Obituaries: Johnny Cash 1932 - 2003

I became infatuated by Johnny Cash when I was only eight years old. The year was 1959 and my father had brought home a copy of the album The Fabulous Johnny Cash. The cover pictured Cash wearing a white shirt and black suit jacket, sitting on a stool, leaning on an acoustic guitar that was balanced on his knee. One hand was laying flat on the guitar, the other was balled into a fist with the thumb sticking out and placed beneath his chin, a common pose often used by family portrait photographers.

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He was looking directly into the camera's lens and something in his eyes betrayed the smile that was on his face. My father and mother couldn't see it, they thought he looked happy and fine, but I knew that this was a very sad man, the saddest person I had seen in my young life. I don't remember much about the music on the album, except that it had the song, Don't Take Your Guns To Town, which was to become a lifelong favorite.

The only thing I really remember is the "saddness" in his face, which was the only word I could find in my eight year old vocabulary to describe what I saw. I wondered what had made him that way, and I wanted him to be happy.

By the time I'd turned twelve I'd lost my parents love for country music. Like most kids my age in the early sixties, I wholeheartedly adopted rock n roll as the music of my generation and wanted nothing to do with country, pop or big band, the music of my parents' generation. I quit listening to Slim Martin's local afternoon country show on WGBG in favor of Johnny C on local "flame throwing" rocker WCOG or Booby Nash on WPET.

Secretly however (secret because I didn't want my school chums to know that I had a square side), I retained a fondness for Johnny Cash and his contemporary Marty Robbins. When I was old enough for my parents to allow me to roam around town unsupervised, I would sometimes walk or take the bus to the Apple House restaurant on Tate Street, where you could play the juke box (a nickel a song) right from your booth. If none of my friends were around I'd play Ring of Fire, a song that completely perplexed me.

In 1968 Cash recorded a live version of Folsom Prison Blues, which had been a hit for him back in '56. Columbia Records released it as a single and it immediately became a bigger hit than it'd been before. In my hometown the song became somewhat controversial when radio station General Manager Tom Armshaw banned it from his radio station.

According to Armshaw, he was listening to the radio while shaving and getting ready to go to work when his young son walked into the bathroom and asked, "Daddy, do people really do that?"

"Do what son," Armshaw asked.

"Shoot men just to watch them die," his son answered, referring to a lyric in the song.

Later that day, Armshaw publicly banned the song from his radio station, and got much coverage from the local CBS television affiliate. At the time, he was in the process of changing his radio station to a gospel format and most people saw this as a move to put him in a favorable light with the born agains.

That same year I took a job as night DJ at a radio station that was struggling to be the town's first full-time country on the FM dial. I hated country music, and I hated being a country disc jokey. Every evening, much to the chagrin of my boss, I would break format to play Folsom Prison Blues and I Walk the Line.

By 1971 I was a full fledged hippie, firmly entrenched in the "don't trust anyone over thirty" culture. That year Cash released The Man in Black, which explained why he always wore black:

"I wear it for the sick and lonely old; For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold; I wear the black in mourning for the lives that could have been; Each week we lose a hundred fine young men; And I wear it for the thousands who have died; Believin' that the Lord was on their side; I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died; Believin' that we all were on their side."

Suddenly it was okay to be a hippie and to trust an elder. Johnny Cash it seemed, "straight," square and part of our parents generation, was on our side.

Over the years many of my hippie heroes have disappointed me. Jerry Rubin became a Wall Street capitalist; Eric Clapton began hawking beer; Greg Allman sold-out his manager to avoid federal prison. Others, unable to adapt to the times, slowly became irrelevant. Johnny Cash, however, remained a most unlikely hero to this aging hippie. He never sold-out his ideas; until he drew his last breath he remained vital and relevant.

He began his career opening for Elvis. He ended his career being honored by twenty-somethings on MTV three generations later. Not bad Johnny. Ya done good.

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