Johnny Cash: The Authentic Voice of the American South - Research Paper Example

Johnny Cash The Authentic Voice of the American South. Introduction This paper presents a biographical study of the life and work of Johnny Cash (1932-2003). In his autobiography the singer saw his status towards the end of his life as having moved from “Nashville has-been” to “hip icon”1 and it is true that he was a gifted musician who achieved considerable wealth and renown in a long and varied career. This paper will argue that his significance goes beyond the superficial fame of a commercial singing star because he gave expression to the lived experience of millions of Southern States Americans in the 20th Century. His ability to combine key elements from his early life in Arkansas into his musical work meant that his story and America’s story were merged in an authentic and exceptionally memorable way. The Life and Times of Johnny Cash Johnny Cash was born in 1932 as the fourth child in a family of seven children in Kingsland, Arkansas.2 This rural area had suffered very badly during the Great Depression, and the economic consequences of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 sent the prices for agricultural produce dropping at rates never before seen. His father, Ray Cash, was an impoverished share-cropper, which meant that he was dependent on seasonal work and a variety of temporary jobs such as cattle tending and woodcutting to feed his family. His mother Carrie was a devout Baptist and a lover of music who encouraged her children to sing gospels and hymns while they worked in the fields. Roosevelt became President the year after Johnny Cash was born, and he immediately set to work on the New Deal, a collection of initiatives designed to help families like the Cash family who had insufficient income to live on, and no land or property which they could mortgage.3 Large parts of Arkansas were over dependent on the cotton crop, and when prices had fallen from $125 per bale before the Great Depression to only $25 per five-hundred-pound bale in 19324 it was clear that emergency measures had to be introduced to save whole communities from starvation. The Agricultural Adjustment Act was passed in May 1933 with the goal of raising agricultural prices by reducing the total volume of crops produced, and resettling the poorest of the white farmers to uncultivated areas5. In 1935 the Cash family took advantage of this opportunity and moved to a specially created colony called Dyess. A house and a portion of land were provided, and the family were required to make the tangled, uncultivated land into a profitable concern and pay back the costs when their harvest was in. Life was tough, and the family struggled against the extremes of Arkansas weather, including severe storms and floods, and personal tragedy when their second son Jack, the beloved elder brother of John, was killed in a chainsaw accident. This event marked Johnny Cash with deep sadness. At the time it strengthened his Baptist faith but it was also to haunt him with a feeling of guilt and despair for the rest of his life. In his earliest years Johnny Cash was deeply immersed in rural life. Free schooling was provided, and he was elected vice president of his school’s chapter of the “Future Farmers of America” organization.6 When he graduated he, like the majority of his classmates, travelled far away to seek work on a production line in a factory. Cash was homesick, and returned from his job in Michigan to Arkansas. This was 1950, and the Korean War started in June of that year. In July Cash joined the U.S. Air Force, to avoid being drafted to a combat area. He served time near the Mexican border and in Germany until in 1954 he returned to marry his first wife Vivian and settle in Memphis, Tennessee with a sales job. In due course he found recording contracts for his music, and travelled to California and across America to become one of the greatest singing stars of the late sixties and the seventies. His addiction to alcohol and amphetamines contributed to the break up of his first marriage but he had a long and happy marriage to his second wife June. In 1994, at the age of 62, he had a comeback, encouraged by the record producer Rich Rubin7 and found a whole new generation of fans for his lone guitar and solemn singing style. The Significance of the Man and his Work. From an early focus on religious themes and styles, Johnny Cash matured into a protest singer in a folk/country genre. He made a series of live prison recordings, first in Folsom Prison, California and then in San Quentin, also in California, and in Ostraka Prison in Stockholm, Sweden which enhanced his reputation as a wild man, who had a lot of sympathy for the underdog, and for men who lived on the wrong side of the law. One of his most famous songs, “Man in Black” which he recorded in 1971 for the album of the same name contains the lines “I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down, living in the hopeless, hungry side of town/I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime” and this image became his trademark. It recalls the working class deprivation of his childhood, and may be a reflection of the person he could well have become, without the intervention of his family and his faith. A great many of his songs like “I Walk the Line” (1956) and “Ring of Fire” (1963), speak of the moral struggles of a Bible believing Southern man who knows what is right, but so often cannot stay on the straight and narrow path. Edwards describes how Cash in 1990 turned the old black folk song “Delia’s gone” into a “bitter, jangling, Southern Gothic lament rather than a rousing folk sing-a-long”.8 This is not the cosy, comfortable country music of Nashville, but something edgier, both more ancient and yet more contemporary. It shows that Cash could use his talents to bring a strong message to different generations of listeners, without changing the core beliefs that he retained throughout his life. Edwards goes on to point out the apparent contradictions in the political positions that Cash adopted, ranging from this prison reform agenda, to support for Republican President Nixon and concludes that Cash “embodies a model of placing competing American ideas in a productive tension”9. Cash profited hugely from the media-obsessed country music scene, but equally railed against its commercialism. This was a man who spanned a very wide moral spectrum and yet still managed to walk some kind of consistent line thorough it all which people recognised and identified with. In Edwards’ view, then, Cash was expressing nostalgia, and a longing many Americans in the late twentieth century still felt for a rural past without the chaos and complexity of modern industrialized, urban life. Other critics see a specifically blue collar appeal in the songs, for example Fox says that country music is a “class-specific cultural response to changes in the regional, national and global economy” in which working class Americans have lost “both cultural identity and economic security”.10 This stands in contrast with the more intellectual protest songs of Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and the like, who came from a more privileged and highly educated milieu. Hypocrite or Saint? Throughout his lifetime and even more since his death, the phenomenon of Johnny Cash has attracted some considerable attention. There is no question that he was an exceptional man, with an exceptional talent, but there are certainly questions to be asked about his messages and the tenability of some of his positions. On the issue of race, for example, he appears on the surface to be a pro-Native American activist, and many of his songs, such as “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” have become anthems used by civil rights groups who focus on the needs of this and other ethnic minorities. On the other hand, however, Cash bought a mansion on the island of Jamaica and famously lived a life of imperialist luxury at the expense of an impoverished local community11. In religious matters, too, there are huge discrepancies, so that, for example, he was able to make a recording of the New Testament (1990) and multiple religious albums throughout his life, despite abandoning his first wife, being several times hospitalized for alcoholism, and leading a debauched life of drug abuse and violence. Against this background some of his lyrics can appear to be more sanctimonious than saintly. Johnny Cash could be accused, also, of exploiting the schmaltz factor that many people see at the heart of country music, and exploiting his family towards the end of his life when he filmed his last days for a television documentary. A particularly clear example of the tacky side of his reputation can be seen in the Arkansas Entertainers Hall of Fame Website which entices visitors with the opening words: “Come to the Arkansas Entertainers Hall of Fame and trace the careers of The Natural State’s sons and daughters who have made their mark on the entertainment world. Be greeted by an animatronic statue of Johnny Cash that will entertain you with several original songs”.12 Some of his autobiography reads like a mythologizing of his own past, for example when he says “Our house was right on the railroad tracks,… one of my first memories is of seeing (his father) jump out of a moving boxcar and roll down into the ditch in front of our door”13 and “The first song I remember singing was “I am Bound for the Promised Land” on the road to Dyess”.14 These statements sound like clichés, or sound-bites from a man (or perhaps from a ghostwriter, because one is never quite sure who actually writes celebrity autobiographies!) who wants to look good in the annals of fame. The phenomenon that is Johnny Cash does indeed display elements of the hypocrite, and elements of the over-hyped saintly icon. Conclusion In summary, then, we have seen that this larger than life character tapped into a vein of American experience that is both backwards looking, to the period just after the Great Depression, and rooted in working class popular culture of the 1960s and the late 20th century. Gospel and country music were a natural medium of expression for this sensibility and he was fortunate to have talent enough to make an extremely good living from his work. The paradoxes and contradictions that mark the life and work of Johnny cash echo the trials of the American South: protestant, Bible based religion, set against the temptations of alcohol, sex and drugs and an agriculture based economy set against economic change towards urbanization. Johnny Cash sang about these things, but unlike many singers, he actually did live those experiences. He was the quintessential poor Arkansas kid with no shoes, and had a father who hitched a ride on boxcars in search of work. He was a country boy in a sophisticated world which despises, but secretly longs for, the simplicity of his origins. The important thing about clichés is that they so often contain quite a large element of truth. Johnny Cash, for all his faults, was the authentic voice of the American South in the twentieth century. Bibliography Arkansas Entertainers Hall of Fame website. Available at: http://www.arkansasentertainershalloffame.com/ Cash, Johnny. Cash: The Autobiography. New York: Harper Collins, 1997. Edwards, Leigh. Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009. Fox, Aaron, A. Real Country: Music and Language in Working Class Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Johnson, Ben F. Arkansas in Modern America. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2002. Streissguth, Michael. Johnny Cash: The Biography. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2006. Whayne, Jeannie, M. A New Plantation South: Land, Labor and Federal Favor in Twentieth Century Arkansas. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1996. Read More