The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The sins of the Man in Black
A handsome new book, replete with gorgeous photography, surveys Johnny Cash’s life and lyrics – though there are some depths it’s reluctant to plumb
I once asked Cash for his favourite advice. ‘Don’t keep whiskey by the bed,’ he replied
Johnny Cash is a Mount Rushmore figure in American music. He had a voice as deep and ancient as the wellspring from which his folk and country heritage sprang, and a face that might well have been carved from a mountainside. Across six extraordinary decades as a recording artist, from his debut single Hey Porter (1955) to his 67th and final album American IV: The Man Comes Around (2002), Cash wrestled with love, hate, crime, punishment, forgiveness, redemption, death and salvation. He was the God-loving sinner who could deliver his most famous line, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”, with the same conviction he brought to a gospel spiritual.
“I have a feeling for human nature in difficult situations – don’t know why, but I always have,” Cash told me during an interview in 2002, the year before he died at the age of 71. We spoke via a transatlantic phone call, and I can still recall the thrill of hearing him come on the line with the four words he’d uttered at thousands of concerts: “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.” That famous gravel voice was instantly recognisable, if a little shaky with age. When I asked him whether, looking back over his long life, he had any regrets, he laughed. “None that I’d really like to publicise. I don’t cry in my beer – or milk, for that matter.”
Cash was then in the midst of a late-career flourish, releasing a series of stripped-back albums produced by Rick Rubin. More than just a coda to a rollercoaster career, the American series framed Cash as an immensely complex figure, embodying and embracing the many contradictions of being human. “Truth is what ties it all together,” he told me of his vast recorded output, almost all of it featuring sparse productions that made no concessions to fads. “I never thought about doing it any other way except the simple, straightforward bare-bones way that felt right in the beginning… I try to keep it down to earth – play it as it lays and say it as it is.”
Standing 6ft 2in, and with an incomparable gravitas, Cash was a big man in every sense of the word, and it takes a big book to do him justice. The Life in Lyrics is a proper doorstopper, a large-format hardback of 384 pages that weighs in at 4.5lb. Structured partly chronologically and partly thematically, it attempts to tell a life story in songs and pictures, packed with 125 lyrics – from the 600-plus Cash composed – plus hundreds of photographs, handwritten letters and memorabilia from his personal archive.
The photos are glorious. In shots from 1969, a year in which Cash saw off the challenge of Elvis Presley, the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel to be named the biggest-selling recording artist in America, his hands are bony and rough-skinned, testament to a poor childhood spent picking cotton and fights. His face looks whip-thin and dustblown, brow deeply furrowed, eyes sunken and haunted. Those were his wild, mean days of amphetamines and whiskey. “I always thought somebody was trailing me,” he told me in 2002. It may have been the ghost of his beloved older brother Jack, who died, aged 12, in a horrific chainsaw accident. “I probably never did get over it,” Cash admitted.
But he certainly worked through it. Among the classic songs that Cash composed, and are reproduced here, were the deathless romantic ballad I Walk the Line, the bitter confessional Folsom Prison Blues, the epic Big River, the tragicomic flood narrative Five Feet High and Rising, the careworn lament Don’t Take Your Guns to Town, and the stark protest song All of God’s Children Ain’t Free. At their best, Cash’s lyrics are carefully wrought, with the basic structures and rhyming schemes of folk poetry underpinned by rough-hewn wisdom, sharp observation and quick wit. His signature song, Man in Black (1971), remains an enduringly powerful statement of empathy for his fellow man: “I wear black for the poor and beaten-down / Living on the hopeless hungry side of town.”
These songs were written to be sung, however, and in The Life in Lyrics, without that inimitable voice to sustain them, their essential simplicity can appear trite. The accompanying text, written by authorised Cash biographer Mark Stielper with dewy-eyed contributions from Cash’s son John Carter Cash, is informative but hagiographic, with a tendency to exaggerate achievements and gloss over failings. Cash’s brave 1969 anti-Vietnam war song, Route 1, Box 144, which describes a dead American soldier being returned to his family, may offer touching commentary, but is it really “the greatest argument for peace ever devised”?
There’s also an unfortunate tendency to brush over or excuse the
darker elements of Cash’s life, the drug addictions, infidelities and appalling behaviour – despite the fact that these gave his music so much depth. The 1964 hit Understand Your Man is a song of spectacular bitterness directed at his soon-to-be ex-wife Vivian while he was already having an affair with future wife June Carter, yet it warrants only a brief, glib paragraph. I could have done with fewer stories about the deeply pious impulses behind Cash’s gospel hymns, and more tales about, say, the time he smashed every crystal chandelier in a hotel lobby in a drug-fuelled rage over his amorous rejection by a friend’s widow. The Man in Black accepted the darkness within him: it’s a disservice to try to whitewash his image now.
As well as being a songwriter, Cash was an interpreter who could make a song completely his own, but this aspect of his art is inevitably missing from a book of his lyrics, so there’s no commentary on such Cash hits as Ring of Fire, A Boy Named Sue, The Ballad of Ira Hayes, Highwayman or his definitive cover of Hurt (originally by the industrial metal group Nine Inch Nails). We do, however, learn of the genesis of one of his last and finest songs, the mysterious, apocalyptic The Man Comes Around. Composed in 2000, it was apparently inspired by a dream about none other than Elizabeth II, who told him: “Johnny Cash, you’re like a thorn tree in a whirlwind.”
In the last song Cash wrote, Like the 309, he imagined being carried away by a heavenly train, and viewed it with anticipatory relish: “Take me to the depot, put me to bed / Blow an electric fan on my gnarly old head.” As we reach the end of this mighty book, with the cumulative impact of Cash’s sincere words, the photos of his creased face changing over the years, his clear and consistent love for June and family and, indeed, his fellow man, the final pages become incredibly moving. Blind and weakened, Cash awaits his inevitable end, still embracing life with humour and pathos. When I spoke to him that day, he was stoically suffering ill health, and in such constant pain that, having kicked his pill addiction, he was required to take painkillers just to function.
Yet, when I asked what was the best advice he had ever received, he didn’t miss a beat. “Don’t sleep with your whiskey bottle by the bed,” he said, laughing deep and low. “That’s a piece of advice that has probably kept me alive this long.”