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9 "Big River": Johnny Cash and the Currents of History
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9 “Big River” johnny cash and the currents of history John Hayes In the 2003 video for Johnny Cash’s cover of the alternative song “Hurt,” the floodwaters of the Mississippi River raged, seeming to sweep away everything in their wake in a dizzying array of visual imagery. The symbolism was germane : Cash had grown up near the mighty river, in Mississippi County in the Arkansas Delta, lived in Memphis for five years in the mid-1950s (where he began his long career as a singer and performer), and spent much of his adult life in a house on Old Hickory Lake outside Nashville, a lake created from one of the Mississippi’s major tributaries, the Cumberland. He had memorialized the Mississippi in a variety of songs, most notably 1957’s “Big River,” where the river became a frame for a love affair gone awry, 1959’s “Five Feet High and Rising,” which evoked the terror of a catastrophic flood in his youth, and 1970’s “Mississippi Delta Land,” which told of how hard agricultural labor in the rural South yielded little more than “a mind that knows the truth.” Now in “Hurt,” as the piano boomed and the song reached its crescendo, Cash dramatically signified what exactly that hard-won “truth” was. Staring straight out at the viewer and asking in song, “What have I become?” his trembling hand poured a goblet of wine all over a festal banquet table. Like detritus in the Mississippi floodwaters and wasted, wine-soaked banquet food, the trappings of fame shown in the video—awards, honors, memorabilia in the defunct House of Cash museum—were imagined as a hollow, ultimately ephemeral “empire of dirt.” To this hollow empire of dirt and destruction was contrasted, in a variety of elusive imagery, the redemptive suffering of Christianity. The video opened with a crucifix on the wall of Cash’s house, “Big River” | 183 moved on to a Victorian Protestant painting of Jesus, evoked Eucharistic imagery in its ornate festal banquet, and came to a dizzying, dramatic conclusion with images of the Crucifixion from Cash’s own 1973 life-of-Jesus film, The Gospel Road. The symbols all suggested an arc of return in Cash’s life, from the religion of his Delta youth, away from it into American popular culture, and then imaginatively back home, back to his deepest cultural roots in the faith of his upbringing. The “Hurt” video brought Cash considerable publicity that year, winning the Country Music Association’s Single of the Year award, playing over and over again on MTV and VH-1, and generating considerable public discussion . The video-single sold over two million copies, officially becoming Cash’s best-selling single shortly after its debut.1 Cash’s core audience of aging country fans watched the video and talked about it, but so did teenagers who knew little about country music and typically did not listen to anyone over thirty. The video showed Cash as a badly aged seventy-year-old man, candidly displaying his severe physical decline. But when he died in September, some six months after the video’s premiere, it came to serve with striking serendipity as a kind of self-penned epitaph on his long public career. In the months after Cash’s death, as “Hurt” was in continual replay, scores of tributes and eulogies poured forth from a wide variety of sources, from Bob Dylan to Christianity Today, from the Nation to National Review, all offering different forms of praise for a performer who had spent almost fifty years on the public stage, whose persona already seemed mythic and semi-legendary. In a reflective tribute in the Nation called, suggestively, “JC’s Resurrection,” Benjamin Hedin argued that no one else in American popular music “possessed the sort of obsession, or waged the same struggle, with faith.”2 Certainly “Hurt” displayed that struggle recently and vividly, and so did the title track of the million-selling double-album that “Hurt” appeared on, a booming epic of the apocalypse and the risen Christ that Cash wrote called “The Man Comes Around.” So also did the posthumously released My Mother’s Hymn Book (2004), an album of old gospel hymns and folk songs that Cash had learned from his mother in his Delta childhood. Cash’s artistic statements of faith coincided with a heightened presence of Protestant Christianity in American politics and culture. The Republican Party triumphed in the November 2004 presidential and congressional elections , and the...