Johnny Cash: Country Man of the World

Even the kitschiest of country singers tries to do a song here and there about "down home folks." Most of them are forgettable, many of them painfully bad. But Johnny Cash could do them well, and without affectation.

For example, on one of his last albums, American III: Solitary Man, Johnny included a song of his called "Country Trash," a song he said he wrote from "a little country pride in my childhood way of life."

Well, there's not much new ground left to plow/And crops need fertilizin' now/My hands don't earn me too much gold/For security when I grow old/But we'll all be equal under the grass/And God's got a heaven for country trash.

But Johnny's voice reached far beyond his native Arkansas and far beyond America. The memorial article from the German weekly Der Spiegel says, "Johnny Cash was the absolute embodiment of the American musician." In the long and admiring article, author Werner Theurich says:

Since he issued his "Man in Black" album in 1971, the public saw Johnny Cash only in black clothing. For the underprivileged and the losers of this world, said Cash. Because he looks so cool in them, said the poisonous New Yorker critic Robert Christgau. But Cash mastered the art of remaining cool as well as credible. He ignored the temptations of Big Business in the form of Las Vegas and stylish productions. And even in his deep spirituality, which found expression in various Gospel-influenced albums, he displayed bite, integrity and precision. He didn't have to search for musical expression. Cash always knew how something needed to sound. The fact that in well more than one hundred albums that he issued he also had a few weaker ones hardly matters. Cash always made his errors at a high level of quality.

The Frankfurter Rundschau captioned its obituary picture of Johnny, "The true voice of America." A fitting and wonderful tribute - even though it's a quote from Richard Nixon (!!!), who on that occasion at least was telling the honest truth. The sub-headline says that by the end of his life, "his voice wasthat of humanity itself."

Johnny was one of American's best exports. And one of the best faces our country could have hoped to present to the world.

Hearing: Rosanne and Johnny Cash, "September When It Comes"

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