Johnny Cash, RIP. You Earned It.

There's not much to say about Johnny Cash that isn't going to be said in a hundred other obituaries, but for me Johnny Cash was not just another country star. Thanks to the diverse musical tastes of my father, I inherited an appreciation of Cash and the Carter Family he married into (and, later on, Nick Lowe, who also married into that family). My mother also gave me a firm fondness for what I have to call today "real" country music (cuz that crap they play on the radio bears no resemblence). Stuff like Patsy Cline, Ernest Tubbs, Hank Williams Sr., bluegrass music, southern folk and gospel, Negro Spirituals and so on.

The part of Johnny Cash that is going to get glossed over in the obituaries is that he was a pro-union, working-class hero. That doesn't play well in Ashcroft's Amerika, I guess. They'll probably make the smallest mention possible of his battle with drugs and alcohol as well, saying only that he recovered and found religion. Well, it wasn't as easy as that -- you'd think that a battle that consumed most of his time and energy for the past five decades would be worth expanding on as a lesson to others, but no. People just want to remember the hits, the clothes and the voice.

Johnny Cash was, by his own admission, not much of a singer or guitar player. Go and listen to his first big crossover hit, "I Walk the Line" (1956) and hear how little is actually there. But what's important is that his voice conveys the emotion and somehow communicates to anyone listening that he's been through hard times already (though the real hard times were yet to come). That ability is what served him well right up till the end, in his last video "Hurt."

One night during the Florida Film Festival, they decided (after years of urging from people like me) to do a whole night of music videos. Even though the event was on a Wednesday (traditionally a dull night out), the place was packed. It's almost as though people enjoy seeing well-made music videos. Maybe they should do a cable channel like that ... but I digress. One of the last of the videos screened was Cash's "Hurt," a cover of a Nine Inch Nails song and just beginning to find traction on the college/indie stations at the time.

Simply put, the video blew everybody in the room away. Many of the other videos were stylish, or well-made, or highly entertaining. This one was powerful. Cash's voice, craggy face and shaky hands told the story better than the lyrics: here's a guy who is hurting. Bad. Trent Reznor should be humbled by how well Cash gave new life to his silly little song about a self-obsessed drug addict and the pain they inflict on others, by infusing it with his real pain. The visuals, alternating between the decaying House of Cash museum, images scooped up from a lifetime in the brutal and fickle industry, and scenes of The Man Himself as a king trapped in his own castle showcased the raw emotion exquisitely.

Someone once said that if Jesus were a country singer, he's sound like Johnny Cash. In more ways than one, I think that's accurate. Cash grew up among sharecroppers (the slaves of the post-Civil War South), dirt poor and always working hard for his money. When he made it big, his first move was to reach out to prisoners and the downtrodden both in song and in person, a move no other artist I can immediately think of ever really did. It's said that one of the prisoners he played to in his California prison shows was a young Merle Haggard.

Later, he would take to mixing stories into his songs, not just novelty hits like "A Boy Named Sue," but tales of his youth and the hard work and small reward folks got back then. His steering of country music down a more folk-rock path enables him to walk equally with Woody Guthrie and a young Bob Dylan as much as Porter Waggonner and Flatt & Scruggs. His heart was in the Grand Ole Opry but his art was more sophisticated than his audience a lot of the time, and he paid dearly for that as the 70s progressed.

In 1963, he came out with his first "Best Of" collection, which included my favourite of his songs, Ring Of Fire. Country Music Television described it recently as "a collection of folk, gospel, Civil War, gunslinger, Carter Family and C&W jukebox hits." He was the musical equivalent of John Wayne. He later strongly allied himself with the plight of the American Indian -- again, the only recording artist I know of who has done so.

In 1968, Cash makes a hit out of a song by Carl Perkins that becomes an absolute staple in our household. "Daddy Sang Bass," becomes one of my father's favourite songs, and I can't even tell you how many times we all sang it with dad's accompaniment on guitar. We were no Carter family, but it (along with a handful of other folk and C&W staples like "Shine On Harvest Moon" and "Sweet Georgia Brown") formed the bedrock of my happiest childhood memories.

Then suddenly, in 1994 after a prolonged absence from the non-country mindshare of America, comes Cash again with American Recordings, the first of a four-CD series of guest-star-filled, self-tribute CDs. Most of the tracks are covers of other people's tunes (notably Dylan, Tom Petty, Nick Lowe and U2 songs), and it sometimes comes across like a wake for someone who's still living, but the rapidly-aging Cash is still able to put plenty of energy and emotion into the songs, often bringing out new sides to them that even their authors didn't know existed ("Hurt" is an excellent example of this).

In some ways, Cash never made it as big as some of his early labelmates like Elvis Presley, George Jones and Carl Perkins. But unlike most other recording stars of the time (or since), he was taken into people's hearts in a very personal way. Even when his career seemed to be winding down in the late 80s, he remained a beloved public figure. Though I'm sorry he's gone, he is at last free of all the pain -- pain exacerbated by the rather sudden death four months ago of his second wife, June Carter Cash (who appeares briefly -- and eerily -- in the video for "Hurt"). He went out on top (re-discovered by a new generation, winner of MTV Music Awards, one last hit record under his belt) and never lost the love of his fans, the respect of his peers (except for country radio, but they disrespected all the standard-bearers of country), and the goodwill of a nation that sees him as part and parcel of what "America" means to people.

It's hard to do much better than that.