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  • Johnny Cash International: How and Why Fans Love the Man in Black by Michael Hinds and Jonathan Silverman
  • K. Brandon Barker
Michael Hinds and Jonathan Silverman. Johnny Cash International: How and Why Fans Love the Man in Black. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020. 270 pages. $27.50 (paper).

Like the great myths told as a multitude of variants across cultural contexts, a star who shines as brightly as Johnny Cash prompts investigations at paradoxical poles of human experience–the expanse of a phenomenon spread worldwide vis-à-vis localized, individual experiences of that phenomenon. In Johnny Cash International: How and Why Fans Love the Man in Black, Michael Hinds and Jonathan Silverman attend to this paradox:

In practice, [international] Cash fandom paradoxically intensifies a sense of place. As fans respond powerfully to the imaginary geography of Cash’s songs and the actual geography of his life, they also express a strong sense of relationship, if not affiliation, to their home locality.

(8) [End Page 117]

Framed by these international and localized points of view, Johnny Cash International is organized into Part I, “Histories and Contexts of International Fandom,” and Part 2, “A Year in the Life of Cash Fans around the World.”

In both, Hinds and Silverman present analyses of Cash’s international performance records, of qualitative surveys administered to respondents from seventeen different countries, and most frequently of the bewilderingly “worldwide” spaces of the Internet. For localized views, they report–mostly in the second part of the book–on a range of personal interactions with Cash fans from several different countries, including Ireland, England, France, Portugal, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands. At times, these interactions amount to one-off interactions at a café or in University settings; at other times, they rise to a level of longitudinal, ethnographic study.

In the Preface, we learn that Hinds, a literary scholar from Ireland, and Silverman, an American Studies scholar teaching in New England, met in Dublin City in 2010 when Silverman gave a talk about Cash’s song “A Boy Named Sue” at Mater Dei Institute where Hinds was working at the time. Both, they learned, were Cash fans, and from the outset, their relationship was fruitful. A thesis formed: People across cultures are capable, willing, and often successful creators of their own version of Johnny Cash fandom (or Cashdom as the authors name it). It is a good argument to make. And when the book leans into its thesis, when the authors fully describe situated examples of personal and group agency necessary for pulling off expressive acts of fandom, Johnny Cash International shines.

Chapter 1 establishes the book’s range, introducing two Cash fans who become “a prologue to the work of this entire study” (14). The first is “Charlie Taggart, a shopkeeper in the Northern Irish town of Omagh, Country Tyrone, whom Hinds met in 2013 when he went to buy a newspaper” (14). We learn that Taggart always–every day–plays Cash on a cassette player in his shop. A self-conscious Johnny Cash fan, Taggart stands out among the Irish country music and traditional music fans who generally appreciate Cash but do not necessarily adore him. Taggart also stands out among other Cash superfans discussed in the book, for he is not a performer or tribute artist. He does not collect copious amounts of Cash memorabilia. Charlie Taggart’s fandom presents, according to Hinds and Silverman, the kind of self-reliant fan who “does not want to be Johnny Cash, just admire him through contemplation” (19). From this introduction, Hinds and Silverman build out an intimate description of Taggart’s fandom by unpacking the shopkeeper’s own ideas about his reception of Cash, including Taggart’s thoughts on his favorite Cash song, on the uniqueness of Cash’s performative charisma, on the dualistic complexities of Cash’s rambling-man, contrarian ways, and his gospel-singing, Southern-gentleman demeanor. The second “fan” amounts to little more [End Page 118] than an anecdote about a student at a Christian school in Tomb, Norway, who approached Silverman after a lecture in order to show him the Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash tattoos on his calf. Admitting that...

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