The song was written by Danny Dill and Mel Tillis, a pair of Nashville-based writers whose hard-country credentials are absolutely impeccable. Tillis especially has a cornpone image—a stuttering central Floridian, tall and gaunt, who eventually made it big as a singer of straight country love songs.
About the same time that Bare came out with Tillis’s song, he cut another record with a similar story—a restless young man is getting ready to cut loose for greener pastures, wrestling with the prospect of leaving his lover, but knowing that he will go and she will stay and neither of them will be very happy about it. The song was called “Four Strong Winds,” and it was written by a Canadian singer named Ian Tyson.
Tyson at the time was half of the folk-singing duo of Ian and Sylvia, and in the minds of the fans at least he was identified strongly with the Peter, Paul and Mary branch of contemporary folk music. For one thing, he had the same manager (Albert Grossman), and so did Bob Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, and a host of others.
But there was a similarity between Tyson’s song and that of Mel Tillis, a sort of instinctive grasp of the same universal, that drew the attention of Bobby Bare and his producer, Chet Atkins. And as it turned out, the similarity was really no accident, for Tyson had grown up as country as Tillis, if not more so.
A decade and a half before all the cosmic cowboys crowded onto the scene in Nashville and in Austin, Texas, Tyson was appearing onstage in faded Levis and battered cowboy boots, and it all came naturally to him. He was raised in the cattle ranges of British Columbia and Alberta, listening to the same kind of music as his American country-boy contemporaries—the songs of Merle Travis, Flatt and Scruggs, the Carter Family, and also the spangled Canadian country stars like Hank Snow and Wilf Carter.
Eventually, Tyson and his guitar found themselves in Toronto, where he ran into an Ontario ballad singer named Sylvia Fricker. They decided to team up about the same time that the folk-music revival was rippling out from Newport and Greenwich Village, engulfing nearly everyone with a guitar and a desire to sing songs with a little bit of substance. But Tyson saw no contradiction between what he was singing and what he had always listened to, believing that all of it sprang from the same earthy source.
The same point of view was emphatically shared by his friend and fellow Canadian, Gordon Lightfoot, who would soon emerge as one of the biggest stars his country had ever produced, another pivotal figure in the reunification of folk and country music. Lightfoot was a farm boy from outside the town of Orelia, Ontario. He had been raised on a radio diet of the Grand Ole Opry and the “Wheeling Jamboree,” beaming his way from WSM in Nashville and WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia. But then one day, as he later explained to his friends, he heard a Bob Dylan song called “Girl From the North Country,” and he was bowled over by the craftsmanship of the lyrics. He decided on the spot to make a serious pursuit of songwriting, and the result was a steady outpouring of songs like “Early Morning Rain”—a blend of craftsmanship and earthiness that attracted the attention not only of Ian and Sylvia, and Peter, Paul and Mary, but also of a Grand Ole Opry singer named George Hamilton IV.
Hamilton has never been what you would call a country music purist. He began his recording career in 1956 with a million-selling teen ballad called “A Rose and a Baby Ruth,” and for the next several years he continued to churn out the teenybopper tearjerkers. But his private tastes were considerably more sophisticated, and in the early sixties he decided—long before it was a proved path to success—to pack up his family and move to Nashville.
According to nearly everybody who knows him, Hamilton is one of the most remarkable people ever to come through the city. He is tall and quiet, with unobtrusive good looks that are more wholesome than handsome. He sings pretty well, though there are scores of singers whose styles are more memorable; and yet somehow he has managed to hang on as a considerable force in the music business ever since his beginnings in the 1950s.
The reason is deceptively simple. Hamilton is, as it happens, one of the most thoughtful people in country music, and one of the things he thinks about most often is the music itself—where it comes from, where it’s all going, and all the other philosophical questions that make it more than just a pastime or a way to make a living. When he began to apply those tendencies to the music of the Canadian folkies, he soon realized that the songs they were doing were only a short step farther down a path on which he was already headed.
He didn’t see much difference, for example, between “Early Morning Rain” and the “get-drunk-and-ramble” songs of Jimmie Rodgers. And certainly there was a similarity between Lightfoot’s music and a song like “Abilene,” which Hamilton had recorded in 1963. So he began to cut the songs of Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell, and they proved as successful as anything he had tried. Some of his Nashville picker-friends were dumbfounded.
“But the folkies and the Nashville pickers were operating out of the same heritage whether they wanted to acknowledge it or not,” Hamilton says, looking back on the sixties. “There was a political split in those days. It was serious, but it was based on a set of conditions that appeared and have now begun to change. The common ground, I think, was much deeper.”
Hamilton believes that the Canadians such as Lightfoot and Ian Tyson played a pivotal role in the rediscovery of that common ground, for there was, he says, a crucial distinction between them and their American counterparts.
“Dylan and Joan Baez and the other Americans in the sixties folk revival were all highly political,” Hamilton explains. “They perceived some major wrongs in the country, and it led them into folk protest. But in Canada, you had a generation of kids who grew up very differently. They were in a much bigger country, with only twenty million people. It was less crowded, and there was no war and no civil rights problem—at least not of the proportions that we had in this country. So when those Canadian young people began to write from their own experiences, they produced poetic, romantic, introspective lyrics, but not angry lyrics. And that was the major contribution of the Canadian folkies in bridging the gap to country music. It was easier to relate to what they were doing, because they were writing straight people-music, without the political overtones.”
Hamilton believes that in the last ten years or so the gap has been bridged almost entirely. From the mid-sixties on, he and a host of others (Bobby Bare, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Kitty Wells, to name a few) began recording the songs of Lightfoot, Tyson, and even Bob Dylan.
The folkies themselves soon caught the spirit and began streaming through Nashville to record their albums, or to appear on Johnny Cash’s show on ABC, or simply to hang out in the motels and bars and trade some songs.
It was, Hamilton and others maintain, a watershed era in the recent history of American music. For one thing, it helped make possible the emergence of a whole new generation of songwriters—Kris Kristofferson, Mickey Newbury, Dick Feller, John Hartford, Guy Clark, and dozens more—who have combined the lyrical finesse of the folkies with the gritty simplicity of Hank Williams.
But there was even more to the reunion than that. It was a metaphor—a prelude—to a national depolarization. For when Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash begin issuing formal declarations of soulbrotherhood, and Joan Baez begins to understand that her own political philosophy is very close to that of Earl Scruggs, then clearly something significant is about to occur.
Nobody in Nashville perceived that significance more clearly, or was heartened by it any more completely, than the hard-living, Christian expatriate from Dyess, Arkansas—Johnny Cash.
4
Johnny Cash: Putting the Traditions Back Together
Just so we’re reminded of the ones who are held back, Up there in front, there oughta be a Man in Black.
—Johnny Cash
It stands there on the left, a mile or two beyond the tacky frontiers of runaway suburbia, looking like an antebellum prop on a movie set. Unl
ike most recording studios in Nashville, which are jammed together in a spruced-up swatch of urban renewal turf, the House of Cash rises stately and alone against a backdrop of rolling Tennessee pastureland.
The grass is still bent from the dew, and the sound of a mockingbird echoes faintly across the hillsides as Johnny Cash’s Cadillac glides into the parking lot. It is eight-thirty in the morning, a time of day that he would have dreaded a few years back—during the seven or eight years when he would begin each day by gulping a handful of amphetamines. He wasn’t too particular about the dosage, two or three at a time, ten or fifteen milligrams a pop, dexedrine, benzedrine, dexamyl. It didn’t much matter as long as they did their thing—as long as they helped him get from one concert to the next on the long road trips, and then, finally, as long as they helped him exist from one miserable morning until the one that followed.
The side effects were predictably squalid. He would pace the floor until the wee, desolate hours of semidawn, until finally barbiturates would bring him down and lull him into a nightmarish sleep. He developed a nervous twitch in his neck, and apparently in his brain as well, judging from some of the things he did as his metabolism ran its tortured course from uppers to downers and back again.
He was arrested and jailed seven times, on charges ranging from public drunkenness to buying drugs from illegal sources. On one of his stops in jail—in Carson City, Nevada—only an impromptu version of “Folsom Prison Blues” managed to pacify an unglued lumberjack whose avowed intention was to strangle his more famous cellmate.
He once crashed through a warning gate at a U. S. Navy bombing range and drove four miles across a live mine field in the Mojave Desert. He drove tractors over cliffs, wrecked half a dozen expensive cars, and tore up his marriage. Yet somehow he managed to survive until 1968, when, as Kris Kristofferson puts it, “he got him a good woman” and found himself reintroduced to Jesus.
That reintroduction became a bedrock for him, and in the process it gave his music a sense of mission that grows stronger and stronger as time goes by. Whether it’s singing protest songs about the plight of Indians, or doing free shows in racially tense prisons, or donating time and testimonials to Billy Graham’s crusades, Cash is essentially giving expression to a brand of back-home Christianity that is far more subtle than most people might expect.
“Yeah, I guess that’s true. That is what I’m trying to do,” he agrees, as he munches on an apple in his wood-paneled office, his features ruddy and relaxed, and his trim, two-hundred-pound frame draped into an easy chair.
Cash does not give many interviews these days, but when he does, he participates fully and shows no traces of superstar pretensions. In the early stages, in fact, his voice will display just a hint of the butterfly tremors that are there around the edges when he walks on stage before five thousand people. But launching into an answer is like launching into a song, and his presence becomes certain and commanding as he begins to discuss, say, the relationship between his religion and his legendary concerts at several dozen prisons.
“The only prison concert I ever got paid for,” he explains in a baritone voice that’s as rich and ringing up close as it is on record, “was the one I did in Huntsville, Texas, in 1957. I took the show to the other ones free, I hope as my Christianity in action. I don’t usually talk about that, and I wouldn’t now if you hadn’t asked me. I don’t think a Christian oughta brag about his deeds, and anyway it’s something that’s meant a lot to me.”
He peels off another chunk of apple with his black-handled pocketknife and then begins warming to the subject. “There are a lot of people who don’t understand what’s happened to me,” he says. “They say Cash used to be tough and now he’s soft. The truth is I’m a lot tougher now. What those people don’t understand is that the old Johnny Cash would have literally died in sixty-six or sixty-seven if it hadn’t been for faith.
“Faith is the foundation of everything I do. It’s what I am. It always has been, really. There was just a time when I wasn’t living it very well.”
Cash, unlike some of his fellow fundamentalists, does not usually begin such monologues on his own. He is not a heavy-handed proselytizer, at least not with words, for he understands full well the tedium of holier-than-thou sermons. But his Christianity is a serious thing, as are the morals and values that have been tied up with it ever since his boyhood days in Dyess, Arkansas.
He was raised in a five-room, wood-frame house in the sultry cotton country of the delta. The Depression was in full force, but his father, Ray Cash, always seemed to make enough of a crop to feed his own family and to bailout needy neighbors as well. There was an ethos of sharing in those days that intertwined very logically with the deification of hard work.
Dyess, in fact, was founded on precisely that combination of principles. It was an FDR experiment—a socialistic farmers’ cooperative with a store, cotton gin, and cannery that belonged to the farmers themselves. According to the plan, the co-op members would bring their edible crops to the cannery, and after the processing was completed they would get back eight of every ten cans. The other two would be sold to keep the project going, and if there were any profits at the end of the year, the co-op members would divide them.
Times were much too hard to permit any philosophical ramblings about the ideologies that were being practiced. But young John Cash was deeply influenced—permanently, as it turned out—by a curious meshing of the Protestant work ethic, a Golden Rulish empathy for people in need, and the visceral, unabashed fundamentalism of an Arkansas Church of God.
All of that has stamped his music with a distinctive tension, a creative tug-of-war between toughness and sentimentality, idealism and earthiness, that has enabled him to reach an impressive array of people and emotions. He could stroll onstage at San Quentin, for example, and sing a few old spirituals like “Peace in the Valley,” tugging on the heartstrings and the latent, laid-away softness that does not usually show itself behind the walls of a prison—and then he could break suddenly into one of the most ruthless and hard-hitting prison songs that many of the inmates had ever heard: San Quentin, I hate every inch of you/You cut me and you scarred me through and through.
Cash saw no contradiction between the feelings expressed in the spirituals and prison songs, or for that matter between the various kinds of stages where he was asked to play—from Richard Nixon’s White House, to the Ryman Auditorium, to the annual folk festival in Newport, Rhode Island. It all fit together deep in his instincts, and to understand how, it helps to spend an unhurried hour or two in his tastefully posh, second-floor office at the House of Cash.
The trappings around the room will tell you a lot—a Holy Bible in the middle of a heavy oak coffee table, and next to it a paperback collection of Appalachian protest songs, Voices From the Mountains. On a table off to the side is a stack of testimonial books from born-again Christians (topping the stack, appropriately enough, is Chuck Colson’s Born Again), and on the wall behind his desk are five color photographs that he took himself. Three are close-ups of his family—his second wife, June, and his young son, John Carter; and then a pair of nature shots that may or may not be intentionally symbolic—a hummingbird hovering near a dew-covered blossom, and a gnarled and wind-blown cottonwood tree, clinging to life in the deserts of New Mexico.
Still another photograph, less predictable than the rest, leans next to the desk in a stained wooden frame. It’s an autographed enlargement of a Bob Dylan album cover, with an inscription that reads: “To John and June, Love, Bob Dylan.”
It turns out that Dylan and Cash go back a long way, to the days when the fans of folk and the fans of country found themselves on opposite sides of a deepening political chasm—one group focusing on the nation’s inequalities and shortcomings, the other on its promise and prosperity.
The folkies were younger and luckier. They had that crucial combination of intelligence, sensitivity, and economic security
that made it possible to question the status quo; and when they did, they found a lot of answers that were not very satisfying. The fans of country, meanwhile, had come out the other side of a ferocious depression and a couple of wars with their patriotism stirred and their standard of living on a steady path upward. They not only believed, they knew, that the country couldn’t be nearly as badly off as its critics were contending. They became increasingly defensive and bitter, and before the shouting match was over it brought out some of the ugliest instincts that both sides had to offer.
At least that was generally true. But there were, of course, exceptions, and Cash was among them. He saw no problem in focusing on problems as well as prosperity, believing that the commonality of the American experience went deeper than even the most serious of political divisions. He came at that understanding through his musical intuitions, and the process began in earnest back in 1962, when Columbia Records released an album entitled The Free-Wheelin’ Bob Dylan.
It contained some of Dylan’s best-known originals—“Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Don’t Think Twice” (which Cash later recorded), and a bitter protest anthem called “Masters of War.” All of them were done in Dylan’s peculiar, talking-blues style that soon turned the folk world on its ear.
Cash, however, heard the album a little bit differently from most of Dylan’s other admirers. “I didn’t know him back then,” he remembers, casting a glance towards Dylan’s likeness, “but I liked the album so much I wrote him a letter—got his address from Columbia Records [which is also Cash’s label] and I congratulated him on a fine country record. I could hear Jimmie Rodgers in his record, and Vernon Dalhart from back in the twenties, the whole talking-blues genre. I said, ‘You’re about the best country singer I’ve heard in years.’
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