bargain.

Indeed, the question often asked since his death on Sept. 12 is: "What made Johnny Cash so special?" He wasn't a particularly good singer or instrumentalist. He could put on a pretty good show, but there were times he didn't show up.

Yet he was undeniably a superstar, and by my accounting country music has produced only a couple, most notably Cash and Hank Williams. Both are known by people who do not listen to country music. Both have had massive influence across the popular-music world. Their songs are at the heart of the country repertory, and probably always will be.

Cash and Williams shared other characteristics: humble family and education credentials, drug addictions, failed marriages. Cash was eventually abandoned by the Nashville music industry; Williams might also have been ditched sooner or later, but there was no later in his life. (He died at 29 after a long stretch of profound excess.) But there's no doubting that Cash and Williams will be remembered long after Shania Twain's perfect tush has returned to dust.

What was their secret? Williams said he held the pen and God did the writing; Cash, too, was quick to credit the Good Lord with his good fortune. Cash's mother was the first person to suggest that the Almighty was directly involved in J.C.'s fate. After hearing her young son warbling at their Arkansas sharecropping farm, she said, "God has His hand on you." He was destined, Ma Cash believed, for musical greatness. That was a bold prediction: The Cashes were largely without cash, and Johnny could sing a bit, but only a bit. He didn't concentrate on guitar until years later, when he joined the Air Force and was shipped to Germany. He learned the standard chord progression - - tonic, subdominant, dominant, with the occasional relative minor and major second -- and began writing songs. He left the Air Force, started a family, and sold appliances door to door. None of this suggested a superstar in the making.

But Cash had his dream, and soon decided that he needed somehow to wrangle an audition at Sun Records, a small Memphis label. He had no contacts, so one morning he simply camped out on the Sun doorstep. Sam Phillips showed up for work, and because he had no other plans told Cash he'd give him and his two sidekicks a listen.

Cash's bass player later recounted the audition: "We were two auto mechanics and an appliance salesman" -- and they sounded that way. But Phillips heard something he liked and signed the band. J.C. produced a few regional hits, including "Hey Porter" and "Cry, Cry, Cry," and in 1955 recorded "Folsom Prison Blues," probably his best-known song -- though not his biggest seller, which was "A Boy Named Sue," whose lyrics were penned by poet Shel Silverstein.

Country music's power is based on something of a paradox. While the musical form is simple, the lyrics often take up Major Life Issues: death, love, treachery, faith, sin, hope, despair -- sometimes all in the same song. If the voice is right -- and Cash's gravel-rich baritone could gnaw on you -- the effect can be chilling. So it was with Cash's most famous couplet, in which a downcast and somewhat repentant federal prisoner says he "shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die." This might not have been the kind of message Ma Cash had hoped for, but "Folsom" charted well.

Yet Cash was on the fast train to hell. He soon found himself in a prison of his own making: a ferocious addiction to amphetamines and barbiturates. He missed concerts, wrecked cars, wasted away to nearly nothing, and finally destroyed his marriage. One day, in an apparently earnest pursuit of death, he climbed down into a Tennessee cave, where he hoped to perish. But instead of finding the Grim Reaper, Cash later recalled, he found himself in the presence of God, who informed him that He had other things in mind for him.

One hesitates to suggest exactly how the Great Ledger records the transaction, though it seems to have worked along these lines: Cash got his life back and in return he'd stand as an example of the restorative power of Christianity. With the help of second wife June Carter Cash, he rediscovered his Pentecostalist faith, and made it clear that the Good Lord had intervened in his woeful life -- standing between Cash and his demon. The latter two would live a precarious coexistence. There would be backsliding. But J.C. had saved J.C., and that was that.

Cash was not a warm-spit believer. He and June sang for Billy Graham crusades and crusades put on by Graham's son, Franklin, lately infamous for suggesting that Islam is not much about the lion resting with the lamb. Cash sometimes brought a minister to concerts and concluded the show with an altar call. He baptized his sister in the Sea of Galilee, and in his last video, Jesus hangs prominently upon the bloody, telltale cross. Suffering is inevitable, Cash reminds us, but it is not the final word.