Nine Choices: Johnny Cash and American Culture

Chapter 5: Cash Chooses (Not to Choose) Vietnam

5 Cash Chooses (not to Choose) vietnam NO In 1969, Johnny Cash told the story about his involvement in the Vietnam War in front of an enthusiastic crowd at Madison Square Garden. He recounted a conversation he had with a reporter after returning from visiting troops in Vietnam. “That makes you a hawk, doesn’t it?” asked the reporter. Cash told the audience that he answered, “‘No, no, that don’t make me a hawk.’ But I said if you watch the helicopters bring in the wounded boys, and then you go into the wards and sing for ’em and try and do your best to cheer ’em up, so they can get back home, it might make you a dove with claws.” He then launched into a cover of Ed McCurdy’s “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” a song about ending war.1 The image of a “dove with claws” is striking—the symbol of peace fused with a symbol of aggression. On one level, the image makes little sense—Cash later called the metaphor “stupid”—as indeed doves already have claws; it’s the equivalent of talking about a dog with paws. But as an imaginary symbol, perhaps a small peaceful bird with extended oversize claws, ready to defend or attack as necessary, it works better. Maybe when he described himself as this kind of dove, he meant that he sought peace aggressively.2 This problematic metaphor is apt for Cash’s own ventures into the world of popular politics in the 1960s and 1970s, ventures that were decidedly ambiguous in their orientation toward the traditional poles of liberal and conservative. Leigh Edwards calls this political ambiguity a contradictory element meant to keep audiences from characterizing the performer: Cash “is striking for his consistency in refusing to resolve binary tensions, in the depth and longevity of his exploration of those binaries in a range of American themes, and in the degree and longevity 132 ✭ nine choices ✭ of this incorporation of that irresolvable tension into his media image.”3 In that respect, Cash was successful. He was an outspoken defender of the downtrodden throughout the decade of the 1960s, but he never fully connected with more prominent forms of protest. Bitter Tears chronicled the Native American plight in 1964, and he played prisons in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, culminating in At Folsom Prison and At San Quentin. Only Bitter Tears could definitively be called protest ; still, because playing at prisons helped bring attention to the plight of inmates there, one could certainly classify the prison concerts as protest albums. He also recast his use of black. Earlier commentators had noted his tendency to wear black, labeling him the “Man in Black.” In 1970, Cash redefined the label to denote into a crusader who wears black to protest injustice of almost every sort. (Later he refined it as indicative of his religious faith.) Such liberal-seeming associations allowed general audiences to at least commercially endorse him—he sold more albums than practically anyone else in the late 1960s.4 But soon after Cash visited the troops in Vietnam, he played at the White House and, despite not playing songs that Richard Nixon requested , said he would “stand behind him.” He was also associated with country music, and although he did not always confirm that association, it was generally considered a politically conservative genre. And in 1974 he wrote and recorded Ragged Old Flag, whose title cut is unabashedly patriotic. Such political stances seem more profound in retrospect. But as Jim Hightower quipped in the title to his book, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow lines and dead armadillos,” and Cash’s famed ambiguity sometimes got him in trouble with his audiences. For the generally liberal audience that adopted him because of the prison albums, there was little liberal about his Vietnam stance, especially given the tenor of the discourse coming from popular music artists and critics. In other words, Cash may have been liberal but not in the terms of the liberal consensus at the time. On the other hand, his prison concerts and endorsement of Native American rights and the decidedly democratic nature of his television show may have given his conservative, classic country audience pause. At the same time, Cash in this period seemed hyperaware of his audiences, perhaps because of his raised national pro- 133...