Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity (review)

The mythology surrounding Johnny Cash includes two widely disseminated opinions. The first is that Cash is a walking contradiction in just about every aspect of his life, career, music, and reputation. The second is that Cash embodies the essence of American character and culture, summoning claims that he is an American hero whose face “ought to be up on Mount Rushmore,” as fellow singer Kris Kristofferson asserted, and drawing out comparisons with Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity, American studies specialist and English professor Leigh Edwards takes as her starting point these two opinions and endeavors to explain the powerful allure of these images of Cash. His widespread appeal and substantive role within American popular culture, she asserts, arise from the irresolvable contradictions within his identity, which are, in fact, the “foundational contradictions” (2) of American identity. Thus, Cash’s magnetism is that he leads us to engage, in essence, with ourselves.

Johnny Cash rightly stands as a colossal figure in American popular culture. His professional career spanned nearly five decades, from his first rockabilly recordings in 1955 to his death in 2003. Many consider him the quintessential country singer, yet others who claim to loathe country music are also fiercely loyal to him. Even through years of Cash’s professional turmoil and misbehavior, his fans engaged in a torrid love affair with his music that is rivaled only by Cash’s actual affairs and much-discussed romantic relationships. He successfully staged the reinvention of his commercial career several times, winning over successive generations of fans and earning a reputation among hipsters as a trendsetter even in his waning years.

Although Edwards uses Cash’s life’s work—his recordings, autobiographies, films, interviews, and the marketing and reception of his work—as her primary source materials, the book is not really about Cash. Readers will find little here about the man that is not already known. Instead, Edwards’s contribution is her insightful writing about how and why Cash’s complicated identity matters within American, and specifically southern, culture, because, as she convincingly argues, Cash’s image is decidedly a southern, white, working-class male construction.

Edwards takes on five distinct ideological arenas, each a site of intense contradiction in southern culture and in Cash’s work. The first is musical authenticity—the values that fans ascribe to commercial music through which they imagine it as a pristine, noncommercial art form. Cash explores and challenges “the market-versus-purity dialectic” (35) throughout his work, Edwards explains, by avoiding opportunities to debunk myths about his biography, by using his considerable vocal talents to sound raw and unpolished on purpose, and by engaging with the folk revival of the 1960s and its complicated relationship to an imagined uncommercial past. The second arena is gender (which earns two chapters), particularly an examination of southern masculinity, in which Cash represents “hard-working, hard-bodied men struggling to provide for their families,” who are “prone to violence but are always admirable . . ., declaring their loyalty to mother and wife . . . [although] they also see women as a source of problems” (67). That virile version of masculinity is reinforced in his many prisoner and rambler songs. Contrasting with those, however, are Cash’s songs that unseat those conventions of gender with stark questions, humor, and unusual treatment of female characters in the song’s plots.

The third arena is race and its deployment within southern culture. Cash’s music resides squarely within the whiteness of country music, for instance, yet he also forged a connection with Jamaican music and plays not only as cowboy but also as Indian on concept albums built around both personas. Here, the emphasis is on “play,” as Cash’s longtime claim of Cherokee blood turned out to be unsubstantiated, even though a large part of his 1960s career centered on it. He fostered his affiliation with cowboy culture through re-enactment, dressing the part, sleeping outside...