Wired Mesh

Cash

Johnny Cash was to American music what Dostoyevski was to Russian literature, what Michelangelo was to sculpture, what Beethoven was to Romantic music, what Shakespeare was to playwriting. He was the most honest artist of his time, dealing with the bedrock struggles of life in ways that his hundreds of imitators have never begun to understand. He was the best.

Cash died today around one in the morning, at the age of 71. His passing marks the end of an era in all American music because it is the conclusion of a time in songwriting -- and in living -- when the harshest truth and the most heart-rending beauty could walk together, when community could overcome cowboy individualism, and when sin was still followed by redemption.

Connecting it all, I think, was his voice. When he sang, it sounded like one of the presidents carved on Mt. Rushmore had decided to take up country music. Even as a young man, he sounded like everyone's grandfather, wise and weary. There was an authority to his singing that added depth and dignity to even a silly ditty like "A Boy Named Sue." (Try to imagine that song's author, Shel Silverstein, singing "Sue," and then you'll really appreciate Cash's voice.) Toward the end, cracks in his voice opened up, revealing new layers of vulnerability, but he never lost the gravelly edge in his singing. Yesterday I was listening to his last album, "The Man Comes Around," and his growl on the title track was so perfect, so intense, that I yelled out "Damn!"

In Today's New York Times obituary, Stephen Holden writes, "The sound of the slapped bass on his first major hit, "I Walk the Line," and the hard-edged boom-chigga beat of the early hits he recorded with his trio, the Tennessee Three, were primal rock 'n' roll sounds. And his deep groaning voice, with its crags and quavers, demonstrated that a voice need not be pretty in order to be eloquent." But what was so amazing about Cash was that he never dichotomized that rural authenticity from beautiful melodies. All his songs are prime humming material. The raw power of that voice famously shook the rhinestone wasteland of Nashville, certainly, but Cash's influence flowed in the other direction as well. It was after starting a friendship with Cash, for example, that Bob Dylan released his Nashville Skyline album, shocking his fans with his discovery that he could still be honest without singing like a dying eel.

Today's popular culture no longer recognizes that union between beauty and hard truth. These days, you're either a fan of Enya or Eminiem -- treacly senimentality of hard-edged rebellion. Johnny Cash never made that distinction. He didn't sing like an angel or a devil: He sang like a pilgrim on a very long journey.

He didn't take that journey alone of course. The "Man in Black" image was of an angry young troublemaker, symbolized famously was no invention -- he once started a forest fire, for heaven's sake -- but neither is it a surprise that Johnny Cash died only four months after his wife, June Carter Cash. He was as dedicated to his "mama bear" as a man could be, and his marriage to her placed him directly in the center of the Carter family, a gospel-singing community that carried him through many a difficult time. If Johnny Cash was the image of the hard-working, minimum wage American, then the Carters were the equally American family he came home to at night.

Cash first met his wife-to-be while wrecking her car. She was married to a bandmate of his, and as that marriage fell apart, Cash joined his buddy in throwing back a few cold ones and going to smash up June's house. They totalled the car. Months later, Johnny actually met June. Two years later, they wed. The legend is that she converted him to Christianity and put him on the straight and narrow. The truth is more complicated. Cash's marriage indeed brought with it a reawakening of the his faith (he became a Christian at a summer camp when he was 12), but the next 30 years saw him in a constant battle with depression and two bottles: one with booze and one with pills. Johnny Cash's life was about struggle, a series of hard-won battles with his own bad-boy nature.

His songs reflected that battle of sin and grace. Few of them discuss romantic love or beer-fueled brawling without also featuring the fear of judgement, the regret for murderous deeds ("But I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die. When I hear that whistle blowin' I hang my head and cry"), and the hope of salvation. It's appropriate that the last self-penned song he released, "The Man Comes Around," is about the Apocalypse, and the combination of judgement and mercy it paradoxically contains. Cash's songs never fit the easy evangelical pattern of new birth followed by life of the heavenly highway. They were about sanctification in the middle of a ring of fire, about the pain that comes from doing wrong and the hope that comes from the love of God or a good woman. As he told an MTV interviewer last month, "You can't let people delegate to you what you should do when it's coming from way in here" (tapping his heart). "I wouldn't let anybody influence me into thinking I was doing the wrong thing by singing about death, hell and drugs. 'Cause I've always done that. And I always will."

When it comes to evaluating what Johnny Cash really meant, I'm at a loss for words. I'm a very young man, and he's been old since before I was born. But what I feel about Cash is perhaps a bit like the feelings G. K. Chesterton expressed for the Catholic church. He said that the church was the unifying force that allowed justice and mercy to kiss, whereas now they are no longer even on speaking terms. In a similar way, I think Johnny Cash stood for the rapidly disappearing union of disparate aspects of the American mind. His songs never valued the individual over family, never spoke truth without a simple rythym and melody, and always united sin and grace as a fully linked concept. These are the fundamental unions of Johnny Cash, and they are fundamentally American unions. And I can't help but wonder if they will long survive him in this increasingly fragmented society.

Johnny Cash was the soul of American music. We are going to miss him.

But we'll see him again, too. "I expect my life to end pretty soon," he said recently. "I'm 71 years old. I have great faith, though. I have unshakable faith."

Posted by mesh at September 12, 2003 04:45 PM | TrackBack