Johnny Cash's Redemption Song
The Online Beat by John Nichols
09/12/2003 @ 6:33pm  

Later this year, Rick Rubin's American Recordings label will release a 
collection of Johnny Cash songs including a collaboration between the 
legendary country singer and one of his greatest fans, the Clash's Joe 
Strummer. The pair's version of Bob Marley's "Redemption Song" will serve as a 
poignant reminder of why Cash, who died Friday at age 71, was so revered by 
his fellow musicians -- if not always by a music industry that had a hard time 
figuring him out. 

"In a garden full of weeds," explained U2's Bono, Cash was "the oak tree." 

Cash loved playing with younger artists who shared his recognition that a song 
ought to come with an edge -- and maybe even a little politics. His 
collaborations with Bob Dylan, U2 and Strummer, and the delight with which he 
covered songs by Nine Inch Nails, Nick Cave, Beck, Tom Waits and Bruce 
Springsteen, made it impossible to slot Cash into the narrow categories where 
contemporary radio programmers consign artists. "He's an outsider, never been 
part of a trend," Rubin said of Cash. 

In his remarkable 1997 autobiography, Cash reflected on a career that began 
with hit singles but eventually saw him searching for a proper record label -- 
a search that ended only when Rubin, a groundbreaking rock and rap producer, 
signed him to American Recordings and produced four starkly brilliant albums. 
When people wondered why a country singer was on his label, Rubin said, "A 
rock star is a musical outlaw and that's Johnny." 

Cash embraced that outlaw image, singing in his signature song, "Man in 
Black": 

"Well you wonder why I always dress in black/Why you never see bright colors 
on my back/And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone/Well there's 
a reason for the things that I have on/I wear the black for the poor and the 
beaten down/Livin' in the hopeless hungry side of town/I wear it for the 
prisoner who has long paid for his crime/But is there because he's a victim of 
the times." 

Later in the song, he referenced the war in Vietnam, singing: "I wear the 
black in mourning for the lives that could have been/Each week we lose a 
hundred fine young men." 

Cash took sides in his own songs, and in the songs he chose to sing. And he 
preferred the side of those imprisoned by the law -- and by economics. Cash's 
obituaries are quick to quote the lines at the start of his classic 
song, "Folsom Prison Blues," which go: 

When I was just a baby my mama told me son/Always be a good boy don't ever 
play with guns/But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die... 

Later in the song about a prisoner listening to a passing train, however, Cash 
sings: 

I bet there's rich folks eatin' in some fancy dining car/They're probably 
drinkin' coffee and smokin' big cigars/Well I know I had it comin' I know I 
can't be free/But those people keep a movin' and that's what tortures me 

Though he was not known as an expressly political artist, Cash waded into the 
controversies of his times with a passion. Like the US troops in Vietnam who 
idolized him, he questioned the wisdom of that war. And in the mid-1960s, at 
the height of his success, he released an album that challenged his country's 
treatment of Native Americans. That album, Bitter Tears, featured an powerful 
version of Peter LaFarge's "As Long as the Grass Shall Grow," a sad, angry 
rumination on the mistreatment of the Seneca tribe of the Iroquois nation, and 
of how the US government "broke the ancient treaty with a politician's grin." 

Years later, Cash would remember that, as he prepared Bitter Tears, "I dove 
into primary and secondary sources, immersing myself in the tragic stories of 
the Cherokee and the Apache, among others, until I was almost as raw as Peter. 
By the time I actually recorded the album I carried a heavy load of sadness 
and outrage; I felt every word of those songs, particularly 'Apache Tears' 
and 'The Ballad of Ira Hayes.' I meant every word, too. I was long past 
pulling my punches." 

The Bitter Tears project inspired one of Cash's many disputes with a music 
industry that wanted him to entertain rather than educate. 

"I expected there to be trouble with that album, and there was," Cash wrote in 
his autobiography. "I got a lot of flak from the Columbia Records bosses while 
I was recording it -- though Frank Jones, my producer, had the sense and 
courage to let me go ahead and do what I wanted -- and when it was released, 
many radio stations wouldn't play it. My reaction was to write the disc 
jockeys a letter and pay to have it published as a full-page ad in Billboard. 
It talked about them wanting to 'wallow in meaninglessness' and noted 
their 'lack of vision for our music.' Predictably enough, it got me off the 
air in more places than it got me on." 

Even in the 1960s, Cash said, "craven worship of the almighty dollar" was 
interfering with the ability of artists to get good music heard. 

Thirty years later, as Clear Channel and other radio conglomerates sucked what 
life there was out of radio, Cash would argue, "The very idea of 
unconventional or even original ideas ending up on ‘country' radio in the late 
1990s is absurd." 

In 1998, after Cash won the Grammy award for best country album, American 
Recordings purchased a full-page ad in Billboard that was addressed to country 
radio programmers who had failed to play his music. The ad featured a picture 
of a much younger Cash with his middle finger held high in a fierce gesture of 
defiance. 

Even as Cash was widely honored in his last years, his music was seldom played 
on mainstream country radio. And, yet, Johnny Cash kept being heard, singing 
the last track of a U2 album, appearing in a haunting video that somehow found 
a place on MTV and joining in that one last "Redemption Song" with a late 
British punk named Strummer who recognized that no one rocked like the Man in 
Black. 
 

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