Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity

Notes

Throughout his corpus Johnny Cash generates strong contradictory currents around the theme of Southern white working-class masculinity. As he leaves the sinner-saint, the rambler-homebody, the Saturday night–Sunday morning binaries in productive tension, his work voices larger contradictions in American culture. From his uncertainties about masculinity to his fraught representations of race—especially of whites and American Indians—Cash illuminates core national paradoxes. In so doing, his work challenges and yet reinforces nationalism, although its tensions insistently raise questions of difference, power, and appropriation in ways that leave America never coherently monocultural. The way that texts such as the Hurt video sell Cash further epitomizes how formulations of his authenticity are exploited to market that very idea of contradiction, drawing on the necessary overlapping of opposed ideas in American culture, such as the market versus art or individualism versus community. His image sheds light on how these kinds of competing social forces shape the contested idea of the American character. Drawing on the previous discussion of religious binaries, a brief case study of a posthumous text offers signs of how Cash’s image might continue to circulate after his death. I analyze the framing of him in the posthumous video for his song “God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” from American V: A Hundred Highways (2006). In this instance, the text encapsulates Cash’s equivocating image and refers to 186 conclusion how that image relates to a Southern white working-class culture. But at the same time that the video turns Cash into a media icon, it also accentuates the commodity nature of its endeavor and introduces a new level of appropriation—Cash the media image can seemingly be appropriated for different ideological causes. The text points toward a process of flattening him, making him one-dimensional, so that he is primarily an icon in a way that moves afield from the content of his work. This detachment and superficiality, though worrisome, also indicates how Cash as a symbol can be incorporated into new wrinkles of American cultural ambivalences. In the celebrity-laden video for Cash’s version of this traditional folk song, which appeared on his posthumous release, American V: A Hundred Highways (2006), we get a clear sense of the degree to which Cash’s saint-sinner persona is both iconic and marketable, and of the extent to which it circulates in media images after his death. This chart-topping album notably includes, in addition to Cash’s last composition, “Like the 309,” an updated version of the song Larry Gatlin wrote for Cash’s Gospel Road movie in 1973, “Help Me,” and another religious song that Cash wrote, “I Came to Believe.” A contemplative album that unflinchingly addresses death, it also includes tunes that point to a departure, an afterlife, or the aftereffects of an individual’s presence (Lou Herscher and Saul Klein’s “I’m Free from the Chain Gang Now,” Bruce Springsteen’s “Further on Up the Road”). “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” has been released by other artists such as Elvis Presley under the title “Run On,” and has often been performed as a gospel song (released by Odetta on Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues in 1956). Cash’s version has a stomp-clap rhythm driving it forward alongside his sparse vocals, emphasizing the lyrical content in which God has final judgment over all sinners, no matter how they might try to escape him. Cash’s version includes lyrics that describe how God spoke to the song’s speaker, calling his name and telling him to do His will. Cash emphasizes a compassionate God here in the speaker’s exchange with Him, but the message that God instructs the speaker to spread is all fire and brimstone: “Go tell that long tongue liar” the message “that God’s gonna cut ’em down.” The speaker then warns others that they can “run on for a long time” but eventually God will catch them and reveal their sins if they have sinned against others. The video, meanwhile, takes Cash and his message of religious warning and fetishizes him in a way that illuminates how Cash’s saint-sinner persona is a core part of what others frame as “authentic” in their constructions of the man. Prompted by Justin Timberlake (who famously called it a “travesty” when his video for “Cry Me a River” beat Cash’s Hurt for Video of the Year at the 2003 [18.223.172.252] Project MUSE (2024...