Goodbye, I'm Johnny Cash

By Crispin Sartwell

Human beings are not distinct from one another. We merge in innumerable ways, make each other what we are. That is most true where we are most individual, where some improbable amalgamation of persons and places and cultures find relation and something absolutely unique is made.

There was only one Johnny Cash, and he emphasized his aloneness. He was an American emblem, and hence an embodiment of what Emerson termed our "self-reliance." "The Man in Black" always stood isolated on stage, barely moving, playing songs that often spoke not - or not only - of loneliness or yearning, but of pride, independence, grit, and work. He told the dark story of the archetypal outlaw, in which those admirable qualities bring suffering or death.

But of course he sang to us, and because of some quality in his voice - some hint of the infinite - and the words it spoke, we joined him and one another in these experiences. He drew us back into a mythic and real America which forged identities in hardship. He called us into experiences we didn't know we shared.

Like Hank Williams, like Merle Haggard (who as a prisoner heard Cash play a live show), like Steve Earle, Cash was a white man singing the blues, and like them he spoke to outsiders, prisoners, and people left at the bottom. But of course he embodied not degradation, but the truth and strength that emerged from struggle and survival. The suffering in his voice was transformed into a form of authority.

He drew on almost every source of a real American voice and a real American power: the hardscrabble poverty of subsistence agriculture; hard work; addiction, with its desperation, isolation, and ecstasies of merger; southern Christianity and its extreme expressiveness - the whole body reaching toward the whole God; character forged in rural provincialism and struggle; prison and freedom as realities and as metaphors.

He managed to be an icon both for the most conservative and the most radical Americans, and he loved and connected to Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan as much as to his more obvious compatriots such as Haggard and George Jones. Surely there can't be anyone writing about him in this, the week after his death, who won't pay him a deep tribute and express a deep connection to him.

Wherever people come into juxtaposition with one another, they transform each other, and embody that transformation in their art. The blues is as good an example of that as anything could be: a perfectly coherent musical style that arose in a chaotic merging of cultures, and is now fundamental to virtually every form of world popular music, from reggae to Afro-beat to electronica to disco to jazz to country. Even the exclusion and oppression that are associated with American race relations are forms of merging, as a culture is as much defined by what it wants to push away as what it wants to be. Cash's music, like all great American music, demonstrates that even apartheid is a mating, and that we are all of mixed race.

Cash of course married into one of the great legacies of American music, the Carter Family, who with Jimmie Rogers were largely responsible for making the world aware of the art made possible by the mergings of our America. His first sides were cut in Memphis for Sam Phillips in 1955, a place and a moment and a sound that Robert Johnson and a tradition of African-American spirituality and white gospel music symbolized as the crossroads. Phillips compared Cash to the great bluesman Howlin' Wolf, and eventually the things that people like Cash and Wolf made reached, moved, and changed almost everybody.

Cash, finally, embodied our joining to one another, and to our land, our work, and our God. The power, we might say, blew through him like a wind through an isolated field. But like a wind, it blew from the whole of the land and swept us all.

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Reach Crispin Sartwell at c.sartwell@verizon.com