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2 CASH CHOOSES COLUMBIA NO During a tour out West in the 1950s, Johnny Cash was asked by fellow Sun Records musician Bill Justis, author of the instrumental hit “Raunchy,” to help distribute his records. Cash says the band “stopped at a beautiful scenic overlook on Mt. Hood and distributed those big, brittle old 78s by hand, one by one. They flew really well,” he said. “That record became a hit, too; we were always proud of being the first to distribute it.”1 Such was the state of music organization in the 1950s, when independents in the country, rock, and rhythm and blues genres were trying to get a toehold in the music business, while larger pop-oriented companies focused on churning out the same type of music, more or less, that they had produced for decades. Only in the 1960s would genre music like rock and roll become big business without crossing over into pop. But it was not only Sun’s small size that prompted Cash to leave for Columbia Records in 1958. Seeking more artistic control of his work— not to mention higher royalty rates—he left a struggling record producer (for all intents and purposes, it did not survive the 1960s) for one of the most storied recording companies; Columbia and its antecedents had been around for decades. Cash’s signing with Columbia was surely both practical and symbolic, an indication that he had made it to another level, despite the enormous success he had at Sun. Cash used his freedom at Columbia to record religious music and then folk music. In the early 1960s he released multiple folk albums, including several prominent theme-oriented ones: Ride This Train, a musical journey around the country; Bitter Tears, songs about the plight of Native Americans; and Johnny Cash Sings the Ballads of the True West, a collection of new songs and old standards, in addition to albums about working-class concerns and the Grand Canyon.2 If at any time 66 ✭ NINE CHOICES ✭ Cash himself sought authenticity, it was expressed here in his desire to reclaim, rediscover, and at times relive American culture in order to be taken seriously as an artist. This chapter discusses Cash’s recording history generally and his move to Columbia specifically, but focuses on his folk career at Columbia as a crucial moment in his efforts to move from a country audience to a wider one. For Columbia, mixing Cash’s popularity with the possibility of producing folk music with Don Law (who discovered and recorded the bluesman Robert Johnson) must have seemed like a good bet. Working with Law matched well with the idea of himself that Cash had seemed to settle upon—a wandering, peripatetic, broken hero who found his refuge in reclaiming culture. Recording folk music meant drawing on a form of authenticity in the genre most associated with artistic integrity and reclaiming the voices of the people. Within the folk genre, however, that concept was further complicated. Some thought authenticity meant imitation or reproduction , the standard definition in the early part of the twentieth century, whereas others thought it meant originality, which was becoming the definition in this new musical era. But it was not a simple divide. Bob Dylan, for example, although he acted like a folk singer in his nods to Woody Guthrie and traditional country music, turned to singing about society as it stood (and could become) in songs that were often oblique and funny rather than direct and easily interpreted. Even though Cash often chose to reproduce traditional songs rather than write new folk music, the originality of his concepts was beyond debate. The idea that there is a music of the people, advanced by collectors such as John and Alan Lomax and performers like Guthrie, suggests in its very conception that folk music is the authentic American music, not only because it comes from the people but also because it eschewscommercialmotivations.InI’mNotThere(2007),ToddHaynes’s fragmented motion picture about Bob Dylan, one actor says she likes folk music “because it’s honest. Commercial songs, pop music, can’t be honest. It’s controlled, it’s censored by the people who run society and make the rules.” In making his Americana albums in the early 1960s, during a time of intense folk revival, Cash was guided by the idea that traditional songs (such as those on Ride This Train and Johnny Cash [3.144.116.159] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 01...

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