A black woman enjoying Johnny Cash? You bet. Johnny Cash was the champion of the working class and the downtrodden and a griot of Southern culture. If you are Southern, especially middle-aged and older, your life's experience was probably captured in his songs.
Oh, sure, there were times in my college student-as-black-nationalist period that I would not admit to enjoying Cash and would neither buy nor listen to his music. That would not have been cool, especially among the crowd advocating that blacks take over Southern states and secede from the Union. Go figure.
But I always came back to Cash and other country singers, including Charley Pride, who has remained an anomaly as a black superstar in this métier, and Ray Charles, who can do country as well as other forms of popular music. The Neville brothers' music is also tinged with country - Louisiana-style.
But it's not cool - or politically correct - to make a big deal of that if you are black. Or young, as in the MTV generation that embraced his last album, "American IV: The Man Comes Around." Of one song, "Hurt," a Rolling Stone magazine editor said: "It's a record that's going to be hard to ignore." As will all his music and the hardscrabble but ultimately patriotic, spiritual life he lived devoted to family. His life was a prolonged blues suite.
| Newsday's E.R. Shipp visits "Johnny Cash's country, and mine"
Country music was not by any means hostile or foreign to my childhood spent listening to the Tuscaloosa radio stations of the 1950s. We were gifted with a Nat King Cole tune only after enduring hours of Hank Williams, Roy Acuff, Minnie Pearl, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Skeeter Davis, Ernest Tubbs, Tennessee Ernie Ford, ad nauseam. It was not our music, but back then we didn't consider it the music of the Klan.
The 1960s changed all that. With the coming of programmed black radio stations, country music thankfully went out of my life. That is until I landed at Fort Bliss, Texas. My third roommate in the bachelor officers quarters was an Italian-American from New York who went full, fanatic wild Western. He hobbled about in cowboy boots, wore belt buckles the size of food trays and never darkened a door without his 10-gallon Stetson, complete with feathered band.
My New Yorker roommate was comic relief, visually. His music was not funny. Each morning his clock radio would spring to life with the moody river tones of Johnny Cash.
Closed doors didn't damper the Cash voice. Army plywood, in fact, was such an efficient conductor that it rendered our flat into a two-bedroom stereo system of amplified woofers and tweeters. I held my temper on Cash in the morning because I played John Coltrane, at a crisp volume, deep into the night. When Coltrane proved too melodic to balance the Cash ledger, I moved over to the jazz bass syncopation of Charles Mingus. His upright lion-head bass rumbled the plywood doors with the best of Cash. So it was Mingus and Coltrane into the night and Cash at dawn.
Before I really took a listen, Johnny Cash sounded like just another hillbilly singer. In time, thanks to repetition, the singer burned through with a unique style unto himself. The first of his tunes to grab me was "Don't Take Your Guns to Town," one of his biggest hits that crossed over into the pop charts and broadened his reach.
Cash's novelty song, "A Boy Named Sue," was a bit off the wall, but his "Folsom Prison Blues" album gathered traction and I began to pay closer attention. "I Walk the Line" zoned in on a frequency that, for me, defined the man whose voice had the resonance of a glass of bourbon on a bar in an earthquake.
What seemed to distinguish Cash songs, a few of them at least, was his drive to remain optimistic no matter how rough the road. This is a mark not of the country song but of the blues. It is in this way that the Arkansas-born singer blurred the line between country and the blues.
| Continue Les Payne's Newsday column "He Blurred the Line"
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