I had the privilege of spending a couple of hours with Johnny Cash twice; on neither occasion was he dressed, head to toe, in his signature black. The first time, at the Cashes’ sprawling home on Old Hickory Lake in Hendersonville, he had on jeans and an untucked blue Oxford cloth shirt with a button-down collar. The second, at the cottage that he and his wife June shared at the Carter Fold in the Clinch Mountains of southwestern Virginia, he wore black sweatpants and an embroidered white work shirt.
That second encounter was in September of last year, on the final day of summer. The leaves were starting to turn, but it was still hot and sticky, and storms were gathering to the west. I was on assignment and had driven from Nashville to interview Johnny at the Fold, the old homestead of the “first family of country music”—the place where A.P. Carter was born and where he and his ex-wife and singing partner Sara are buried. The Cashes were there, at the house that used to belong to June’s parents, Mother Maybelle and Ezra Carter, to work on her latest album, an unvarnished musical memoir called Wildwood Flower that the Dualtone label released after her death this spring.
Johnny was propped up in a black leather recliner as I was shown into their modest, memento-lined living room, his feet elevated to prevent swelling due to water retention brought on by diabetes. He also suffered from asthma and autonomic neuropathy, and looked more frail than imposing, his eyes glassy and tired. Yet somehow, he still seemed vital, even unassailable, sitting there; though ravaged by time, pills and sickness, his craggy baritone reverberated with a mix of dignity, hunger and steadfastness that carried much the same biblical freight as the man himself.
Indeed, the week before in Nashville, at the Americana Music Awards, he had accepted the first ever Spirit of Americana Free Speech Award for his unflagging commitment to people struggling on society’s margins. He was also set to release the fourth album in his series of career-rejuvenating American Recordings with rap-metal producer Rick Rubin, and plans for a fifth project were already in the works. And he still had June, his partner and soul mate for the better part of four decades, at his side.
Cash pressed on after June’s passing May 15, of complications from heart surgery; he even made public appearances and continued to record. But he was also in and out of the hospital, his final stay at Baptist ending with his death, from respiratory failure, shortly before dawn last Friday morning. People sensed it was coming; journalists had been updating their obits ever since his health fell off precipitously after he was diagnosed—mistakenly, it turned out—with Parkinson’s disease in the mid-’90s. It’s one thing, though, to contemplate a world in which we’ll never again hear him utter, “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash”; it’s quite another to face the fact that, from now on, that salutation will merely echo in our memories.
Celebrities and public figures die all the time, but Cash, who was 71, was different: The figure he cut, the way he sounded and the things he stood for are etched into popular consciousness as ineradicably as the presidential countenances chiseled into Mt. Rushmore. Doubtless, some will find consolation in knowing that Johnny and June are somehow reunited, as they believed they would be—and as they sang in “Far Side Banks of Jordan.” But for many who remain behind, Cash’s passing is tantamount to losing a totem, an emotional and cultural compass the fixity and magnitude of which rival that of the North Star.
As emblematic and conflicted a figure as any in American popular culture, Johnny Cash was a singer, songwriter, actor, author, filmmaker, historian and social activist who transcended categorization at nearly every turn. His music spanned country, folk, pop and rock, even as it influenced punk and rap. (He was the first person inducted into both the country music and rock ’n’ roll halls of fame.) He was a doubter and a believer and could be hip as well as square, a rebel and a voice of reconciliation. He was an addict and an evangelist, a protestor of the war in Vietnam and a guest at the Nixon White House, a singer of grim odes to murder like “Delia’s Gone” and an aficionado of clodhopper cornpone who married one of the funniest country comics ever. Unwilling to let any one thing define him, Cash could truly say, with Walt Whitman, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”
Which is why it’s been so vexing in recent years to see the media, and especially the rock press, reduce Cash to a two-dimensional avatar of darkness, equal parts proto-punk and forerunner of the gangsta MC. This isn’t to say that his dark side—his addictions, his hell-raising, his bouts of emotional turbulence—don’t define a large part of his myth. Nor to deny that many people identify with the outlaw hero tradition of which that myth is an extension, particularly as epitomized by Cash’s Man in Black persona. And neither is it to ignore the extent to which the prevailing fascination with the “bad-ass Cash”—the man who flipped off the camera at San Quentin and kicked out the footlights of the Grand Ole Opry stage—is a product of how the singer was marketed by his record label in the last decade.
Yet to tout his darker tendencies at the expense of the romantic, fun-loving and devotional sides of his character obscures the outsized spiritual journey that made Cash so heroic in the first place: his lifelong struggle—not nearly as easy as “I Walk the Line” admits—to remain true to his unruly heart. He wrote the song as a pledge of fidelity to his first wife, Vivian Liberto, but over the years, Cash’s vow to keep the ends out for the ties that bind took on greater existential significance. He seemed to be confessing—his message driven home by the obdurate beat of the Tennessee Two—how desperately he wanted to unite the disparate strands of his conflicted self in hopes of subduing the beast within. It was through this hard-won multiplicity, and not by collapsing the tensions that dogged and defined him, that Cash achieved whatever transcendence he did.
That transcendence was considerable, and it’s writ large in his music, beginning with the staggering catalog of songs he wrote: “Folsom Prison Blues” (flinty and class-conscious), “I Walk the Line” (definitive), “Big River” (Rabelaisian), “I Still Miss Someone” (a wrenching expression of Ralph Ellison’s “blues impulse”), “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town” (epic), “Daddy Sang Bass” (sentimental and devout), “Man in Black” (self-mythologizing), “The Man Comes Around” (apocalyptic). It’s also evident in the way Cash sang these songs, and those of others—“Ballad of Ira Hayes” (patriotism at its radical best), “A Boy Named Sue” (serious fun), “Sunday Morning Coming Down” (spiritual abandonment on the brink)—his voice imperious, inimitable and, you’d swear, sui generis. And it’s there in the boom-chicka-boom that drove it all, the inexorable, freight-train rhythm that Cash patented with Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant at Sun Records—a sound as enduring as Bo Diddley’s hambone beat, Ray Price’s 4/4 shuffle or the one-chord funk vamps of James Brown & the JBs.
That transcendence is likewise there in Cash’s prodigious journey—in his rise from the cotton fields of Arkansas; in his perseverance and breakthrough with Sam Phillips at Sun; in his heady early days touring with Elvis, Jerry Lee, Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins; in his struggles with drugs, booze and self-doubt; and, finally, in his redemption by June Carter and her parents. “June and her family have kept me steadily on course when the rudder was shaky,” he told me in 1999. June might have written “Ring of Fire” (with Merle Kilgore) out of the trepidation she felt when she was falling hard for Johnny, but she proved to be even tougher than he was. She didn’t just flush his pills down the toilet; she loved him with a fierceness that made their romance one of the great love stories of the 20th century.
Together, the Cashes blended two unwieldy broods, had one son of their own, toured the globe, starred on TV and in movies together, and adopted all manner of singers, actors and ex-sons-in-law, seemingly drawing everyone into their fold. Indeed, few people have evinced Johnny and June’s gift for attracting and uniting people of different stripes, from Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson to Billy Graham and Robert Duvall. And that’s to say nothing of Johnny’s wide-ranging taste in songwriters, including the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Trent Reznor, Dorothy Love Coates and Beck. Nowhere was this ecumenism more dazzling than on his pioneering TV variety show, which during its run on ABC from 1969 to 1971 played host to such disparate icons as Dylan, Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson and The Who. Making hillbilly culture hip to mainstream and even countercultural audiences, The Johnny Cash Show contributed more to the Southernization of American culture than anything else from its era.
Through it all, Cash remained attuned to issues of social class, and not just at arm’s length. Born of the poverty he endured as a child, his vision of justice compelled him to stand, like a tree planted by the water, with oppressed people everywhere, be they in prison, on the streets, in hospital wards or otherwise on the margins of society. It was precisely this prophetic voice and stance—his ability to connect the dots between poverty and incarceration in “Folsom Prison Blues,” or between racism and disenfranchisement in “Ballad of Ira Hayes”—that made him the Man in Black.
The meaning of that “blackness” has been masked by the recent gloom-as-fashion portrayals of Cash’s persona—a persona born of his ability to envision a better world, to see a light that might dispel the darkness. Cash acknowledged as much, amid considerable talk of home and family, when I spoke with him at the Carter Fold a year ago. Yet he also admitted that despite his appreciation for—and embodiment of—the outlaw-hero mystique, he too had contributed to the increasingly narrow picture of his image and legacy. “I pigeonholed myself a lot,” he said. “It’s true that maybe I’m defining myself more as an artist, and maybe as a person, in these later years. I don’t know. But looking back at myself, and at what I project out there, there seems to be a hardness and a bitterness and a coldness...and I’m not sure I’m too happy with that. I’m not sure that’s the image I want to project, because I’m a pretty happy man.”
Later that morning he asked me if I’d fix him a cup of coffee. He took it black, with three sweeteners.
