Country Music Critics Poll

The year 2003 was one of death and tragedy for the Carter-Cash clan. It began Feb. 12 when Howie Epstein, Carlene Carter’s common-law husband from 1987 through 2002, died in New Mexico. On May 15, June Carter Cash, the family’s reigning matriarch, died unexpectedly during an operation. Johnny Cash, already in fragile health, was staggered by his wife’s death and passed on Sept. 12. Less than two weeks later, his stepdaughter Rosey Nix died in Clarksville, Tenn.

And yet it was also a year of tremendous artistic achievement for the family. When 90 music writers from North America and Europe voted in the fourth annual Country Music Critics Poll, they turned again and again to the many-branched Carter-Cash tree. The critics named the last single of Johnny Cash’s life, “Hurt,” the Best Single of 2003, and they named his posthumous box set, Unearthed, the year’s Best Reissue. Not only did those two records win, they won by the largest margins in the poll’s history. (The poll previously appeared in the now defunct Country Music magazine.)

Voters cited Fate’s Right Hand by Cash’s ex-son-in-law Rodney Crowell as the year’s Best Album. Two tracks from that album finished in the top 20 of the Best Singles voting, and Crowell was named the year’s Best Songwriter. Crowell’s ex-wife and Cash’s daughter, Rosanne Cash, finished in the top 10 for Best Album, Best Female Vocalist, Best Songwriter and Best Artist.

June Carter Cash’s Wildwood Flower was voted the year’s seventh Best Album, and her Live Recordings From the Louisiana Hayride was the 12th Best Reissue, right behind her husband’s album of the same name. Johnny Cash was also voted the second-best Artist and the second-best Male Vocalist. Marty Stuart, another of Cash’s former sons-in-law, was cited as the seventh Best Live Act and for the 11th Best Album.

It’s tempting to chalk up these votes to sentimentality, as confirmation of the old saw that “death is the best career move.” After all, Johnny Cash also won three awards from the Americana Music Association in September and three more from the Country Music Association in November. But death and loss were much more than just a publicity hook for these records; they provided the subject matter and context for the songs. This was once standard operating procedure for country music, but now it is so rare that it seems almost shocking.

It’s true that the songs were written before the tragedies, but while June’s death was a surprise, the others weren’t. Johnny Cash had already had several close calls and was living on borrowed time, and the personal demons afflicting Epstein and Nix were no secret. When Cash recorded Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” he was clearly contemplating his own mortality. Backed by minimal guitar and piano, he sings, “Everyone I know goes away in the end.” He doesn’t expect pity; he doesn’t hold out false hope; he unflinchingly confronts the truth of it, a truth that hasn’t been heard on country radio in years. When that vocal was coupled with film footage of his puffy, blotched face, the result was the rare music video where sound and image combined into a whole greater than the parts.

Even more powerful was Johnny’s duet with Rosanne, “September When It Comes,” a recording that might have received more votes if it had been released as a single before the polling began, rather than halfway through it. Rosanne’s composition is not a radio-friendly tale of uncomplicated parent-child love; it’s a story of a tremendously complex relationship, marked by absence and resentment, acknowledged by both father and daughter. The love never seems diminished by these acknowledgements, however; it seems all the richer for them. When Johnny becomes the autumnal father and, dropping all facades, sings, “I cannot be who I was then; in a way, I never was,” the effect is devastating.

Something similar happens in Rodney Crowell’s “Earthbound,” a song about looking back over “50 years of livin’ and your worst mistakes forgiven.” There’s even a verse about a cantankerous father-in-law who could well be Johnny Cash. But the song’s main point, driven by a bouncy, sparkling guitar figure, is that no matter how we dream of rising to perfect love and triumphant careers, we remain stubbornly earthbound.

This is the great achievement of Johnny Cash’s children. They took his willingness to talk frankly about the bedrock issues of American households and added the complications of the post-Beatles era—not only in the ironies of their lyrics, but also in the unpredictable changes of their chords and the push-and-pull of their rhythms. And by his children, I mean not only his kids and sons-in-law, but also artistic heirs like Patty Loveless, Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, Guy Clark, Jim Lauderdale, The Mavericks, Emmylou Harris and Buddy & Julie Miller.