The Man in Black, Living in a World of Grey

Johnny Cash reminds us of the fiercely independent soul of a musical genre that’s become the de facto soundtrack of the Bush Administration.

By Adam Jentleson, Campus Progress
Tuesday November 22, 2005

In his 2002 State of the Union, George Bush divided the people of the world into two categories: those who are with us and those who are against us. A few months later, country music superstar Toby Keith made it clear which side he and his fans were on when he sang at the terrorists, “we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way.”

Less than a year later, the Dixie Chicks’ Natalie Maines engendered the wrath of the country music establishment when she told a London audience, “just so you know, we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.” Later that year, at the Country Music Awards, singer Winona Judd called country music an art form with a “true love of independence.” But when the Dixie Chicks were mentioned as an award nominee, a deafening chorus of boos rose up from the audience. If there had been any doubt which side country music was on, by 2004 it was gone.

Country music has always been the music of tough guys and gals, so lyrics like Toby Keith’s and the backlash against the Dixie Chicks should come as no surprise. But it would be a shame if the current political side-taking of the country music establishment clouded the music’s deeply skeptical and unsimple soul. After all, it’s taking the side of an administration that operates on the unquestioning loyalty of its members and labels dissenters as unpatriotic.

For those of us who worry about things like this, “Walk the Line,” the new biopic about Johnny Cash, arrives not a minute too soon. As it popularizes the life of an American icon, it should also give pause to anyone inclined to write off all country music as simplistic – the music of people too dumb to make it in no Northern town, in the words of Randy Newman.

Cash is often made out to be a troubadour of the working class, of people who’ve been done wrong in one way or another. Being broke, busted, betrayed, beaten down – you name it, he’s got a song about it. But lots of country singers sing songs about hardship. What sets Cash apart is the complicated interplay between just and unjust authority that fuels the songs he sings. A deeply religious man, Cash was also a sinner through and through. Throughout his career, he struggled to reconcile these two competing forces without excuses or justifications. Trying to do what was right but knowing he was far from righteous, the man in black lived in a world of grey.

Much is made in the movie about Cash wearing black all the time – “because I couldn’t find anything else to wear” is the explanation Joaquin Phoenix, portraying Cash, gives. Cash himself offered a different explanation. In the song “Man in Black,” he sings, “I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down/Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town.”

It’s no coincidence that the song “Man in Black” appeared on an album laden with religious overtones and featuring a guest appearance from the Reverend Billy Graham. Cash’s passion for the dispossessed was rooted in his Christianity. Cash was never preachy, but his Christianity was his compass, especially after he married June Carter.

At its most socially conscious, Cash’s religion inspired songs like “Man in Black.” At its most spiritual, it inspired haunting premonitions of death and confrontations with mortality, like in the title track of his final album, “The Man Comes Around.” In that song, meditating on Armageddon, Cash offers a window into his worldly take on religion as he sings:

Whoever is unjust let him be unjust still,
Whoever is righteous let him be righteous still,
Whoever is filthy let him be filthy still,
Listen to the words long written down,
When the man comes around.

To clarify what was going to happen when the man did come, Cash sings, “Will you partake of that last offered cup?/Or disappear into the potter’s ground/When the man comes around?”

The song is unusual because Cash rarely sang or wrote so self-consciously about judgment day. It’s hard to imagine the song wasn’t inspired at least in part by the approach of his own personal judgment day; it was released just a few months before his beloved June passed away, and less than a year before he himself followed.

But in addition to painting a compelling picture of the second coming, the song lays bare Cash’s moral world: one where it’s OK to be yourself, but where if you’re too bad, you’ll get yours. There’s room for free will in Cash’s world; but looming over everything is a righteous authority that will hold you accountable for the way you use it.

This, of course, is nothing new for anyone who’s ever been to church; it’s a healthy dose of good old-fashioned Judeo-Christian worldview. What sets Cash apart from the preachy crowd is that he leaves the judgment to God.

In Cash’s world there’s plenty of room for a righteous authority, but there’s not room enough for two. The authority of man and his laws is therefore suspect, if not denied outright. At the very least Cash himself never passes judgment on the people he sings about. And they’re begging to be judged. In song after song, Cash sings about the absolute dregs of human society, lost cases on whom humankind has long given up.

One of Cash’s best-known songs, “Folsom Prison Blues,” takes the first-person perspective of the cruelest of criminals, a man who, famously, shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Yet Cash manages to evoke sympathy for the dude. In “Orleans Parish Prison,” he begs reprieve for another murderer. Like the inmate in Folsom, this one shot a man without any apparent reason. But, Cash sings, “I heard him say, as they led him away/He’s sorry for what he done.” In the next verse, he pleads the case of a prostitute. She may’ve done wrong, he argues to a faceless authority, but “she’s tired and cold and you got the gold she took from a hungry world.” So let her go.

Cash makes no effort to deny that the people in these songs are guilty of transgressions. But he treats the characters in his songs like Bruce Springsteen’s highway patrolman treats his brother, in a song that Cash covered. The patrolman’s brother was constantly running afoul of the law, but, “if it was any other man, I’d put him straight away/But when it’s your brother sometimes you look the other way.”

In the true Christian spirit, Cash treated all the people he sung about like the highway patrolman treated his brother. Cash never denied their terrible deeds; Lord knows he’d done his share of bad things, too. Nor did he apologize for them. But he never shook a Bible at them either. They were human, just like him – deeply flawed and prone to sin.

This is a man, after all, who was never reborn. Even Bob Dylan released a Christian rebirth record; Cash never did. His religion was integrated into his sin-laden worldview. He would praise Jesus and sing about killing a no-good woman in the same breath. And for all his singing about betrayal, God and death, the devil is conspicuously absent from Cash’s songs. One suspects it’s because when it comes to explaining why evil happens, blaming the devil is a cop-out.

There is, however, a recurring bad guy in Cash’s songs. But it’s not Lucifer; it’s prison. Soulless, unfeeling, inhuman – in Cash’s world, prison is the ultimate manifestation of unjust authority. Whenever it appears in his songs, prison exists solely to destroy man’s spirit and dehumanize his being by enforcing an imperfect authority. For Cash, humans are part good and part evil. It’s up to God to tabulate the balance sheet at the end of a life. Any other entity that tries to fill that role lacks the authority to do so.

But even for a man deeply skeptical of humans judging other humans, presumably there are limits, transgressions so extreme they render irrelevant any good that may reside in the transgressor; ramming planes into buildings and killing three thousand people just to watch them die, for instance. So who knows, maybe Johnny Cash was a Toby Keith fan.

But listening to a body of work that relentlessly questions the legitimacy of human authority, one thing comes through loud and clear: The farther country music walks down the path to being the soundtrack of the ruling party, the more distance it puts between itself and the legacy of Johnny Cash.

Illustration: August J. Pollak