Nine Choices: Johnny Cash and American Culture

Introduction

INTRODUCTION NO “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.” For twenty five years of his performing life, and even at the height of his fame, Johnny Cash greeted his fans with this phrase.1 Given his popularity, one might think that his self-referential opening line was superfluous. But given a career that took so many turns and engaged so many audiences, perhaps he did need to reintroduce himself at every step. Almost everyone knows him as the singer of “Folsom Prison Blues,” “I Walk the Line,” and “Ring of Fire.” Most readers probably know the movie Walk the Line (2005), the engaging but problematic portrayal of Cash’s early life and career. Yet fans who love him for his classic country may not know that he put out five well-received albums in the last two decades (and another four-CD set of outtakes and alternative versions) under the guidance of producer Rick Rubin, two of which received Grammys. His posthumous albums too, have been immensely successful: in January 2006 the compilation album The Legend of Johnny Cash reached the top 20 of the Billboard charts, and in the summer of 2006, his A Hundred Highways, the fifth installment of Rubin’s American Recordings series, hit number 1. Fans who helped buoy Cash’s success may not know that at the same time as his 1994 comeback album, American Recordings, he also released a sixteen-CD reading of the New Testament. His Christian artistic output was extensive: he made a movie about Jesus; wrote a novel about the Apostle Paul’s conversion, Man in White; appeared regularly with Billy Graham at crusades; and even sold electronic Bibles at Christian trade shows. Neither group of fans may know that he spent seven single nights in jail but served no prison sentence, produced several collections of folk music in the early 1960s, and covered modern artists such as Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen long before his experiments with Rubin. For a man everyone seems to know, these divisions of knowledge are striking. Indeed, Cash’s biography reveals a wealth of curious tidbits. He was a highly religious liberal, a southerner whose family depended upon a 2 ✭ INTRODUCTION ✭ socialistic government project; an ex-serviceman who received the highest clearance in decoding Soviet communication (he claimed he was responsible for letting the West know that Joseph Stalin had died); an amateur photographer; a wrecker of hotel rooms; a drug abuser; a man who underwent codependency training with his second wife, June Carter; and a man who was unmarried for only three months in the last forty-odd years of his life. In addition to the above-mentioned work, he wrote two autobiographies and a science-fiction story, and he won a Grammy for his liner notes. At different points in the 1960s, he called himself both a cowboy and an Indian. He received an associate degree in Bible studies. He recorded his own songs in German. He and June Carter worked on revitalizing Asbury Park in New Jersey. He was attacked by an emu. He set fire to a national park. He taught his daughters how to water-ski. While these facts may demonstrate the trappings of an interesting life, Cash also mattered as a cultural figure in the turbulent period his career straddles. He first emerged in the 1950s at the same time as the national introduction of rock and roll, suffered because of decisions he made and how musical culture changed in the 1970s and 1980s, and reemerged in the 1990s as an icon of what might be the natural combination of rock and roll and country—a subgenre called alt-country or Americana. In negotiating these cultural shifts, Cash often acted in ways that seemed at once bold and idiosyncratic—by leaving Sun Records for Columbia Records, recording live at prisons, hosting a television program, and choosing Rubin as a producer, for instance—and thus situated himself as a risk-taking performer. These fragments also mark a complex life, the narrative of which in itself only partially explains how Cash became famous, the heights and depths of his career, and why he had such a renaissance in later years. Getting answers to such questions requires something different from a biography, whose aims are directed more to knowing about the subject than to explaining the subject. Rather, this work explores Cash’s personal and artistic choices as a way of understanding his life, his impact on American culture, and its impact on him...