One gets the impression that when Johnny Cash lays eyes on St. Peter, he'll have a guitar slung around his neck and be looking for a microphone. The Man in Black never seemed to have been satisfied with any kind of retirement plan-the video of his version of the Nine Inch Nails song "Hurt" was a multiple nominee at last month's MTV awards--and we are all beneficiaries of his work ethic. "So many times, when there would be something I'd have to do that I didn't have my heart in, I'd say, 'All I ever wanted to do was play my guitar and sing a simple song,'" Cash told Rolling Stone magazine. "And that's still all I want to do."
Dead today at the age of 71, Johnny Cash is a patriarch of modern American music, a singer and songwriter almost beyond category. Launched into fame by hits such as "Folsom Prison Blues," "Ring of Fire," and "I Walk the Line," Cash sold more than 50 million records and won 11 Grammys. He is the only person to be inducted into the rock-and-roll, country music and songwriters halls of fame. He worked with Elvis and Dylan, and performed for presidents and prisoners.
He wrote books, hosted a popular television show, starred in and produced movies, and recorded some 1,500 songs found on 500 albums. The king of blue-collar troubadours, Cash had the lurching height of a NBA forward, the distinctive features of an Abe Lincoln, the swagger of John Wayne, and the he could rise to a moral authority equal to Moses'.
'Can You Hear the Angels Sing?'
Cash was brought up in Depression-era Arkansas, a farm boy whose family scraped at twenty acres of government-granted land. His was a white-trash culture that depended on the white light of religion. The echoes of Pentecostal fire and brimstone preaching reverberating through his soul. "The first preachers I heard at a Pentecostal church in Dyness, Arkansas, scared me," Cash wrote. "The talk about sin and death and eternal hell without redemption, made a mark on me. At four, I'd peep out of the window of our farmhouse at night, and if, in the distance, I saw a grass fire or a forest fire, I knew hell was almost here." That deep sense of everlasting accountability was etched deep into the soul of Cash.
The young Cash loved music, especially when his mother, Carrie, sang gospel songs in the cotton fields or played guitar and sang "What Would You Give In Exchange for Your Soul?" by the Monroe Brothers. "The music in the Pentecostal churches in the early years was wonderful," Cash recalled. "They were more liberal with the musical instruments used. I learned to sit through the scary sermons, just to hear the music; mandolins, fiddles, bass, banjo, and flattop guitars. Hell might be on the horizon, but the wonderful gospel-spiritual songs carried me above it."
