AMERICAN:

Johnny Cash's Legacy of Emotions, on CD's (NEIL STRAUSS, 11/27/03, NY Times)

I'll play you one song," the record producer Rick Rubin said over the telephone. Two clicking sounds could be heard in the background. Then a voice, singing, came through the earpiece: "I never thought I needed help before/Thought that I could get by by myself."

The voice was that of Johnny Cash, accompanied only by a softly strummed guitar, the song by Larry Gatlin. Cash's voice cracked and wavered with each word, at times falling out of tempo and tune as if fighting against extinguishment. Yet it continued, slow, determined, choking back emotion: "But now I know I just can't take it anymore/And with a humble heart on bended knee/I'm begging you please for help."

The song, Mr. Rubin said, was recorded two months after the death of Cash's wife, June, and two months before Cash's own death on Sept. 12 at 71.

It is one of 40 to 50 songs that Cash had recorded for "American V," the fifth CD in a 10-year collaboration between Cash and Mr. Rubin, who started his career producing the Beastie Boys and Run-D.M.C. The disc is expected to be released next year. In the meantime a five-CD box set that includes 64 previously unreleased Cash recordings was released this week under the title Cash Unearthed, a name that Cash helped select.

The CD includes collaborations with Joe Strummer, Carl Perkins, Willie Nelson, Tom Petty, Nick Cave and, in a moving version of the Cat Stevens song "Father and Son," Fiona Apple. The solo material ranges from bittersweet new tracks like "Singer of Songs" to stripped-down classic gospel and country, like an organ-enhanced "Big Iron" that rivals the Marty Robbins hit.

"Isn't it amazing that my father would pass away and such a body of work would come out?" said Cash's son, John Carter Cash. "It looks like a 30-year section of music, but it was all recorded in the last few years. And what's amazing is how much more there is."

Ammo for your Amazon Wish List.

MORE:
Johnny of the Cross (Peter M. Candler, Jr, December 2003, First Things)

In the world of popular music, one generally becomes a “legend” only in death—as if death accomplishes for a musician all that he was unable to do for himself in life. Legends are often made in the manner of their death—in a helicopter crash, say, or collapsed on the bathroom floor. But Johnny Cash’s death at seventy-one on September 12 was decidedly un-legend-like: silent, slow, and unspectacular. Yet “legend” seems, if anything, not big enough a word to describe Johnny Cash.

We all knew the end was coming, particularly after June Carter, to everyone’s shock, beat him to it. But the impact of the news was not thereby diminished. On that Friday we lost possibly America’s most singular individual. I don’t think that it’s too much of a stretch to say that in Johnny’s death a little bit of what is best about America died, too.

The only word that seems to suffice here is magnanimity. The OED defines it poetically: “In Aristotle’s sense of megalopsuchia . . . loftiness of thought or purpose, grandeur of designs, nobly ambitious spirit. Now rare.” That was Johnny Cash: great-souled, rare. Everything about him was as big and black and broad as the Arkansas delta, from his physical stature and persona to “that” voice.

Yet his life cannot be reduced to a metaphor. It was more than just one of noble ambition or grandeur of design; Johnny’s virtues were just as hard-fought as his vices. In life Johnny Cash struggled for and against the God whose grip on him was so frustratingly and thankfully relentless that it was able to absorb all that fierce rage and all those addictions. Johnny could sing about murder and God in the same song and with the same voice because to do otherwise would have been dishonest. At the same time, he let that despair, agony, and rejection stand on their own—he lent them integrity. There was no serious salvation unless there was first some serious sin. Cash echoed St. Paul: “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.” But there is at least one thing that Cash never was, and that is a moralist. He did not chalk doubt up to a misunderstanding. Rather, Cash showed that doubt is itself proper to faith. A God who could not stomach the darkest moments of His creation was not worth our worship, much less a song.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 27, 2003 9:02 AM