Forever Words. Johnny Cash
of World War II, the Cold War, Korea, and Vietnam, to the victories of adulation and the vicissitudes of addiction. We might guess, even if we didn’t know, that Cash’s classic “Five Feet High and Rising” is an account of the flooding with which he was all too familiar from his 1930s childhood in the cotton fields of Arkansas:
How high’s the water, mama?
Five feet high and risin’
How high’s the water, papa?
Five feet high and risin’
His song “Man in Black” is a deft and dexterous comment on Vietnam, a subject on which so many others were heavy-handed:
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
The relationship between the amphitheater and amphetamines, meanwhile, is rather neatly delineated in a piece collected here called “Going, Going, Gone”:
Liquid, tablet, capsule, powder
Fumes and smoke and vapor
The payoff is the same in the end
Liquid, tablet, capsule, powder
Fumes and smoke and vapor
Convenient ways to get the poison in
So ingrained in our collective unconscious is the voice of Johnny Cash that we can all but hear the boom-chicka boom-chicka of his guitar accompaniment, at once reassuring and disquieting in its very familiarity.
The defining characteristic of an effective lyric—even the greatest of them—is that it doesn’t quite hold up to the scrutiny we might bring to bear on a poem, that only something along the lines of that missing boom-chicka will allow it to be completely what it most may be. In the case of work that is previously unpublished, or hitherto overlooked, this intrinsic lack is thrown into even greater relief. Is it possible that Cash himself chose not to round out, never mind record, some or all of these pieces? Are we doing him and his memory a disservice in allowing them out of the attic and into the wider world? Writers of the stature of Elizabeth Bishop, T. S. Eliot, and Philip Larkin are among those whose reputations have suffered at least a dent from the indiscriminate publication of their second- or third-rate efforts. And the fact is that even great artists not only nod, like Homer, but also produce nonstarters and no-nos.
Such considerations weighed heavily on the team—John Carter Cash and Steve Berkowitz—most immediately involved in the collection and collation of the copious raw material from which I was able to make this selection. It was with an initial sense of relief, then an increasingly rapturous glee, that I realized there is so much here that will indeed broaden and deepen our perception of Johnny Cash and his legacy.
II.
Before thinking about Johnny Cash’s legacy, though, I’d like to appeal to a passage from T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which I continue to find particularly instructive in this matter:
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.
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