Johnny Cash

In my continuing consumption of American pop culture like a Whitman's sampler (this is known perjoratively as "being a poser"), I've gotten into Johnny Cash a little lately. I admit that I only got interested because of all of the publicity surrounding the movie "Walk the Line" last year. The Muse and I watched that recently and this post covers that too.

You've got to start with the music, so I bought a CD that's the "Essential Cash" or something similar to that. It's really interesting stuff. I've never liked country music. Partly that's a reaction to lots of people listening to country music where I grew up. Partly that a reaction to driving around in my dad's pickup with my dad, my mom, my sister and my first brother (who was a baby) listening to Willie Nelson's Stardust Memories tape on the tape deck when those things were the new technology. (Sorry, Mom and Dad, "Soft Sounds of the 50's kind of soured me on the Platters, too.) Partly because country music often seems to fall into one of three categories: (1) dumb genre stuff (Achy Breaky Heart); (2) my-woman-left-me-I-got-drunk-and-kicked-the-dog stuff (Kenny Rogers doing "don't take your love town" comes to mind -- I thought the line in that song was "four hundred children and a crop in the field" when I was growing up); and (3) overtly political/jingoistic stuff like Toby Keith singing "we'll put a boot in your ass/it's the American way." I'm sure that there are brilliant country songs expressing the subtleties of life and stuff, but I just haven't heard them.

Or at least I hadn't until I started listening to a little Johnny Cash. Man, you just don't hear lyrics like his very often. I obviously am coming late to this particular party, but it is striking to hear "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." Who sings anything like that?

LAWYER WARNING: This is a warning to all those who are considering being an attorney. That last line comes out of the Folsom Prison song. Folsom Prison is in California. Reno is in Nevada. Having had my brain rewired by law school and law practice, my first reaction to Johnny Cash singing about shooting a man in Reno in a Folsom Prison song was more or less: "Why was he in Folsom Prison? He shot the guy in Reno. California courts wouldn't have had jurisdiction over that." Just a warning: if you don't want your brain to work like this, don't go to law school.

Then you get Johnny Cash's voice, which is this deep, deep thing that seems like it's coming out of some mine. The combination of the voice with the lyrics just convinces you that this is a guy who has seen too much and been through too much.

What's really interesting to me is how these tortured lyrics and this unbelievable voice got put over these almost cliched arrangements. The first song on my particular CD is "Cry, Cry, Cry," which is one of Cash's first songs. Now here is a song that goes into the Creepy Guy Song Hall of Fame with stuff like "Under My Thumb" by the Rolling Stones and "Every Breath You Take" by the Police. "You'll come back to me/for a little love that's true/when I remind you of all of this/you'll cry, cry, cry." Yet it's set over with plink-plunk-plink-plunk bass and guitar arrangement that seems like it came out Grand Old Opry in 1945. The juxtaposition is just fascinating. The same with what is apparently the original arrangement of "Ring of Fire." You had the idea to use a whole bunch of mariachi horns to accompany a song about how love burns, burns, burns with a singer with a deep, sorrowful voice that is just making you feel the pain? It's like no one -- including Cash himself -- knew quite what to do with the things that he wanted to sing. The only early song that seems to get the whole package just right is "Walk the Line," which has the foreboding guitar line throughout that really emphasizes how Cash is having a difficult time keeping it on the straight and narrow. I think that I have heard of some Cash albums with new, really spare arrangements and I'd really like to hear them.

Which brings us to the movie "Walk the Line." I thought that it, and Reese Witherspoon in particular, were quite good. Joaquin Phoenix really committed to playing the part and that's always good, although the results were kind of uneven. But, to me, there was a big, basically irresolvable problem with the movie. The actors sang their own music, which made for good believeability in the singing scenes. The problem with this, however, was that Joaquin Phoenix obviously doesn't have Johnny Cash's voice and his voice was a very large part of his appeal. So, basically, if you've heard Johnny Cash's music, you have to get past Phoenix's voice to like the movie, but Cash's voice might be a big reason you wanted to see the movie in the first place. It's a Catch-22 that those involved with the movie couldn't have avoided. But they did an admirable job of working with it. I give the movie a Movie+.