Watermelon Wine

by Frye Gaillard

  “He wrote back and seemed kind of flabbergasted,” Cash continues. “He said, ‘I remember one time back in Hibbing, Minnesota, in 1957, you were there and I was one of the people out there listening.’ He said, ‘All during the 50s, it was you and Hank Williams.’”

  The letters were the start of a steady correspondence that cemented a sense of soul brotherhood even before the two singers met at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963. Theirs quickly became one of the most remarkable friendships in American music, and in some ways one of the pivotal expressions of Dylan’s humaneness and Cash’s Christianity.

  Both performers recognized that the political divisions between their fans were far from frivolous, tied as they were to such issues as war and peace and residues of prejudice. But in their music at least—and therefore in the deeper and instinctive aspirations of the people who listen—the two performers sensed a similar groping for the same universals. In addition to Dylan’s nonpolitical songs of rambling, Cash could identify strongly with a peaceful anthem like “Blowin’ In The Wind.” He had recorded his share of songs like it, and some that were even more obviously angry.

  One of the angriest was “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” written by an Indian songwriter named Peter LaFarge, and telling a true story that had become bitterly symbolic to a rising generation of young Indian militants. Hayes had been a marine during World War II, and during the Battle of Iwo Jima hill he was one of a handful of men to make it to the top and help plant the American flag. The photo of Old Glory on the rise became one of the classics of World War II, and when Hayes returned home to his native Arizona, he received a short-lived hero’s welcome.

  But, as the song says, “He was just a Pima Indian,” and he returned to the reservation, where jobs were scarce and where water that had once flowed into ancient Pima irrigation ditches had been diverted to serve the growing city of Phoenix. Without either work or hope, Hayes became a drunk, and one night as he staggered toward home he passed out and drowned in a muddy irrigation ditch with two inches of water in the bottom.

  Cash recorded a whole album of songs about such Indian tragedies, but he also wrote and sang about other subjects that struck far closer to home for most of his audience. During the height of the protests against the war in Vietnam, he wrote a song that offered a blunt chastisement of those who were closing their ears and minds to the voices of the young. “What i s Truth?” began with the image of a child asking his father to tell him about war, and the father suddenly stumbling over his words: “Son, that’s when people fight and die.” A little boy of three says, “Daddy, why?”

  The odd thing was that the song was a hit on the country charts, and the reason, Cash thinks, is that even in his most protesty songs, he never traveled far down the road to ideology—never let his music depart from its basically Christian, humane roots to become the political property of any one faction. He was very literal-minded about the points of origin. If the subject was war, his takeoff point was the Sixth Commandment or the Sermon on the Mount. If he was performing in a prison, his inspiration was Luke 4:18 about Jesus and the captives. It was neat and simple, which suited Cash fine. He had already learned from his pill-popping days that his life didn’t work when he lost sight of his moorings.

  But the political factions didn’t understand all of that, and they worked very hard to claim Cash as their own. Richard Nixon invited him to appear at the White House and, through H. R. (Bob) Haldeman, asked him to sing two of the most conservative songs of the era—Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee,” and a reactionary recitation called “Welfare Cadillac,” written on a whim by an amateur songwriter named Guy Drake.

  Cash politely refused to sing either song, much to the delight of his growing following of college kids. But much to their simultaneous disappointment, he pointedly refrained from criticizing either Nixon or the songs themselves, explaining instead that he didn’t know “Welfare Cadillac,” and that he was sure Nixon would soon invite Haggard himself to sing “Okie from Muskogee.”

  “I try not to become involved in politics,” Cash explains today, and in a narrow sense that’s certainly true. But in a larger sense it isn’t, for Cash began to understand that people saw him as a reconciling force—a person whose music and presence could somehow reach beneath the anger and divisions.

  He genuinely believed that there was something more basic about the country than its polarized factions, and the symbol of that conviction became his network television show on ABC. It began in the fall of 1969, and during the course of the two seasons it lasted Cash managed to plug such country artists as the Statler Brothers, Doug Kershaw, Charley Pride, and a struggling young songwriter named Kris Kristofferson.

  But equally significant in his own mind was his attempt to introduce his country fans to the folk artists many of them might have expected to despise: Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, and Judy Collins, to name a few.

  “A lot of people got their first look at American folk on my country show,” Cash remembers with a satisfied smile. “I thought at first we might get some flak for it, but we didn’t really. Only Pete Seeger was an issue because of his politics. But I just told the network he was a fine performer and writer, and a legend in folk music. His stand on ecology I appreciated. I just said I wanted him on the show. It wasn’t a big deal really. I saw that country and folk had a lot in common.”

  Cash wasn’t the only one to reach that conclusion. On the other side of the fence, Bob Dylan began feeling enough of a kinship with the music of Nashville to begin making his records there. The idea jelled for a variety of reasons—not the least of which was the influence of his producer, Bob Johnston, who was also the producer for Johnny Cash and shared a belief in the musical compatibility of country and folk.

  In addition, Dylan himself had already developed a healthy professional respect for Nashville’s legendary sessions pickers—among them Charley McCoy, Wayne Moss, Pig Robbins, and Henry Strezlecki. McCoy had played on one of Dylan’s New York sessions (handling acoustic guitar work on “Desolation Row”) and Dylan was impressed with what he heard. So he came to Nashville in 1966, arriving one afternoon about six o’clock and asking the assembled musicians—Moss, McCoy, Strezlecki, Robbins, Kenny Buttrey, and Fred Carter, Jr.—to hang loose while he finished writing a song called “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”

  “About 4 A.M.,” remembers McCoy, “he was ready to record.”

  The musicians didn’t mind the wait; they were being paid for their time. But they were at first stunned and then deeply impressed by Dylan’s unique combination of casualness and a single-minded determination to make the best possible music whatever the cost.

  “Really,” says Moss, “we used to think of Nashville sessions as being relaxed, but Dylan changed our whole approach. He was so relaxed and laid-back that your creative juices took on an entirely different aspect. He took the time to think the session out. Anything we wanted to try, it was have at it. He was very critical of himself, not so much of the musicians around him.”

  Dylan made three more recording trips to Nashville, and each time he found himself more and more drawn to the city’s musical style. The culmination of that attraction was his Nashville Skyline album, which relied heavily on such distinctively country sounds as Pete Drake’s steel guitar. But if Dylan’s affection for Nashville seemed to grow with each of his visits, the same was also true of Nashville’s affection for Dylan. Almost everyone associated with the Nashville Skyline sessions—from the musicians to engineer Neil Wilburn—was impressed by Dylan’s soft-spoken courtesy and thoughtfulness. And the result of that impression was a sort of ad hominem-in-reverse analysis of his politics. If he’s such a decent person, people began to say, maybe we shouldn’t be offended by the things he believes.

  “That’s one of the great things music can do,” concludes Charley McCoy. “If you take a controversial subject, politicians can tell you what they think and you’ll get
mad. Somebody can put it in a song and you love it.”

  Johnny Cash believed that too, and McCoy, Dylan, and nearly anyone else around Nashville will tell you that there was nobody any better at proving the point. Cash would wander onstage at the rickety old Ryman, the late-night crowd a little bleary around the eyes but moving toward the point where fatigue gives way to a second wind of rebel yells.

  Clad in his ruffled white shirt and Lincolnesque dress suit, he would run through a kind of autobiography in song: from lonely-times ballads like Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” to the gospel songs of his later years, delivered in a rich, flat voice that sounds as if it’s welded to the lyrics.

  During one of those appearances, on March 15, 1974—the last performance of the Grand Ole Opry before it moved to its slick new quarters at Opryland—Cash paused briefly in the middle of his set and ad-libbed an introduction to a pair of new songs. His voice showed traces of uncertainty, as if he were not sure how much to say. Then he cut the explanation short and let the music speak for itself. The first song was also the oldest, a piece called “Man in Black,” written in 1971 before a concert at Vanderbilt University. It was intended to be a statement of his political philosophy, he said, and as the spotlight narrowed and focused on his face, these were the words he began to sing: I wear the black of the poor and the beaten down,/Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town.

  As the lyrics poured out, the old men with wrinkled faces and the scabs of fresh razor nicks sat ramrod straight and squinted toward the stage as if it were crescendo time in the preacher’s sermon. The good ole boys decided to ease off for a while on the rebel yells, and the ladies with the piled-up hair and the Instamatic cameras let their flashbulbs fall temporarily silent.

  Cash had gotten inside them the way he always does, providing some fodder for their serious thoughts, a tug or two at their laid-away feelings. But then, to underscore the point that he was still one of them, and to deepen their understanding of what was on his mind, he quickly shifted gears and moved into a song called “Ragged Old Flag.” It’s a poignant pledge of allegiance, the story of an old man sitting in a small-town square, gazing at the tattered flag that flies above the courthouse and speculating about all the things that it and the country have been through together.

  “I don’t like to brag,” the old man tells a stranger, “but we’re mighty proud of that ragged old flag.”

  It was a triumphant night for Johnny Cash, one of many in the early seventies. But even as the applause was ringing in his head, he also knew, as he later wrote in his autobiography, that he was nearing the end of a chapter. With a little help from his friends, the pieces of his own life had been put back together, and there were some early indications that the country was moving in the same direction. So he began to enter a period of reflection, of savoring the moments with his family, and of exploring a feeling of contentment that he hadn’t often known since the years of his boyhood.

  And yet, strangely enough, it proved to be a time of peculiar nonsuccess. For the better part of two years, until the summer of 1976, every record he released turned out to be a flop. “I just got lazy,” says Cash if you ask him why. But if that’s what it was, he seems to have found a new burst of energy. A string of hits including “One Piece at a Time” and “That Old Time Feeling” signaled the beginning, he thinks, of some new stage.

  Cash says he has no preconceptions about where the stage will lead him. But if he can mix some commercial success with his peace of mind, then the long, hard trip will have all been worth it. And in any event, he says with matter-of-fact conviction, it’s all in the hands of the Lord.

  5

  In the Wake of Johnny Cash: New Writers & New Ideas

  Ain’t no better nights than nights in Nashville makin’ music on my old guitar.

  —Hoyt Axton

  One Saturday night in 1970, George Hamilton IV got a call from Joni Mitchell. She was in Nashville, she explained, to do a taping of the Johnny Cash show, but in the meantime she was having some pickers out to her motel room for a late-night jam session.

  She invited Hamilton to come along, which was not the least bit surprising. He had been one of the first performers in any musical field to have a major hit with a Joni Mitchell song, and it had happened quite by accident. One night on his way back to Nashville from North Carolina, he had been cruising along Interstate 40 listening to the car radio when Tom Rush came on with a song called “Urge For Going”—a Joni Mitchell original about good-byes and wanderlust that was laced with the kind of lyrical imagery that would soon make her famous.

  Hamilton was impressed, tracked her down at a Charleston, South Carolina, coffeehouse, and got her to send him a tape. His version of the song made the Top Ten on the country charts, and for Joni it was a commercial breakthrough.

  By the night of her Nashville jam session, however, she had become a star in her own right, and Hamilton was flattered to be included in the gathering—especially when he saw the people who were there. Along with Joni, there were rock singers Michael Nesmith, the talented member of a teenybopper heart-stopper group called the Monkees, and Graham Nash and David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. From Nashville, in addition to Hamilton, were an up-and-coming songwriter named Mickey Newbury and a shy and somber unknown named Kris Kristofferson, who everybody said was going to be great.

  “It was quite a night,” Hamilton remembers, looking back from the perspective of a few years later. “It was one of those famous exchange-of-songs sessions that were so common in Nashville in those days. Every time people like Joni would come through, they would get together with some local pickers, often out at Cash’s house, but someplace, and they would listen to each other’s songs.

  “This particular session went on until the wee hours of Sunday morning, and then Joni turned to Kris, who had been just sitting there quietly while everybody else played, and she said, ‘You haven’t played anything yet, Kris.’ He mumbled some ‘aw shucks’ reply about how he wasn’t a singer, but everybody insisted, so he pulled out a notebook and said he had a couple of new ones and he’d have to read ’em.

  “He sang ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ and ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down.’ I’ll never forget it. There he was, a bashful newcomer with his short hair, no beard, and button-down collar; and I mean it wasn’t an act. That’s how he really was, a really genuine kind of person reading his songs out of a notebook while he strummed on his guitar.

  “When he finished with those two, there were maybe 60 seconds of total silence. Everybody knew it was the best two songs that were done that night. People were thinking, ‘Who the hell is this?’ And yet everybody knew he was the best in the room. Nash and Crosby told him to look them up if he ever got out to the Coast, and he mumbled something about how Cash or maybe Roger Miller had said something about cutting some of his stuff. Pretty soon both of them did, and after that, he was on his way.

  “It was a beautiful period in Nashville.”

  And so it was. Kristofferson hit town about the same time as a few dozen other like-minded young writers—people like Newbury, Willis Hoover, Vince Matthews, and John Hartford—all of whom had grown up in the Bob Dylan-Gordon Lightfoot era of songwriting but had clung to a stubborn, undiminished appreciation of Hank Williams, Roger Miller and Lefty Frizzell. There was a sort of respectful rebelliousness about Kris and his cronies, and even in the early years, when they were scratching for their meals in the run-down rooming houses, there was a sense of excitement about their coming. They weren’t making any money; their songs were being cut only sporadically, if at all. But they were immersing themselves in the life of Nashville, and drawing in return a good bit of emotional sustenance.

  Mythology has it that the powers of the industry were initially indifferent, and at the boardroom, coat-and-tie level, that was largely the case. But at the artist level, it was not, and as Kristofferson looks back today, the things that
stand out for him are the late-night jam sessions with the established writers and performers—Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and Harlan Howard, among others. Howard, especially, was a fan of his proteges. He had established himself long before as one of the most skillful writers of straight country songs—“Busted,” “Pick Me Up On Your Way Down,” and hundreds more that weave authentic emotions through simple structures. But he would hang out at the Professionals Club with Kristofferson and the hungries, and he would tell them with absolute conviction: “If Nashville is going to progress, it’s going to be because of you and you and you; not Willie and me.”

  Johnny Cash had a similar reaction, and Kristofferson and the other young writers will tell you—in tones that often lapse into reverence—that there was nobody any more generous or energetic in pushing their cause. Cash, however, is inclined to remember his own role in more modest terms.

  “Kristofferson was carrying out wastebaskets at Columbia studios, about 1966 sometime,” he says. “I had a lot of sessions that year, and he always managed to get his work scheduled when I was recording. He could be carrying out trash at two in the morning.

  “He had been told not to plug his songs to me while I was recording. I didn’t even know all that; he told me about it later. Finally, he got to slipping the tapes to June (she and I weren’t married yet), and I’d sit up all night long listening. I thought, ‘Anything this good can’t be commercial.’

  “‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’ was the story of my life at that time. He had another one called ‘The Best of All Possible Worlds,’ which is about getting thrown into jail, and I heard it right after I got out. I held on to his songs for three or four years before I ever recorded any of them. That didn’t do him any good, but they were just too personal for me at the time.