Read
Part 1
"You talk about ‘I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,’"
he says, quoting his most famous lyric, from 1955’s "Folsom Prison
Blues." "Well, Jimmie Rodgers had a song in which he wrote,
‘I’m gonna buy me a shotgun just as long as I am tall / I’m gonna shoot
poor Thelma just to see her jump and fall.’ And Vernon Dalhart had the
first so-called country million seller back in the 1920s, called ‘The
Prisoner’s Song,’ which was a very sympathetic picture of a prisoner
crying to be released. So what I’m saying is not altogether new. I was
a criminal in my mind when I wrote ‘Folsom Prison Blues,’ and I think
it’s a compliment that so many people believe I’ve been in prison." The
truth is that Cash has been in jail seven times, mostly for public drunkenness,
and never for more than one night.
In 1967, feeling truly alone, Cash hit bottom again. Crawling deep
into a cave in the Tennessee hills, he thought seriously about staying
there until he died. Instead, he crawled out again and, with the help
of June Carter, experienced a religious conversion. He married Carter
(daughter of Ezra and Maybelle) in 1968, quit drugs cold turkey, and
launched his comeback with At Folsom Prison and At San Quentin
(1969), two of the greatest albums ever made.
By the time Cash recorded them, he’d been playing prison concerts for
more than ten years. But At Folsom Prison was different. For
the first time, people outside those walls were listening, too, and
the sounds they heard—prisoners cheering, laughing, stamping their feet
while Cash sang lines like "I’ll never forget the day I shot that
bad bitch down" or "San Quentin, may you rot and burn in Hell"—were
some of the darkest, most disturbing moments in recorded music.
Released in the Woodstock summer of 1969, At San Quentin was
about killing, revenge, retribution—and in between the murder ballads,
in songs like "He Turned the Water into Wine," it was about
the peace of finding God’s love. At the height of the Vietnam War, when
the U.S. was divided between hawks and doves, Cash embraced both the
soldiers fighting the war and the students protesting against it. Taking
his show to the troops at Long Binh, he came back with "Singin’
in Vietnam Talkin’ Blues," a moving account of war, and "What
Is Truth," where a father explains to his three-year-old son that
war is simply a place "where people fight and die."
The experience of performing in Vietnam and visiting the wounded soldiers
has never left him. Even now, Cash is still writing songs about it.
And though he’s always resisted the label of protest singer ("I’ve
been called that a few times," he says, "but that’s not what
I am. I’m not protesting anything; I’m just singing."), 30 years
ago he was a powerful symbol of rebellion against all the hypocrisy
around him. Hosting his own weekly television show, he welcomed outsiders
like Bob Dylan, Merle Haggard, Charley Pride, and Pete Seeger into the
Nashville establishment. And in 1971, at the height of his popularity,
he re-created himself as the Man in Black, dressed in mourning as a
reminder of "all the ones held back":
I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down
Living on
the hopeless hungry side of town
I wear it for the prisoner
Who has long paid for his crime
But is there because he’s a victim of the times
I wear it for the sick and lonely old
For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold
I wear the black in mourning for the lives that could have been
Each week we lose a hundred fine young men
For two years, Cash was Columbia’s best-selling artist. But in those
same years, starting with his tour of Vietnam, he was also falling off
the wagon and finding himself again addicted to pills, in a cycle that’s
been repeated again and again over the course of his life. By the mid-’70s,
Cash had fallen off the charts, too, and though there were some occasional
hits, by the end of the decade, most of his audience had stopped listening.
For most of the ’80s, the records kept coming anyway, even though Cash
admits that he wasn’t motivated anymore. At his lowest point, he recorded
the "intentionally atrocious," self-parodying "Chicken
in Black," which Columbia released as a single before deciding
not to renew his contract. It was so bad that after leaving Columbia,
Cash had trouble finding another record label. When he finally did,
recording five albums in six years for Mercury/Polygram, the results
were so disappointing that he spends less than one page writing about
them in 1997’s Cash: The Autobiography. "By that point,
I’d given up," he writes. "I didn’t want to deal with record
companies anymore."
In 1993 Cash began his third comeback. Rick Rubin, who’d produced albums
for LL Cool J, Public Enemy, and the Beastie Boys, approached Cash with
the idea of recording a solo acoustic album, with just Cash singing
and playing guitar, doing anything he wanted, any way he wanted to do
it. Working between Rubin’s living room and Cash’s cabin, they recorded
more than 100 songs. Then, whittling them down to 13, they came up with
a masterpiece. With no electric instruments, no effects, and no overdubbing,
American Recordings arrived as a revelation. Coming at the beginning
of the acoustic revival, this new, unplugged Cash felt more powerful,
more intimate, more direct than ever before. His voice had lost none
of its strength, and his guitar playing, which had always been overwhelmed
by the musicians around him, came across in all its bare, stark simplicity.
It was the sound of Carrie Cash and Pete Barnhill, that perfect, steady,
rhythmic accompaniment where "every guitar note came from [his]
thumb."
"It’s nice of you to call me a guitarist," says Cash. "I
know about four chords, and they’ve always worked for me: C, F, G7,
and A minor. Or if you’re in G, that’s G, C, D7, and A minor. Since
I’ve been with American, I’ve had to learn a few more. I think there
were seven chords in Nick Lowe’s song, ‘The Beast in Me.’ I was lucky.
I had a good teacher, Mike Campbell. It really stretched me out. I felt
good about it."
American Recordings won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk
Album. Its successor, Unchained, with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
as Cash’s backup band, rocked much harder, bringing Cash back to his
rockabilly roots with new versions of "Mean-Eyed Cat" and
"Country Boy." Like American Recordings, Unchained
featured an impeccable selection of younger-generation covers, from
Beck’s "Rowboat" to Chris Cornell’s "Rusty Cage"
and Josh Haden’s "Spiritual." Unchained won a Grammy
for Best Country Album.
Since then, Cash has started to show signs of slowing down. Between
bouts of bronchitis and pneumonia, he’s gone for months at a time without
being able to sing a note. In 1997, after stumbling on stage in Flint,
Michigan, he was diagnosed as having Parkinson’s disease; two years
later, the diagnosis was changed to the much rarer Shy-Drager syndrome.
By now, doctors have ruled out both. Whatever his ailments, Cash doesn’t
want to talk about them. "It’s been steady recovery and progress,"
he says, and though his energy is clearly flagging as the conversation
continues, Cash insists that he has no trouble playing guitar, no trouble
with his fingers, and no trouble with his voice.
With all these illnesses, it took Cash three years to record the 14
songs on American III: Solitary Man. Like the two other American
albums, his guitar and voice are at the front of the mix; but this time,
he’s also got plenty of guitar help, with Norman Blake, Mike Campbell,
Merle Haggard, Larry Perkins, Randy Scruggs, and Marty Stuart filling
in the spaces between his strumming. From the folk tradition, there’s
"Wayfaring Stranger"; from vaudeville, there’s Egbert Williams’
"Nobody"; from country, there’s David Allen Coe’s 1972 "Would
You Lay with Me (In a Field of Stone)"; and from rock, there’s
U2’s "One."
The album features three original songs, too, each one showing a new
side of Cash, still at the top of his form. Written while looking at
the nighttime sky, "Field of Diamonds" is a delicate, humbling
picture of Cash and his place in the universe. In "I’m Leavin’
Now", he returns to the memory of leaving his wife and children,
going off to live on his own "muscles, guts, and luck." And
in "Before My Time," inspired by Stephen Foster, he finds
his roots in the simple songs that people have always sung and always
will.
"My mother said that songs came through God, and I’d like to believe
that might be true," says Cash. He likes to wake up early, to have
time by himself for writing, thinking, and reading the Bible. After
a lifetime of struggle, he’s now free to relax, knowing that the songs
for his new album have already been recorded. Due out later this year,
My Mother’s Hymn Book features new acoustic versions of the gospel
songs he learned from his mother while sitting around the woodstove
after dinner: "I’ll Fly Away," "In the Garden,"
and "When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder."
"My mother would say, ‘God has His hand on you,’" he says.
"She made me sing in church, to make sure I’d get the experience
of singing before people, even when I was 12 years old. I didn’t know
it then, but she told me later that’s what she was doing. She knew I
was going to be a professional singer."
All these years later, Cash has few regrets. He wishes he’d taken the
time to learn a few more guitar chords and wishes he’d taken some of
his recording sessions more seriously. But unlike the picture of him
in his daughter Rosanne’s "My Old Man," where she calls him
"frightened by the future and embarrassed by the past," he
can’t remember ever feeling either of those things. "No, those
are her words, not mine," he says. "That’s what she saw
in me, and maybe she’s right and I’m wrong, I’m not sure. But I have
a lifetime contract to record for American, and whatever it takes to
get it right is what we’ll spend. I’m free to do whatever I want to
get my records the way they need to be. Right now, the future looks
wonderful."
I’m Leavin’ Now
Words and music by Johnny Cash
Of the three new songs on Solitary Man, Cash says that "I’m
Leavin’ Now" was the easiest to write and the easiest to record.
"It was one of those songs that really came about as fast as I
could write it down," he recalls. "I was thinking about my
ex-wife when I wrote that one. No doubt about it, that’s where that
song came from."
Compared to 1964’s "Understand Your Man," which was written
four years before his divorce, "I’m Leavin’ Now" is much more
relaxed, more playful. Recorded as a duet vocal with Merle Haggard,
who’d been in the front row at San Quentin in 1958, the chords are simple,
the performances bouyant. Cash keeps time, strumming chords with his
thumb, while Marty Stuart, who played in Cash’s band 20 years ago, bends
bluesy single strings on lead, playing what Cash calls "Hank Snow–style
guitar."
SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY
Love God Murder, Columbia/Legacy 63809 (compiled 2000).
American
III: Solitary Man, American 69691 (2000).
The Man in Black: His Greatest Hits, Columbia/Legacy 65752
(1999).
VH1 Storytellers: Johnny Cash/Willie Nelson, American
69416 (1998).
Unchained, American 69404 (1996).
American Recordings, American 45520 (1994).
The Essential Johnny Cash, Columbia/Legacy 47991 (1992).
At San Quentin, Columbia/Legacy 66017 (1969).
At Folsom Prison, Columbia/Legacy 65955 (1968).
Blood, Sweat, and Tears, Columbia/Legacy 66508 (1963).
Excerpted
from
Acoustic Guitar
magazine, June 2001, No.102.
That
issue also contained a transcription of Cash's "I'm leavin' Now,"
a story about online guitar communities, and a review of the latest
guitars and gear.
Click
here to read about Johnny Cash's instruments and gear.
