Johnny Cash (1932-2003)

This has absolutely nothing to do with baseball. But I was saddened to awake this morning to the news that Johnny Cash had died. As a musician and an icon, Cash bridged gaps between generations, classes, and cultures in a way that was second to none. In a career that began alongside Elvis Presley in the mid-fifties, Cash not only outlived Elvis by twenty-five years, he was still producing relevant work nearly a half-century later. Meditate on that one for a moment.

Patriot or rebel, liberal or conservative, rich or poor, the body of Cash’s work — from his first Sun singles to his live-in-prison albums to his autumnal American Recordings series — speaks to just about everyone. “Folsom Prison Blues,” “I Walk the Line,” “I Still Miss Someone,” “Dark as a Dungeon,” “Ring of Fire,” “A Boy Named Sue,” “Man in Black,” the list of his great songs rolls on like the “Big River” of which he sang.

To put it another way, if you can’t find something that resonates in Johnny Cash’s music, you just ain’t listening.

It’s safe to say I think of Johnny Cash every day — I have a large painting of him (above), done by musician Jon Langford of the Mekons and the Waco Brothers, which hangs above our living-room couch. Cash’s music has been with me since I was a little boy, when my father would play tapes of his greatest hits on road trips to California or Oregon. Rediscovering his work as an adult not only helped to bridge a generation gap within my family, it opened me up to a whole new world of music which I continue to explore today.

And it gave me something I could finally sing in the shower without scaring the hell out of anybody within earshot; I can hit those low notes. If I could be anyone, anywhere with a microphone in front of me, it would be Cash in front of the Tennessee Two. “I hear that train a-comin’, it’s rollin’ ’round the bend, and I ain’t seen the sunshine since I don’t know when…”

Plenty of obituaries of and tributes to the man are out there today, and plenty more will be rolled out in the days to come. But the words which resonate most for me were written by Langford, as eloquent a musician as you’ll ever come across, in the liner notes to a tribute album he did in 1994:

He is the polar opposite of the cozy, safe, sexless and bland that white America usually clutches to its all purchasing, suffocating breast. Decency, truth, honesty… around him these gutted terms retain some of their original meaning and in a country that fears self-criticism above all else he holds a mirror up to its rotten hide… ironically it is patriotism and terrible guilty grief that fuels this righteous rage at totalitariansm, racism, genocide… going into the prisons & reservations, putting his own weakness under the same microscope.

Johnny Cash is gone, and he will be dearly missed. The world has lost a great voice.

As the man himself once sang, “I don’t like it, but I guess things happen that way.”