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1 CASH CHOOSES MEMPHIS NO After years of touring, Johnny Cash claimed to know the country so well that he could “wake up anywhere in the United States, glance out the bus window, and pinpoint my position to within five miles. . . . I don’t think talent has anything to do with it. I think it’s just lots and lots of experience. Like the song says, I’ve been everywhere, man. Twice.”1 Though one must acknowledge the playful tone in which Cash described this feat, it nonetheless was a claim for authenticity: such ability, gained through experience, gave him legitimacy as a chronicler of American life. Life on the road was only part of his complicated relationships with place. He spent a great deal of time in many places, including Port Richey, Florida; Landsberg, Germany; the Carter compound in southwestern Virginia; and Jamaica. But he lived primarily in four locations —Dyess, Arkansas, where he grew up; Memphis, where he settled after leaving the air force (1954–1958); Southern California, where he went to become a movie star (1958–1967); and the Nashville area (1967– 2003), where he lived for more than thirty years. This chapter takes as its beginning Cash’s choice to move to Memphis to make a living but also focuses more broadly on the way place functioned both in his music and in musical culture generally. Cash had a twofold relationship with authenticity and place. His associations with symbol-laden locales like the farm, the country, Memphis, Nashville, and California contributed to his audiences’ perception that he was real. At the same time, through his own writing and singing, he tried to create his own authentic world, that of the small town. Both relationships rely on the general idea that some places are more authentic than others. Cash benefited from Memphis’s associations with Elvis Presley, Sam Phillips, Sun Records, and the “birth” of rock and roll. His recording 36 ✭ NINE CHOICES ✭ and performing history in Nashville gave him credibility with country audiences, as did his formative years on the farm. Even his California associations, fraught as the Golden State is with a reputation for fakeness, led to an enhanced reputation for realness through his recorded concerts at two California state prisons, Folsom and San Quentin. His time on the road led to both his claim that he became geographically savvy and a sense that musicians lived a romantic if itinerant life. Despite (or perhaps because of) his peripatetic ways, he returned to the small town over and over again in his music, creating a world of sorts, one I call Cashville, after the reconstructed train station he built in Hendersonville, Tennessee, his home near Nashville. This vision was his version of informed simplicity—he saw the small town and farm as a base for complex moral dramas, as witnessed by his covers of “Long Black Veil” (about a narrator who would die rather than reveal his affair with his best friend’s wife) and “Dark as a Dungeon” (the musings of a coal miner), not to mention “Ballad of a Teenage Queen” (about an actress who marries “the boy next door” after rejecting Hollywood), and his own compositions such as “Five Feet High and Rising,” (his account of the 1937 flood on the family farm), “Drive On,” and “Mean Eyed Cat.” His compositions and covers display for multiple audiences a version of their ideal America. As Jennifer Senior wrote recently, “In American lore, the small town is the archetypal community, a state of grace from which city dwellers have fallen (thus capitulating to all sorts of political ills like, say, socialism). Even among die-hard New Yorkers, those who could hardly imagine a life anywhere else, you’ll find people who secretly harbor nostalgia for the small village they’ve never known.”2 Cash used this nostalgia as a staging ground for human drama and dilemmas, sometimes with a romantic tinge but often with what Leigh Edwards notes as country music’s loss and desire associated with nostalgia, “the metanarratives of a perceived opposition between market pressure and a nostalgic idea of purity.”3 By focusing on small towns and the farm, by linking the past to the present, and by writing about his life as a traveler, Cash painted a picture of a nation where people know each other, an idealized working-class world that takes as its starting point his own— the farm—but also celebrates the many other places he has lived...

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