MAN IN BLACK OFF TO MEET THE MAN IN WHITE:

Johnny Cash, Singer Known as 'The Man in Black,' Dies at 71 (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, September 12, 2003)

Johnny Cash, a towering figure in American music spanning country, rock and folk and known worldwide as "The Man in Black," died Friday. He was 71. [...]

Cash had battled a disease of the nervous system, autonomic neuropathy, and pneumonia in recent years.

Dozens of hit records like "Folsom Prison Blues," "I Walk the Line," and "Sunday Morning Coming Down" defined Cash's persona: a haunted, dignified, resilient spokesman for the working man and downtrodden.

Cash's deeply lined face fit well with his unsteady voice, which was limited in range but used to great effect to sing about prisoners, heartaches, and tales of everyday life. He wrote much of his own material, and was among the first to record the songs of Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson.

"One Piece at a Time" was about an assembly line worker who built a car out of parts stolen from his factory. "A Boy Named Sue" was a comical story of a father who gives his son a girl's name to make him tough. "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" told of the drunken death of an American Indian soldier who helped raised the American flag at Iwo Jima during World War II, but returned to harsh racism in America.

Cash said in his 1997 autobiography "Cash" that he tried to speak for "voices that were ignored or even suppressed in the entertainment media, not to mention the political and educational establishments."

Cash's career spanned generations, with each finding something of value in his simple records, many of which used his trademark rockabilly rhythm. [...]

John R. Cash was born Feb. 26, 1932, in Kingsland, Ark., one of seven children. When he was 12, his 14-year-old brother and hero, Jack, died after an accident while sawing oak trees into fence posts. The tragedy had a lasting impact on Cash, and he later pointed to it as a possible reason his music was frequently melancholy.

He worked as a custodian and enlisted in the Air Force, learning guitar while stationed in Germany, before launching his music career after his 1954 discharge.

"All through the Air Force, I was so lonely for those three years," Cash told The Associated Press during a 1996 interview. "If I couldn't have sung all those old country songs, I don't think I could have made it."

Cash launched his career in Memphis, performing on radio station KWEM. He auditioned with Sun Records, ultimately recording the single "Hey Porter," which became a hit.

Sun Records also launched the careers of Presley, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis and others.

"Folsom Prison Blues," went to No. 4 on the country charts in 1956, and featured Cash's most famous couplet: "I shot a man in Reno/ just to watch him die."

Cash recorded theme albums celebrating the railroads and the Old West, and decrying the mistreatment of American Indians. Two of his most popular albums were recorded live at prisons. Along the way he notched 14 No. 1 country music hits.

Because of Cash's frequent performances in prisons and his rowdy lifestyle early in his career, many people wrongly thought he had served prison time. He never did, though he battled addictions to pills on and off throughout his life.

He blamed fame for his vulnerability to drug addiction.

"When I was a kid, I always knew I'd sing on the radio someday. I never thought about fame until it started happening to me," he said in 1988. "Then it was hard to handle. That's why I turned to pills."

He credited June Carter Cash, whom he married in 1968, with helping him stay off drugs, though he had several relapses over the years and was treated at the Betty Ford Center in California in 1984.

What made Mr. Cash so appealing is that he lived and recounted the core human dilemma, wanting to be good, but lacking the strength to be so consistently. "For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do." (Romans 7:18,19)

Here are some of the posts we've put up about Johnny Cash. As we find more stuff today, we'll add it. Obviously he'd been sick and he'd always seemed unlikely to long survive the passing of his wife, June. Still, it seems somehow that an abnormally high number of the famous folk who've died this year were not just celebrities, but genuinely important, even seminal, figures in their fields: Benny Carter, Bob Hope, Strom Thurmond, Katherine Hepburn, etc. It is at least arguable that all but Thurmond were the greatest living members of their profession at the time of their deaths.

It is the nature of Mr. Cash's career and legacy that you could choose any one of dozens of songs to remember him by today, but here's one that's especially poignant and perhaps captures his great theme:

Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down (Kris Kristofferson)

Well I woke up Sunday morning
With no way to hold my head, that didn't hurt
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad,
So I had one more for dessert.
Then I fumbled in my closet through my clothes
And found my cleanest dirty shirt.
Then I washed my face and combed my hair
And stumbled down the stairs to meet the day.

I'd smoked my mind the night before
With cigarettes and the songs I'd been pickin'
But I lit my first and watched a small kid
Playin' with a can that he was kicking
Then I walked across the street
And caught the Sunday smell of someone's fryin' chicken
And it took me back to somethin'
That I'd lost somewhere, somehow along the way.

Chorus:
On a Sunday morning sidewalk
I'm wishing Lord that I was stoned
'Cause there's something in a Sunday
That makes a body feel alone.
And there's nothin' short of dyin'
That's half as lonesome as the sound
Of a sleepin' city sidewalk
And Sunday mornin' comin' down.

In the park I saw a daddy
With a laughin' little girl who he was swingin'
And I stopped beside a Sunday school
And listened to the songs they were singin'
Then I headed down the street
And somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringin'
And it echoed thru the canyon
Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday.

MORE:
Johnny Cash, Country Music's Bare-Bones Realist, Dies at 71 (STEPHEN HOLDEN, September 12, 2003, NY Times)

Mr. Cash exerted an incalculable influence on music. As Rich Kinezie observed in Country Music magazine, he "strengthened the bonds between folk and country music so that both sides saw their similarities as well as their differences. He helped to liberalize Nashville so that it could accept the unconventional and the controversial and he did as much as anyone to make the `outlaw' phenomenon possible."

Long before the term "concept album" was coined, Mr. Cash created such thematically unified albums as "Ride This Train" (1960), "Blood, Sweat and Tears" (1963), "Bitter Tears" (1964) and "Johnny Cash Sings Ballads of the True West" (1965).

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. [...]

Mr. Cash's 1954 song about violent outcasts, "Folsom Prison Blues," has even been described as a forerunner of gangsta rap. The song, which he wrote shortly after he left the Air Force, captured an essential ingredient of his mystique, the image of the reformed outlaw:

I hear the train a-comin'

It's rollin' round the bend.

And I ain't seen the sunshine

Since I don't know when.

I'm stuck in Folsom Prison

And time keeps draggin' on.

With its bare-bones realism, the song distilled the aura of sepulchral grimness that often seemed to engulf Mr. Cash, who fought a long up-and-down battle against substance abuse, particularly amphetamine addiction. But in fact he spent only one day of his life in jail, in El Paso, for possession of pills that would have been legal with a prescription.

"There is that beast there in me. And I got to keep him caged or he'll eat me alive," he said in an interview with Neil Strauss in The New York Times in 1994. But as Mr. Strauss observed, the sinners that Johnny Cash sang about, unlike those in most gangsta rap songs, were usually plagued by guilt and in search of God's forgiveness. His tales may have been grim, but they weren't nihilistic. [...]

For all the grimness of his Man in Black persona, Mr. Cash insisted he was not a morbid person. "I am not obsessed with death — I'm obsessed with living," he said in 1994, six years after recovering from heart surgery. "The battle against the dark one and the clinging to the right one is what my life is about."

MORE:
-REVIEW: of Ring of Fire: The Johnny Cash Reader Edited by Michael Streissguth (Lisa Burrell, American Prospect)
Man in Black -- Man of Faith: Though drugs & alcohol had plagued him, Johnny Cash was steadied by his faith (Erin Curry, Sep 12, 2003, BP News)

Country music legend Johnny Cash died of complications from diabetes, which resulted in respiratory failure, Sept. 12 at age 71 in Nashville. While known as the Man in Black with hits such as "Ring of Fire," "I Walk the Line" and "A Boy Named Sue," Cash became a man of strong faith.

In May, Cash lost his wife of 35 years, June Carter Cash. At her funeral, Courtney Wilson, former pastor of First Baptist Church in Hendersonville, Tenn., recalled how 36 years ago he met June and Johnny, and one Sunday while Johnny was recovering from a bout with drug abuse, June persuaded him to go to church with her. He didn't want to get back into the public so soon, but she said they'd go late and sit in the back. They did, and Wilson preached a sermon about the living water of Christ. Johnny remembered that sermon and wrote about it in a book in later years, Wilson said.

Cash once noted that his favorite Scripture verse was Romans 8:13, which says, "For if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live...."

"Years ago I claimed this Scripture as my own promise, and I feel there were many times a lifesaving situation was realized by turning to this Scripture for counsel," Cash said in a 1997 devotional book called "Lamp Unto My Feet" by Art Toalston. "In other words, the Scriptures, or God speaking through them, have saved my life. This Scripture, especially."

In a written statement, Dr. Billy Graham called Cash not only a legend but a close personal friend, "... a good man who also struggled with many challenges in life.

"Johnny was a deeply religious man. He and June came to a number of our Crusades over a period of many years. Ruth and I took a number of personal vacations with them at their home in Jamaica and in other places. They both were like a brother and sister to Ruth and me. We loved them."

Dr. Graham shared that he and his wife were praying for the Cash family and said, "I look forward to seeing Johnny and June in heaven one day."

-Johnny Cash, Legendary Man In Black, Dies (Eric Olsen, September 12, 2003, BlogCritics)
-AUDIO: Country Music Legend Johnny Cash Dies at 71: 'Man in Black's' Career Spanned Six Decades, 11 Grammies (NPR: All Things Considered, 9/12/03)

AUDIO INTERVIEW: with Johnny Cash (Fresh Air, November 4, 1997)

Music legend Johnny Cash is one of the performers Phillips discovered and recorded in the 1950s. Cash has been inducted into the Songwriters, Country Music, and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame. His autobiography is Cash.

Fresh Air is replaying this interview today or you can listen on-line.
AN APPRECIATION: Tracing the Line Cash Walked (JON PARELES, September 13, 2003, NY Times)

Many of his songs contemplated the darkest, most violent human impulses with realism and remorse, and in them the struggle against sin was never an easy one. He sought relief in gospel songs and patriotic songs, which spelled out the moral code that his characters found so difficult to keep.

In his last decade, on a string of albums that began with "American Recordings" in 1994, Mr. Cash found songs he wanted to sing among the bleakest rock. The country mainstream had long ignored him; he once said that he had been "purged" from Nashville. But on those final albums, he completed his self-invention as a rock-ribbed avatar of tragedy.

Genre mattered less to Mr. Cash than ever. He sang alone with an acoustic guitar, like a porchside picker, and he sang backed by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (on "Unchained" in 1996, which won a Grammy award as Best Country Album). His voice, deeper and more scarred than ever, brought an adult's sorrow to the grunge defiance of Soundgarden's "Rusty Cage" and to the bitterness of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt." The last face Mr. Cash showed the public was the creased, gray, weary closeup in the video clip for "Hurt." It was the face of a man who knew he was mortally ill, with all vanity gone.

In the liner notes to "Unchained," Mr. Cash wrote, "I love songs about horses, railroads, land, Judgment Day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak and love. And Mother. And God." Mr. Cash knew himself well, and he did not flinch.

One of the words Mr. Pareles uses in his essay is gravity--how many popular acts today have any?

MORE:
-OBIT: The Man in Black reaches the end of the line: Country legend, revered by a nation and his peers, dies aged 71 (Oliver Burkeman, September 13, 2003, The Guardian)
-TRIBUTE: 'I saw music could be a beautiful, evil thing, while my parents shifted uncomfortably' (Nick Cave, September 13, 2003, The Guardian)
-OBIT: Johnny Cash: no regrets from the hell-raising Man in Black (Hugh Davies, 13/09/2003, Daily Telegraph)
-OBIT: Johnny Cash Dies: Iconic Man in Black was seventy-one (Rolling Stone)
-ESSAY: Johnny Cash: Original Gangsta' (Kurt Loder, MTV)

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 12, 2003 9:55 AM