A Free Man

That’s the way one of my favorite live albums starts, that deep baritone voice, with the soft Southern accent. This is followed by one of the most familiar guitar licks you’ll ever hear and…

“I hear the train a comin’
It’s rollin’ ’round the bend,
And I ain’t seen the sunshine,
Since, I don’t know when,
I’m stuck in Folsom Prison,
And time keeps draggin’ on…”

The other day we were playing the baby Johnny Cash - the Sun Records version of “I Walk the Line”, in his/her continuing pre-natal musical education, and he or she went crazy, started kicking like Michael Flatley. We’ve interpreted this response as the baby enjoying the music - we’re glass half full kind of people. Now I found this kind of odd, I mean what’s in Johnny Cash for an unborn baby, where are the bits for him/her to relate to? Sometimes I think about things too much, but it got my memory working.

Some of the first music I remember hearing when I was a kid was Johnny Cash. When we first moved to Florida, my dad had a big green Mercury Marquis with an 8-track cassette player and was a big fan of Cash’s “Folsom/San Quentin” live album. I can remember driving in that car with the windows down (no A/C) in the Florida summer just melting into the vinyl seats, with my Dad singing the chorus:

“When I was just a baby, my mama told me, ‘Son,
Always be a good boy; don’t ever play with guns.’ But I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.
When I hear that whistle blowin’ I hang my head and cry… ”

That’s the only verse he ever sung. I’m convinced to this day that my Dad knows only one verse to about a hundred songs.

Johnny Cash was the original rebel. He played country and gospel when Sun wanted rock n’ roll. He did live albums in prison when his record company thought that was career suicide. He made mistakes but he got his life and career together when he needed to. There’s something pure and simple about Cash’s music. There’s no bluster and attitude. He was never a great guitarist, but the sound that comes through on his early recordings is something that had never been heard before. Listen to those Sun recordings of Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two - just Cash, Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant. The music just plunges forward, it’s like a steam train chugging ahead, not necessarily beautiful, but damn compelling.

Cash fell out of favor with the public in the 80’s. So much so that he played a concert at the community college gymnasium in the small Florida town where I grew up. My Dad and I went to see it. Unfortunately I don’t remember much of the concert, but I do remember getting ill midway through and having to leave early. Wasn’t the last time I would get sick at a concert, but the only time that it wasn’t self induced.

Cash’s resurgence came in collaboration with the producer Rick Rubin, known mostly for producing rap albums. When “American” came out in 1994, I was living in Seattle and trying to live a lifestyle with little room in it for anything from my past. But I couldn’t deny the power of this record, just Cash and his guitar. His voice sounded different, weaker but in a way richer. And songs like the cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire” brought a ton of emotion that I could have done without in a kind of fragile emotional state.

Cash and Rubin released four of these records and one posthumously. I think the best is “American IV: The Man Comes Around”. I saw the video for “Hurt” before hearing the album and was awestruck. It’s an amazing testament to Cash and the footage of him, in very advanced age recovering from his own illness and the death of his wife is shocking. The album itself is amazing and unlike the other American series, the Cash originals on this album are the best tracks. Particularly the title track and “Give My Love to Rose”. The latter was originally recorded in 1959, but it’s the version on this album, when Cash sings:

“I found him by the railroad track this morning
I could see that he was nearly dead
I knelt down beside him and I listened
Just to hear the words the dying fellow said…”

You can tell you’re listening to a man that has a grip on his own mortality.

So, pardon, the riff. This was meant to be about why our baby might like Johnny Cash. And I don’t know, but I have a couple of ideas. Maybe it’s because you can’t not like Johnny Cash. I know people who hate country music, but still own a Cash album or two. He’s like Elvis or the Beatles, essential to modern music as we know it. And the honesty and simplicity of his music is impossible to dislike.

Or maybe its for the reason that I liked it when I was a kid. Maybe Baby DVD likes Johnny Cash because his or her Dad does. I like that answer, but then, I am a half glass full kind of guy.

MP3: Johnny Cash - “Folsom Prison Blues” (Live)
MP3: Johnny Cash - “Give My Love to Rose”