FROM ROCKABILLY BADASS TO COUNTRY MUSIC elder statesman, Johnny Cash embodied paradoxes. No single Johnny Cash existed. Full of inconsistencies, Cash always changed, whether he played the drugged rock star trashing hotel rooms or the devout Christian touring with Billy Graham. He was the “Man in Black”: a progressive voice for the disenfranchised and the Southern patriarch performing at Nixon’s White House. Cash embodied the rebel outlaw hillbilly thug and later symbolized the establishment. At the heart of all these ambiguities lies Cash’s appeal.
Let me begin my inquiry into Cash’s iconography, then, with this simple observation: popular culture images of Cash consistently and obsessively refer to him as a contradiction. For the most famous example, we need look no further than Kris Kristofferson’s tribute song, “The Pilgrim; Chapter 33,” which dubs Cash a “walkin’ contradiction.”1 There, Cash the man becomes a mythological figure because he is the trouble-maker, the stoned musician, and the preacher-prophet. Merging fact and fiction, Cash becomes the lonely, empathetic, fallen pilgrim searching for redemption. Kristofferson’s lyrics point to the dual roles Cash plays, both the sacred and the profane. This depiction is typical in that it fetishizes Cash for being a paradox and locates the nature of his appeal. The question I wish to explore is: what is the allure of this image of Cash as a walking contradiction?
My argument is that a key part of Cash’s appeal lies in the way his cultural persona is itself explicitly contradictory, in the pull of cultural ambivalence. He brings disparate or even opposed cultural ideas into close, symbiotic relationship with each other. His iconic image in fact depends on his ability to stage the idea of irresolvable ambivalence—to illuminate how that model of ambivalence, what we might call a “both/and” idea, is an important paradigm for U.S. popular music and for American identity.
Cash embodied the tensions in the American character without resolving them. And in so doing, he encouraged listeners to engage with our most fundamental national paradoxes, from the contradictions of a free democracy founded on slavery to the whipsaw between individual rights and national identity. He once said to an audience, “I thank God for freedoms we’ve got in this country. I cherish them and treasure them—even the right to burn the flag.” As some booed, he went on, “We also got the right to bear arms, and if you burn my flag, I’ll shoot you. But I’ll shoot you with a lot of love, like a good American.”2 At times, Cash sounded like both sides of the Toby Keith/Dixie Chicks debate over the role of patriotism and social protest in popular music. But what Cash does is to ironize and to push adamantly on contradictions, to question false logics and false oppositions, in this case involving paradoxes of “natural rights,” where one person’s idea of individual freedom can take away another’s. His comment is not simply perverse; rather, it speaks to American tautologies.
Cash represents key social tensions in their intricacy, framing them as troubling, true, and distinctively American—and related to the social role of popular music in the United States. Popular music becomes a way to allow audiences to engage emotionally with such issues. Here, what Stuart Hall would call the “emotional realism” of the music does not lead listeners into passive consumption, but into active contemplation of the vexed complications that make up the American character.3 Kristofferson dubbed Cash Abe Lincoln with a “dark, wild streak,” and music journalists incessantly compare him to Walt Whitman in order to make sense of him as a large, democratic, national figure that can contain multitudes.4
Cash illuminates key issues at the crossroads of American studies and popular music studies, not only because he is an exemplary case study, but also because he offers this conceptual model of irresolvable contradictions. In this essay, I analyze how the trope of contradiction permeates the social construction of Johnny Cash. His life and work illuminate other important questions in popular music studies and in popular culture more generally, such as: the complex position of popular music in U.S. culture, popular culture’s ability to question traditional binaries (like sacred versus profane), and the changing models of authenticity. While I focus my discussion on those issues, I also attend to how constructions of masculinity and race play into versions of authenticity, key topics in the study of popular music and of country music specifically.5
Using literary analysis techniques, I unpack an array of representations of Cash, attempting to address aspects of production, the work itself, its reception, and its socio-historical context. Critic Joli Jensen, in her analysis of Patsy Cline’s multifaceted image, notes that the popular image of any artist is the result of the interplay of the media, the audience, and the work itself. All three of what Jensen terms these “levels of explanation” must be examined together, because there is no “true” or “real” version of the artist, only complex layers of representation.6 Here, I address elements of Cash’s own self-presentation (from his two autobiographies to his music, liner notes, interviews, and the marketing of his iconographic Man in Black image) and how others have depicted him (in biographies, documentaries, music journalism, producer Rick Rubin’s marketing of him for the American Records label, Mark Romanek’s video for “Hurt,” and the Walk the Line biopic).
All of these elements, fact and fiction, go into creating Cash’s cultural image, so it is necessary to analyze them together. As I trace these paradoxical images, I argue that Cash’s legacy is most importantly about his ability to slip out of boxes or categories, to make us look at contradictions without papering over them, to express radical ambiguity that insists on painful complexity.
Scholars such as Cecelia Tichi have called for more American studies and cultural studies attention to country music as a genre precisely because of such formative links between these “folk poetry” discourses and American thought.7 Cultural ambivalence and contradiction are key issues in American thought, whether the contradictions stem from capitalism and class struggle or the legacy of race slavery. While Cash’s model of “both/and” is not a radical critique of dominant U.S. culture, it is not simply a model of liberal pluralism either, because it does not offer up some false consensus culture. Rather, his corpus incorporates a struggle over meaning as part of his identity construction, as a model for authenticity, because it insists on presenting the contradictions themselves and eschews easy resolution. His texts participate in and illuminate the dominant culture’s anxieties, but they remain stubborn and disjunctive. As such, his work is an apt case study for how popular culture is a site of negotiation and struggle and is not simply a playground for escapism or for only corporate agendas (here, I side with critics who argue that while corporations produce commercial culture, thus market forces control popular culture; they can not completely control the range of meanings consumers might derive from that culture, however limited that audience agency is).8 Cash is, of course, not unique in addressing American ambivalences through popular music, but he is distinctive and yields insights particular to his work.9
Likewise, Cash is useful as a case study for complexity in this popular music genre. As Barbara Ching has detailed, country music features its own internal critiques of authenticity, and critics must listen for the complexity of those critiques, rather than simplicity in the genre, otherwise they are in danger of insisting on what Jensen calls “purity by proxity,” an act of trying to make the genre transparently stand-in for traditional virtues.
Cash’s death in September 2003 prompted an intense emotional response from legions of musicians and fans worldwide. Such large-scale affective investment in a popular artist itself occasions a need to inquire into his impact and legacy.10 As Kristine M. McCusker and Diane Pecknold note, his popularity is so widespread, we have to account for his appeal beyond niche markets, beyond a country audience. Insofar as the market is a measure of popularity, Cash has sold more than fifty million albums, and he was the bestselling artist internationally with his prison albums in 1969 (he outsold the Beatles that year, selling 6.5 million albums). He recorded more than 1,500 songs, fourteen number-one hits, and won numerous awards, including eleven Grammys, and he was inducted into both the Rock and Roll and the Country Music Hall of Fame. His albums surged in popularity just after his death, with sales doubling.11 The Oscar award-winning biopic Walk the Line (2005), which has earned more than $120 million at the box office to date, sparked yet another round of renewed interest in him, landing his second autobiography on the bestseller list and prompting yet more biographies.12
I have suggested that Cash helps explicate popular music’s role in society in the sense that his music gives audiences a way to engage with contradictions in American thought and identity. In so doing, he also provides us with models for thinking about how popular culture can question traditional categorical binaries (tradition versus social change, establishment versus anti-authoritarian, conservative versus progressive, patriot versus traitor, morally righteous versus fallen, pure versus impure). Cash’s work exposes the problems with such rigid categories, whether political or musical.
In addition, Cash is an exemplar for thinking about popular music’s long-running love affair with the idea of authenticity, that hotly contested, endlessly debunked fantasy of what is genuine. Theorists have long argued that authenticity is a constructed set of ideas and values that reflect particular socio-historical contexts of production and reception. Audiences and record companies might deem an artist or their music authentic because they seem to convey honesty, truth, and an organic relationship to their roots or fan base. Country music has always been framed as a genre of sincerity.13 But one person’s “authentic” favorite singer-songwriter is another person’s manufactured bubble-gum pop star. The idea of authenticity involves a complex set of beliefs about taste, values, identity, and models of artistic creation. It is an arbitrary, constantly changing idea. And it is our job to unpack what it means in each specific instance—and what such ideas reflect about U.S. culture.
I would argue that a large part of what counts as authenticity regarding Cash is precisely this image of a walking contradiction. While he changed his persona over the years, this theme is a touchstone in marketing across the arc of his career, ranging from his early Sun Records rockabilly years with producer Sam Phillips (1955–58), to his long stint with Columbia (1958–1986), which covered his 1960s drug years, to his wildly popular prison recordings in the late 1960s, to his early 1970s superstardom, and to Nashville’s abandonment of him as a solo artist in the 1980s when Columbia shockingly dropped him from their label. It also pervades his 1980s and 1990s work with supergroup The Highwaymen (with Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson), Mercury’s half-hearted attempt to revive his solo career (1986–1992), and his career resurgence with American Records (1993 until his death in 2003, with posthumous releases still appearing).
Responding to his performance, as well as his image, critics consistently refer to Cash and various parts of his musical oeuvre, such as his prison recordings, as “authentic.” Undoubtedly, ineffable aspects of his musical performance are essential to his authenticity effect, a certain kind of constructed idea of genuineness, and it is important to note how his musical and performance elements also involve a sense of contradiction. Cash’s distinctive bass-baritone voice, a deep-sonic tonic, is a vital ingredient of his appeal. It is in part through what theorist Roland Barthes calls the grain of the voice, the embodiment through voice that exceeds words and language, that Cash achieves his emotional effects on audiences.14 Often described as a bad singer who could not maintain his pitch and had very little range, Cash nevertheless mastered the art of conveying sincerity and suffering through his singing. One music critic describes the musicality of Cash’s voice as follows:
Earthy-deep, ominous sometimes, resonant [in terms of loudness or power], virile, untrained, unconventional. . . . Cash has a blue tonality, does not sustain his notes, does not sing by the scale or sing sharps, and he slides into his flats . . . is constantly blending the tone . . . and decorates his melody according to his own interpretation.15
Musicologist Denise Von Glahn observes that Cash’s sound is unique in part because the depth of his voice leaves more room for overtones. When other sounds are layered on top of it, the result is a singular, fuller, richer sound that ultimately signifies power. Simultaneously his voice has a flattened, direct, folk-like character. It possesses little vibrato, a quality long associated with vocal training and synonymous with the high arts. His voice is raw and grainy. She notes that Cash’s unpolished sound coupled with his defiant insistence on being heard fits nicely with his image of speaking for the disenfranchised or the “common man.”16
Cash’s voice cuts through other sounds but also blends in on his recordings and performances. Cash’s longtime producer, Jack Clement, dubbed him “Captain Decibel,” because his voice picked up remarkably well on sound recording equipment. Clement notes:
He’s got the most amazing recording voice that I know of, in terms of getting on the tape. There’s what you call apparent level, and then there’s actual level. He has this apparent level that just gets on the tape. It’s a commodity. You just can’t hardly cover it up. It’s almost impossible to drown him out. You can put in lots of drums, horns, a roomful of guitars and everything else—he still cuts through. It’s powerful. There’s few voices I’ve ever heard like that.17
Von Glahn points out that this effect would be due to the fundamental pitch of his voice and how the partials vibrate.18 Yet at the same time, elaborating on how Cash turned his imperfect voice into a highly effective emotive vehicle, Clement notes how Cash blended in:
I wouldn’t call him a great musician. I’d call him a great musical entity. He was a musical force and a great singer. People believed what he was saying. Most people don’t understand that the voice is like an instrument and has to blend in with the other instruments. Somehow Cash understood that. Mostly because he didn’t care. He would just sing. Somehow it worked. 19
Likewise important are Cash’s compelling abilities as a performer who delivers a sense of emotional rawness and truth. The simplicity of his music, the often-noted struggles he and his first band, The Tennessee Two, had with playing their instruments on the early Sun Records, also contributes to this sincerity effect. But the simplicity is deceptive. As musician Guy Clark points out: “‘I Walk the Line,’ it just sounds like the simplest thing in the world, but it’s really not. It’s really a fairly difficult song to play and sing at the same time. To actually play it on a guitar and sing it is kind of like patting your head and rubbing your stomach.”20
Thus, there are clear musical and performance elements contributing to Cash’s authenticity effect. But I would argue that it is his cultural image that synthesizes the different components of Cash’s performance; his effect vitally depends on his themes and iconography. And I would argue that what is most iconographic in him is this trope of engaging with and embodying larger cultural contradictions, between good and bad, light and dark, God and drugs, faithfulness and cheating. As music critic Anthony DeCurtis notes, Cash was both “Saturday night and Sunday morning,” a dynamic that contributed to his world-wide success as well as country music’s fluctuating rejection and embrace of him.21
Cash’s paradoxical cultural image, like his constant mixing of musical styles, kept people guessing about who the true Cash was. He had to keep admitting that he never did hard time, because his songs and image made people think he had. Wildly disparate groups tried to claim him as their own, from fans of traditional country to indie rockers. In one notable example, MTV reports of his death genuflected to him as “the first punk” because of his projected attitude, citing his notorious amphetamine addiction in the 1950s and 1960s and his pioneering work in the area of rock stars trashing hotel rooms. As June Carter Cash said: “He’s always been a sneerer.”22 Cash was perhaps the original rock ’n’ roll hell raiser.
Indeed, in its form and content, Cash’s body of work imagines him as a border crosser, a category-breaker who merges musical styles, political stances, and social identities. His musical genres include gospel, folk, rockabilly, rock, blues, bluegrass, and country. His mix of cultural forms includes popular music, oral narrative, popular literary genres including autobiographies and historical novels, Appalachian and other folk cultures, film, documentary, and music videos. He constantly bucked efforts to categorize him politically, and his stances varied from social protester and outsider populist critiques of institutions such as prisons to support for U.S. nationalism. In his work, Cash also positions himself as an iconoclast who problematizes identity categories, from the progressive advocate of American Indian land rights and Vietnam protests to the conservative, flag-waving patriot. He famously sang about shooting a man in Reno for the sole purpose of watching him die, and he less famously wrote a novel about St. Paul and religious faith, Man in White (1986).
Looking at how the trope of contradiction appears in Cash’s own self-presentation, we can see key recurring themes. In addition to musical genre category busting, tensions involving the commercialization of country music and the commodification of celebrity, and country music’s well-documented anti-modern critique and nostalgia for an agrarian past, Cash’s work and career also comment forcefully on key issues like identity politics, the relationship between music and politics (such as his commentary on competing definitions of American patriotism), and formulations of Southern white masculinity and authority.
On the issue of gender constructions, Cash for some embodied masculine authority as the patriarch of country music’s “First Family,” since he married into the Carter family. Musician Bono of U2, who recorded with Cash, declaimed: “We’re all sissies in comparison to Johnny Cash.”23 Yet for others, his work sometimes questioned traditional gender role identities and socialization (critic Teresa Ortega has claimed Cash as a lesbian icon because he allows fans to identify with “troubled and suffering masculinity”).24 This troubled masculinity is appropriate coming from an artist who started out in rockabilly, that formative style that hailed the mixing of country and rhythm and blues that resulted in rock. Critics Mary Bufwack and Robert Oermann have shown how rockabilly stars violated gender taboos, taking on feminized behaviors (such as hip-shaking, sob-raking performances). Michael Bertrand has shown how “culturally schizophrenic” Hillbilly Cats crossed both racial and gender taboos. In his study of Elvis, Bertrand details how the integration of “white” hillbilly music and “black” rhythm and blues in the 1950s and 1960s South implied racial integration and was seen as dangerous in the context of desegregation and the Civil Rights movement, but also how the rockabilly stars identified with outsider aspects of black masculinity, drawing on identification between black and white Southern working class cultures.25 That kind of troubled and troubling racial identification and appropriation emerges from the kind of love and theft critics such as Eric Lott read in earlier blackface minstrelsy.26 In an artist such as Cash, who later spoke explicitly to social movements targeting racial inequity, like Civil Rights, the complex identifications and appropriations that comprise his racialized gender performances consistently place his performance and stable identity categories under question.
In his own self-presentation, Cash insists on irreducible complexity. He goes so far as to create a model of identity as multiple.27 Perhaps most famously, he created the “Man in Black” narrative persona in his 1971 song as a conscious construction to speak for the poor and the disenfranchised.28 He also imagines numerous selves in his two autobiographies, Man in Black (1975) and Cash: The Autobiography (1997). There, he uses different names for the different “Cashes” he played in different social contexts. He stages a struggle between “Johnny Cash” the hell-raising, hotel-trashing, pill-popping worldwide star and “John R. Cash,” a more subdued, adult persona. To some family and friends, he remained the “J. R. Cash” from his childhood. In an interview with her father, Tara Cash once asked him, “Did you ever have an imaginary friend?” and he replied, “Yes. Sometimes I am two people. Johnny is the nice one. Cash causes all the trouble. They fight.”
Cash discussed slipping in and out of character, whether in public or private dimensions of performance. In his second autobiography, when describing himself as operating with “various names” and “various levels,” he characterizes himself as “complicated,” and endorses Kristofferson’s walking contradiction line as well as daughter Rosanne Cash’s depiction: “He believes what he says, but that don’t make him a saint.” Cash elaborates: “I do believe what I say. There are levels of honesty, though.”29 He describes navigating his performance of identity:
I prefer to meet people before my shows, not after. When I walk off that stage I’m no longer the character I was in the songs I sang—the stories have been told, their messages imparted—but often it’s a while before I’m J. R. again. When I meet people, it’s important for both of us that I’m J. R.30
His comments register how authenticity is always a constructed idea that depends on the context, since he and his audience both need to be aware of his narrative persona, “Johnny Cash,” as a character he slips on and then gradually sheds.
Locating his appeal in “his vast love and his vast acceptance of paradox,” Rosanne Cash argues: “His heart was so expansive and his mind so finely tuned that he could contain both darkness and light, love and trouble, fear and faith, wholeness and shatteredness, old-school and postmodern, and sacred and the silly, God and the Void.”31 On the topic of juggling his private and public lives, the deep context for his identity construction, she suggests that Cash was only comfortable when he could keep his competing impulses in productive tension:
It’s weird. He’s so comfortable living this public life for forty years that it’s part of his private life. Real life tends to be disappointing for him a lot. I see him trying to get away from it. His impulses for healing and spirituality are constantly being pulled on by his impulses of self-destruction. They’re the same thing. One is a warped attempt to do the other. The constant travel, the spiritual seeking, the drugs. It’s too much to sit still and be on this planet.32
Her formulation is striking for how she sees Cash’s opposing poles as versions of the same in his identity construction, the sacred and the profane as mirror images of each other. Implicitly, in her telling, as in many others, this tortured imbrication of healing and self-destruction, grace and pain—and the restless, seeking energy it produces—defines both Cash and the culture that produced him.
In terms of his own specific thematic paradoxes, a trio of his favorite themes, famously marketed on his three-disc boxed set, Love, God, Murder (Sony 2000), provide further examples of his equivocations. Moving back and forth across his lyrics, thematic content, autobiographical narratives, marketing, and public persona, we can find convolution on these topics. Cash sang about marital fidelity (to his first wife), but his most enduring love story stems from infidelity (the Walk the Line biopic turns on this equivocation, making epic drama from the painful struggles involved in how he fell in love and got involved with June Carter when both were married to other people). As Merle Haggard said, the song was “kind of ludicrous for him to sing,” because Cash “never walked any line.”33
Concerning religion, Cash was a devout Christian who took Bible classes, became an ordained minister (with the Christian International School of Theology), made a film about Christ called The Gospel Road (1973), and evangelized on the Billy Graham crusades. Yet he often avoided organized religion himself, slammed religious hypocrisy, and encouraged his children to follow their own beliefs. The liner notes to his God disc market his religious paradoxes. Cash writes: “At times, I’m a voice crying in the wilderness, but at times I’m right on the money and I know what I’m singing about.” In liner notes for the same disc, musician Bono writes: “Johnny Cash is a righteous dude . . . but it’s the ‘outlaw’ in him we love.” On the question of murder, Cash was famous for singing murder ballads, which contributed to his outlaw image, but, again, he never did time (apart from a few nights in jail from drug busts) and his concern was with redemption; he felt a kinship with prisoners due to what he termed his own religious fight between dark and light within himself, what some journalists attributed to the legacy of his father’s alcoholism (though Cash himself downplayed its impact on him).34
In others’ depictions, the sheer wealth of reference to Cash as a contradiction is staggering, but so is the sense that Cash is something to be fought over and defended. A particularly spectacular example of responses to Cash’s political complexity is the protest at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. When Convention organizers held a reception honoring Lamar Alexander and Cash at Sotheby’s to coincide with the Cash memorabilia auction there (which earned more than four million, triple what was expected), student Erin Siegal organized a protest, replete with 600 fans wearing black, pompadours, and guitars, who insisted that Cash’s populist message could not be co-opted by the Republican party.35 What does “Johnny Cash” symbolize to people, why would both the Left and the Right want to claim him, and why does he need defending? As the story made national news and Republican organizers defended their right to celebrate Cash, Cash’s family responded to the controversy only by saying that he did not have an official party affiliation.36 While I would side with the protestors, what I think is interesting is that Cash’s cultural image allows for enough contradiction for both sides to believe they can claim him.
Equally noteworthy is how often accounts make him a metonymy for America. In Steve Turner’s authorized biography published after Cash’s death, Kris Kristofferson’s foreword enshrines him as “a true American hero, who rose from a beginning as humble as Abraham Lincoln’s to become a friend and an inspiration to prisoners and presidents.”37 Kristofferson often argued that Cash’s “face ought to be up on Mount Rushmore,” a line journalists repeat incessantly.38 Turner explains Cash’s life as one “clouded by pain” (tons of physical suffering and medical problems plus guilt over his brother Jack’s tragic death as a teen, his father’s mistreatment, his infidelities, and drug abuse) and “colored by grace” (Cash interpreted all his trials and tribulations along the lines of Job).39
Music journalist Brian Mansfield, in his compilation book of quotations about Cash, discusses Cash’s mythology in ways that are typical in the sense that he posits the essence of Cash’s social presence as an icon as irresolvable American paradox. Mansfield writes, “Perhaps no other singer in American popular music has crossed as many boundaries as Johnny Cash.” He goes on to locate the source of the singer’s appeal along these lines:
Cash was seen as a poet, patriot, preacher, and protestor. He absorbed the images the way black absorbs light. He was all those things—and, by being the sum of them, he became something entirely different. Cash, with his overpowering presence, was large enough to encompass such paradoxes. . . . Did he contradict himself? Very well then, as Walt Whitman might have said of him, he contradicted himself. He was large. He contained multitudes. He was, after all, Johnny Cash.40
Sweeping, democratic American figures like Whitman are the ones that can sustain profoundly equivocating rhetorics. Likewise, writer Nicholas Dawidoff, in his 1997 book on country music, frames Cash in terms of warring personality traits that mirror America.41 Dawidoff argues that Cash is as much a “piece of Americana” as the objects Cash collected, like “John Wayne’s pistol, Frederick Remington’s cowboy sculptures, Buddy Holly’s motorcycle, and Al Capone’s chair.”42 Cash as American folk hero becomes a national collectible. The link critics make between Cash and his country is both thematic and musical. Dawidoff argues that Cash’s voice is a metonymy for a certain version of the South: “Lodged somewhere between talk and music, his singing is flat and artless and grim, the way the white poverty-stricken South was flat, artless, and grim.”43
In yet another posthumous tribute book that interprets Cash through the cultural vocabulary of contradiction, Mikal Gilmore, in the Rolling Stone book Cash, cites the mid-1980s concert for a conservative audience at Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, New York, where Cash upheld your right to burn the flag and his right to shoot you for it. Gilmore accounts for this stance by saying Cash:
was a complicated patriot, and those complications—like the contradictions of the nation itself—never ceased. . . . It was a statement full of extraordinary twists and turns, genuine pride and dark-humored irony—and only Cash could get away with weaving such disparate stances and affectionate sarcasm together. . . . Cash looked at America the same way he looked at himself: with forthright regrets and unrelenting hope.44
Here, Cash explicitly becomes a model for America, and what makes him gripping is his emotional realism and his troubling of binary oppositions.
Gilmore, like others, underscores key moments in Cash’s personal and artistic history that embody polar opposites. Gilmore cites Cash’s 1969 session and collaboration with Bob Dylan on “Girl From the North Country” for Dylan’s Nashville Skyline album. This musical meeting of the minds brought together icons of country and rock, melding the supposedly conservative, nostalgic values of the country genre with rock’s revolutionary, avant-garde critiques in a collaboration that was somewhat shocking to some audiences at the time. More importantly, from the point of view of American controversies, Gilmore notes Cash’s stance on Vietnam and his 1970 visit to Nixon’s White House as examples of his complexity.
Indeed, if we look at Cash’s oeuvre as a whole, the Vietnam/Nixon issue is a particularly good example of how Cash bucked categorization. Cash supported the office of the president, but also the student protestors against the Vietnam War. He famously supported the students’ right to protest in his song “What Is Truth?” (1970) (one of the songs he sang for the Nixon performance).45 Similarly, his lyrics decry the pile-up of dead soldiers in Vietnam. Invited to the White House, Cash refused to play Nixon’s requests: Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” and Guy Drake’s “Welfare Cadillac.” He reportedly refused the Drake song berating welfare recipients because he thought it was racist, and headlines gleefully cried that Cash had snubbed Nixon.
Yet in later lyrics and comments, Cash playfully avoids resolving the tension between his patriotism and his social protests. He makes fun of efforts to spot his inconsistencies, ducks any attempt to script him into consistent political positions, and insists on his ability to fashion his own complicated stances. An early version of one of his songs references the Nixon White House incident in order to lampoon standard accounts of it. Satirizing press efforts to pin him down as well as all the false mythologies that circulate about him, he jokes that he’s never been to prison, knows little about trains, doesn’t know why he wears black, and would be happy in a mansion or a shack. He says he will let false stories about him stand, but he’ll set reporters straight about the fact that he loves his wife.46 Cash the speaker expresses his weariness at all the same old questions, all the efforts to defrock his authenticity, criticize his mixture of wealth and folksiness, or his own identity constructions. An early draft of the song references the Nixon White House incident and resists the narrative that he made a forceful critique of Nixon by not playing the requested songs. While the published version of the song omits these lyrics, the original lines seem perverse, contrary to his other public stances on the issue of social protest, counter to his Man in Black outsider persona.
In what seems like an apolitical retreat that deflects any truth claims about him, Cash’s lyrics use the White House event as an occasion to critique the process of turning him into an icon. More than that, however, they critique any effort to hold Cash to a resolved, coherent narrative about his life experiences, musical tastes, or how he has expressed his politics. In his autobiography, he similarly performs a double move—he both articulates his politics and insists that no one else can inscribe those politics for him:
The issue wasn’t the songs’ messages, which at the time were lightning rods for antihippie and antiblack sentiment, but the fact that I didn’t know them and couldn’t learn them or rehearse them with the band before we had to leave for Washington. The request had come in too late. If it hadn’t, then the issue might have become the messages, but fortunately I didn’t have to deal with that.47
He goes on the record but then again he does not; he resists reporters’ accounts but leaves ambivalence in his own version, precisely on the issue of how others are going to frame his actions and beliefs—he claims he did not have to go on record with his politics at the White House, but he leaves open the possibility that he might have. He thus asserts the power to construct himself, and he will do so through paradoxes.
Many reporters have unsuccessfully tried to fashion a clean story for Cash, the same one Walk the Line (2005) dramatizes—a redemption narrative where he moves from rebel youth druggie to dramatic recovery through the help of God and June Carter. While Cash approved the film’s script and sometimes supported this kind of narrative, at other times he did not. Noting how Cash delighted in thwarting reporters, an early biographer, Christopher S. Wren, notes, Cash “has never been able to explain himself,” and the star’s deflection of easy answers or story arcs “usually sends reporters frustrated to their typewriters.”48 Cash more often kept his own vacillations active. His second autobiography, for example, notes his multiple drug relapses over the years alongside his deep religious faith.
Some journalists actually go so far as to label inauthentic any portrait of Cash that is not about contradiction. In a New York Times editorial criticizing the Walk the Line film for downplaying Cash’s religious faith, Robert Levine notes the new Broadway show based on Cash’s music, Ring of Fire (2006), itself downplays Cash’s bad behavior. Hitting the common note about Cash as contradiction, Levine says perhaps “Cash’s life is simply too big for one movie” and “different fans could remember him in different ways.” He goes on to argue:
But he was far too complex a figure to be claimed by either side in the culture wars. Although he was guided by faith, he never cared much for organized religion; he had a sense of himself as deeply flawed, but not beyond hope of redemption. Those contradictions, as much as the compelling story of Walk the Line, are what make him fascinating.49
Apparently, Cash’s projected identity is in the eye of the beholder. But Walk the Line and similar biographical narratives do not so much ignore Cash’s paradoxes as try to find explanations for them that are ultimately unsatisfying because his ambiguities foil closure.
It is important to note that Cash and his record companies have used this idea of contradiction for marketing, raking in millions of dollars. There is obvious manipulation involved in the idea that he can play to both sides of the aisle. Indeed, the image of him as a category-breaker has been one of the most successful marketing tools producer Rick Rubin and the American Records label have used for him, both before and after his death. This image of Cash as an artist able to combine distinct cultural traditions into new forms has contributed to his cultural impact and longevity. Claiming him as a murder ballad forefather of the rap artists in his stable, Rubin produced four critically acclaimed albums and a posthumous box set (Unearthed), with extant recordings still to be released. Rubin explicitly resurrected the old rebellious Cash from the dusty respectability of his 1980s image, merging the drug-addicted wild man and the respectable father of country music into one paradoxical, Southern gothic image, with stark covers of, for example, Cash in a black longcoat, flanked by a pair of ominous dogs. The Unearthed boxed set includes an album of gospel songs alongside his covers of bands like Nine Inch Nails and U2.
But Cash’s engagement with contradiction exceeds the logic of the market, because it is deeper than a simple commodity practice. As in his flag comment, he draws out the absurdities and problems inherent in U.S. paradoxes. If he is authentic because he is paradoxical, then Johnny Cash does the cultural work of putting long-running socio-political and cultural contradictions in U.S. culture on the table, putting ideological contradictions on display without resolving them. Cash can both embody the generative energy of cultural mixing, this idea of a Whitmanian figure containing multitudes, as well as the sense of ambivalence and complication some of his boundary crossings provoke.
LEIGH H. EDWARDS is assistant professor of English at Florida State University. Her research on U.S. literature and popular culture has appeared in journals such as Narrative, The Journal of Popular Culture, Feminist Media Studies, and Film and History. She is currently completing a book on Cash titled Johnny Cash and American Ambivalence. Other research in media studies includes a book manuscript, Reality TV’s Family Values: Narrative, Ideology, and New Domestic Forms. Recent publications include: “Dangerous Minds: The Woman Professor on Television,” in Geek Chic: Smart Women in Popular Culture (2007), edited by Sherrie A. Inness; “Chasing the Real: Reality Television and Documentary Forms,” in Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking (2006), edited by Gary D. Rhodes and John Parris Springer; and “‘What a Girl Wants’: Gender Norming on Reality Game Shows” (2004) in Feminist Media Studies. She has forthcoming articles on PBS’s Frontier House and frontier mythology, and on interracial romance narratives. A staff writer for PopMatters, an international magazine of cultural criticism published online at popmatters.com, she reviews television and film. She has also published a poem on Cash, “Johnny Cash Ode,” in Xconnect: Writers of the Information Age, Volume VII (Xconnect, print annual, 2005) and in the online journal issue, CrossConnect 23 (September 2005). An eighth-generation Floridian, she earned her B.A. from Duke University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania as a National Mellon Fellow.
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1 Kris Kristofferson. “The Pilgrim; Chapter 33.” Silver Tongued Devil & I. Resaca Music Publishing Company, 1971.
2 Fine, Jason, ed. Cash: By the Editors of Rolling Stone. New York: Crown, 2004, 43.
3 Hall, Stuart and Whannel, Paddy. The Popular Arts. London: Hutchinson, 1964, 269–83.
4 Mansfield, Brian. Ring of Fire: A Tribute to Johnny Cash. Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press, 2003, 12.
5 See, for example, Barbara Ching, What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture (New York: Oxford UP, 2001); Joli Jensen, The Nashville Sound: Authenticity, Commercialization, and Country Music (Nashville: Country Music Foundation/Vanderbilt University Press, 1998); Richard Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Michael T. Bertrand, Race, Rock and Elvis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Cecelia Tichi, ed., Reading Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Honky-Tonk Bars (Durham: Duke University Press 1998); Kristine M. McCusker and Diane Pecknold, A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004).
6 Jensen details how Cline’s image illuminates country music’s constructions of femininity. Jensen, “Patsy Cline’s Crossovers,” A Boy Named Sue 107–131.
7 Tichi, Cecelia. High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994, 1.
8 For accounts of this kind of cultural studies model of popular culture as a site of negotiation and struggle, see Stuart Hall, Stuart Hall: Cultural Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996); John Storey, Inventing Popular Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003) 48–62. For discussions of how popular music exceeds the logic of the marketplace, see Bertrand in A Boy Named Sue 63; Barry Shank, Dissonant Identities: The Rock ’n’ Roll Scene in Austin, Texas (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994) 251.
9 Critic Greil Marcus, in his landmark study, detailed how key rock ’n’ roll artists like Elvis articulate the equivocations of American democracy, between separation and community, rebellion and conformity, and how they consequently fight over the mythology that is American identity. Cultural theorist Barry Shank has argued eloquently for how Bob Dylan, in the sixties, embodied the countervailing search for both autonomy and authenticity in American culture. Music historian Bill C. Malone has beautifully detailed the Southern and working-class polarities that have shaped country music’s appeal. But as Shank notes, each artist is specific in how they engage with American problems in distinct socio-historical contexts. See Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music (New York: Plume, 1997); Bill C. Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Urbana: University of Illinois Press); Malone, Southern Music/American Music: New Perspectives on the South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979); Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003); Barry Shank, “‘That Wild Mercury Sound’: Bob Dylan and the Illusion of American Culture,” Boundary 2 29:1 (2002): 97–123.
10 Noting the intensity of Cash’s effect on some audiences, Marty Stuart says that while on tour with Cash, “I saw everything from a little boy coming backstage in Kansas and asking him to pull his tooth to a prisoner’s mom getting down on her hands and knees, wrapping her arms around his calves, and begging him to get her boy off of death row” (Mansfield 64).
11 “Johnny Cash Album Sales Soar,” Launch Radio Networks, 18 Nov 2003 http://
launch.yahoo.com/read/news.asp?contentID=214647.
12 Chief among them is the authorized biography, Steve Turner’s The Man Called Cash: The Life, Love and Faith of an American Legend (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2004) and Michael Streissguth’s account of the Folsom concert, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison: The Making of a Masterpiece (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2004). Various others include: Stephen Miller, Johnny Cash: The Life of an American Icon (London: Omnibus Press, 2003); Garth Campbell, Johnny Cash: He Walked the Line, 1932–2003 (London: John Blake, 2003); Dave Urbanski, The Man Comes Around: The Spiritual Journey of Johnny Cash (Lake Mary, FL: Relevant Books, 2003).
13 See, for example, Barry Shank’s critical cultural studies ethnography of identity constructions involving ideas of “sincerity” in Austin music scenes. Shank, Dissonant Identities.
14 Barthes, Roland. The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation. Trans. Richard Howard. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.
15 Quoted in Urbanski xiv.
16 Von Glahn, Denise. Personal Interview, 22 March 2006.
17 Mansfield 38.
18 Von Glahn, Denise. Personal Interview, 22 March 2006.
19 Turner 234.
20 Mansfield 40.
21 “Controversy: Johnny Cash vs. Music Row.” CMT, 11 September 2004.
22 Quoted in Dawidoff 186.
23 Quoted in Fine 208.
24 Teresa Ortega, “‘My name is Sue! How do you do?’: Johnny Cash as Lesbian Icon.” South Atlantic Quarterly 94 (Winter 1995): 267.
25 Bertrand, A Boy Named Sue, 62, 64.
26 Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
27 Pamela Fox addresses female country stars’ construction of complex identity that negotiates class and gender-coded notions of authenticity, and she notes identity switching in female autobiographies of stars like Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, and Reba McEntire. Fox, “Recycled Trash: Gender and Authenticity in Country Music Autobiography” American Quarterly 50.2 (June 1998): 234–266; 235.
28 John R. Cash, “Man in Black,” House of Cash, 1971.
29 Cash, Johnny with Carr, Patrick. Cash: The Autobiography. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 1997, 9.
30 Cash, Cash 146.
31 Fine 13–14.
32 Turner 194.
33 Quoted in Fine 24.
34 Turner 225–235.
35 Gray, Madison J. “3-Day Johnny Cash Auction in New York Rakes in Nearly $4 Million,” The Associated Press State & Local Wire, 16 September 2004.
36 “Row over ‘Political’ Cash Tribute,” BBC, 28 August 2004 http://news.bbc.
co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3608956.stm.
37 Turner ix.
38 Mansfield 12.
39 Turner 226–27.
40 Mansfield 5–7.
41 Dawidoff, Nicholas. In the Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music. New York: Vintage, 1998, 169–199.
42 Dawidoff 169.
43 Dawidoff 182.
44 Fine 43.
45 John R. Cash, “What is Truth?,” copyright John R. Cash, published by Songs of Cash, ASCAP, 1970.
46 John R. Cash, “I’ll Say It’s True,” House of Cash, BMI, 1979.
47 Cash, Cash 286. Fine 102.
48 Wren, Christopher S. Winners Got Scars Too: The Life of Johnny Cash. New York: Ballantine, 1971, 6.
49 Levine, Robert. “Cash Film’s Missing Ingredient: Religion,” The New York Times, 4 March 2006 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/04/movies/
MoviesFeatures/04cash.html.