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Redemption
Songs Tell Life Story of the Man in Black
By
Pete Brooks
Spectrum staff
The first time I saw Johnny Cash in performance was about 10 years ago, at
the Performing Arts Center in Orange County.
He had a cold that night, and between almost every line he sang, he would turn
his head away from the microphone and cough.
I remember thinking, “Man, if I was that sick, I would have stayed home
in bed.” But Johnny Cash was made of sterner stuff.
The only thing he couldn’t survive was the death of his wife of some 35
years, June Carter, who passed away in May of this year. People talked openly
at the time about whether or not Cash was due to stick around long after losing
June, but it still came as a shock last week when word came that he had passed.
Born dirt poor to a sharecropper in Arkansas at the peak of the Great Depression,
the only things that came easy to the young Cash were hard times and trouble.
He picked cotton with the rest of his family, and was only 12 when his older
brother Jack fell on a table saw and died, after lingering near death for a week.
Cash was a vacuum cleaner salesman in 1955 when he approached Sam Philips of
Memphis’ Sun records about an audition. Philips had just signed a young
hillbilly singer named Presley, and was looking to further expand his roster
of artists. In no time at all, Cash had radio hits and concert bookings and was
on his way to becoming a big success.
And there, as they say, his troubles really began.
Cash’s well-documented bout with alcohol and drugs throughout the sixties — a
marathon that should have killed him then, and may ultimately have contributed
to his relatively early death at 71 — was finally quelled by his marriage
to Carter in 1968.
She also brought him back to his Christian faith, which Cash embraced with the
same passion he had previously brought to raising hell and hurting himself. He
had come full circle, and to his fans, he was living, breathing proof that redemption
was possible; that a man could stand up to his demons and face them down, no
matter how wicked they — or he — may have become.
Throughout it all, Cash used his celebrity to support people and causes
he believed in. From performing free shows for men behind bars, to recording
albums detailing the plight of the American Indian to touring with the Billy
Graham Crusade, where Cash’s heart led, he followed, and may the devil
take the consequences.
Cash’s music communicates the same message as his life story. When Johnny
Cash sang a song, you knew he believed every word. The resonance of that deep
rumbling baritone that age ravaged but only death could silence, only increased
as its vigor waned.
It’s appropriate that in the final months of his career — which continued
right up to the end — Cash was enjoying a new fame with a whole new generation
of fans for a song, written by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, that sounds like
it could have been written by Cash himself, back in the mid-sixties:
“I hurt myself today/to see if I still feel/I focus on the pain/the only
thing that’s real.”
The last time I saw Johnny Cash perform live was in 1997, two weeks before illness
retired him from the road for good. At that time, he delighted me by performing
one of his more obscure compositions, a gospel number named “Old Chunk
of Coal.” The lyrics tell how right at that moment, the singer is just
an old chunk of coal, but by hard work and the grace of God, someday, he’s
gonna be a diamond.
By Cash’s own definition, that day has come.
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