Why Johnny Cash Has the Words We All Need to Hear at this Critical Time

Johnny Cash, Trans-Southern Socrates:

How the Birth of Rockabilly Gave “The Man in Black” Wisdom for the Modern World

Galen K. Johnson, Ph.D.

By historic acclaim, the foundation of subsequent western logic was Socrates. Four centuries before the birth of Jesus, Socrates pursued a better life for ancient Athens by persistently asking fellow citizens to articulate the grounds for their beliefs, or, if they could not, to yield their beliefs to a marketplace competition of ideas, from which the clearest defended (on justice, beauty, virtue, etc.) would emerge as most commonly beneficial. But questioning the status quo can threaten even as it strives to enlighten. As described by his disciple Plato, Socrates was sentenced to die from drinking hemlock because his persistence in encouraging rationales for convictions was deemed nothing less than a corruption of young minds. Johnny Cash was intensely aware of this horrible irony of the human race regularly turning against the noblest representatives of its nature, singing in horror about Socrates’ heirs, the great martyrs for forward thinking, Jesus, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., “My god, they killed him.” Few persons have ever expressed the presence of these warring potentialities of humanity, extraordinary vision and inexplicable savagery, as vividly as did Cash. Because of many insightful lyrics he penned and some other songs that he made his own, there is perhaps no greater hope for a much needed modern American Socrates, who rightly refuses to let us remain complacent in any allegiance lower than truth, than Cash. For though the legend is dead, his popularity still thrives across swathes of the American population that seem to have little else in common beyond an ear for Cash’s storytelling. I will assert this potential in two stages: first, historically, by showing how Cash’s prospective assumption of a national conscience now was made possible largely by the specific time and place in which his career launched, and subsequently, by showing how this southern Socrates, with astonishing insight, melodized for modern ears the very wellspring and hope of ancient western philosophy.

At the beginning of their extraordinary rearrangement of the American music landscape, Johnny Cash and his colleagues at Sun Recording Studio in Memphis were, as pioneers often are, navigating back and forth across two terrains: the Eisenhower, post-World War II years of religious conservatism and Sunday School attendance, and the rumblings of rock and roll and changing race relations, as seen in the trauma of the Little Rock 9. Because the decade to come, the 1960s, was still far more unsettling for American society, with demonstrations and riots, the Vietnam War, the assassinations of King and the Kennedy brothers, Woodstock, etc., the creative force of the Sun musicians, born from the resourcefulness needed to straddle worlds and with real respect for the more traditionally religious one, largely disappeared from public display. A new era, or a “new born day” as Cash eventually sang of it, had appeared, and its new musicians, while certainly still clearing new ground, nonetheless proceeded with both feet firmly in that era—one that was unbound to an increasingly distant, conservative past. Michael Nesmith of The Monkees believes that the difference was so great “that it was almost as if the 1957 rise of rock and roll in the US had been a false dawn for 1964,” when The Beatles crossed the pond. But the Sun Studio legends never wanted to be rid of God, not just for tradition’s sake but for the dynamic spark their church upbringing gave their music. While the 60s receive far more attention as a decade of transition, it is really in the 50s, and specifically in the lives and music of Sun Studio’s three brightest stars, where one finds the crossroads of American popular culture that still better inform any new pursuit of wisdom. Indeed, although the late Pulitzer prize winner David Halberstam gained most of his accolades from covering Vietnam in the field, even he claimed that the 50s were the better example of a “cultural interwar” in which some were actually preferring to bridge divides, and he lists the influence of Elvis as second only to Brown v. Board of Education in the effort. The lives of Presley, Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis represent three different perspectives on seeking something eternal even amidst earthly turmoil, from which post-60s culture became too far removed still to see, but, if viewed interwoven, present virtually a seeker’s guide to the serious philosophical questions that still rock, so to speak, our scary-brave new world. Those questions, whether one labels them as issues of meaning, worth, depression, partisanship, gun control or Confederate monuments, all require but help us to answer to another lyric that Cash wrote: “What do I care?”

The Man in Black, the Killer and the Hillbilly Cat all had more interest in recording religious music than Sam Phillips had in promoting it, even though Phillips was at minimum a theist, recorded a commercial for an herbal supplement that referenced the Bible, and tried to convince Jerry Lee that a rocker was not automatically going to hell. But rather than run from, dare or ignore God, as would soon thereafter happen in rock and roll, the Sun artists played hide and seek with God—in a rhythm, like the sun chasing the moon, which in turn chases the sun—like in a rock and a roll. This was already present literally in favorite gospel songs of the three that were influenced by African-American spirituals, like “Bosom of Abraham,” with its “rock-a my soul” lyrics. As surely as the Sun artists could make socks hop on a Saturday night, they also never outgrew the influence of mamas dressing them in their “Sunday best.” They not only did not but could not imagine no hell beneath them, nor above them only sky. Even if largely forgotten later in its development, I dare even say that the Sun (Studio) God made the birth of rock and roll possible.

Elvis Presley seemed never to doubt that God gave him his musical gifts, and that to use the gifts of singing and entertaining were inherently consistent with trusting a higher wisdom and purpose. Elvis denied that his gyrations on stage were lewd; they were, instead, simply the byproduct of deep feeling. He stood up to Ed Sullivan to secure permission to sing “Peace in the Valley” on primetime television. He deflected the title of “King,” saying that only Jesus is King. J.D. Sumner and his nephew Donnie Sumner, both staples of Elvis’ 1970s stage shows, thought that what Elvis deeply wanted was to sing in a gospel quartet, and he would stay up late after performances singing gospel, explaining that it calmed him. His docu-film Elvis on Tour gives a glimpse into these impromptu sessions, and it was during the making of the film that its directors Robert Abel and Pierre Adidge realized the deep southern roots of Elvis’ comfort. “We come from a different background,” they told Elvis. “We come from the middle west or the west coast. … We don’t hear this…; that has a whole different level of meaning to us ‘cause it’s just not … part of our background… That’s as much to you kids as a kid in California growing up in surfing.” Sam Phillips clarified, “Elvis Presley was a spiritual man and able to convey it in a secular way.” On stage, Elvis was very playful, with a tremendous wit perhaps instilled from the “baby talk” code language he developed at a young age with his mother Gladys. He often used Kris Kristofferson’s “Why Me, Lord” as a comedy piece, informing bass singer J.D. Sumner that he had in fact not done one single thing to deserve the pleasures he’d known. But play is a biblical image of God and God’s people, especially in Song of Songs. There, God chases, woos, develops rhythm, rocks and rolls. “People can be delinquent by listening to Mother Goose rhymes if they want,” Elvis told an interviewer, but accusations that his own stage presence was a bad influence seemed not to bother him at all. “There were people who didn’t like Jesus Christ, and he was a perfect man,” Elvis protested. “I believe in God. I believe all good things come from God.” For Elvis, if even the rocks of the earth can cry out in praise of their maker (Luke 19:40), certainly no less may old time rock and roll.

Compared to Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash was in many ways the person most spiritually conflicted, despite being the most publicly associated of the three with organized religion. He told Kurt Loder in his final interview with MTV that he “hoped” to go to heaven after he died—an odd mini-retreat from his public professions of being a Christian during his Billy Graham Crusades appearances, although perhaps “hope” is what a good Christian, especially one who learned to appreciate the fertile soil left behind by a Mississippi flood, should embody best. Cash’s faith was most definitely hatched in dark delta soil, and so, not surprisingly, his outlook on life was very physical and incarnational. He liked walking barefoot in the earth and taking pilgrimages to the Jordan River valley. He may have seen his physical sufferings, particularly late in life, as part of his identification with Christ and the oppressed. Cash identified explicitly, at least in his recording choices, with the marginalized—see, for instance, his Bitter Tears concept album about Native Americans, the poor man whom he wanted to help steal a “Strawberry Cake” from a hotel lobby, or his anthem about “the poor and the beaten down,” “Man in Black,” lyrics to which, parenthetically, he shared in a handwritten letter with Elvis, who was considering “In the Ghetto.”

Yet, Cash was also a great sinner. He wrote “I Walk the Line” for his first wife Vivian but did not actually do it. Vivian described her former husband in the words of Kristofferson, “a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.” And indeed, one wonders if he ever fully reckoned with the anguish that she felt because of him. Maybe he could not emotionally. But he tried to enter into the shoes of everyone else through his biographical songs, about Chief Big Foot, Sam Hall, Abner Brown, Bill MacCall, Doc Brown, Robb MacDunn, Ira Hayes, Cisco Clifton, Annie Palmer, etc. Cash was at root a storyteller, and maybe his most powerful parable was his own life—truly a prodigal son who knew he had wanted his riches too early and became well aware that he needed a merciful father to bring him home. Cash, like Jesus the carpenter’s son, knew what it was like to work with his hands, and songwriting became an extension of the cotton picking over which he both lamented and reminisced as an adult—the means by which he could pick and fashion an adornment for the poor. He really did want to sit down and talk with erstwhile chief of sinners Paul, whose life prefigured his own and served as the inspiration for his only novel, Man in White. Paul freely confessed his walking contradiction—he did what he did not want to do and did not do what he wanted. This was a condition with which Cash was somewhat familiar.

Cash recalled for Kurt Loder when Jerry Lee would tell his Sun compatriots that they were all condemned to hell for singing music that aroused carnal passions. Arguing with Jerry Lee about religion, as a famous studio outtake of Jerry Lee and Sam Phillips proves, was frustrating and fruitless. More of a fundamentalist in his biblical interpretation than his fellow Assembly of God child Elvis, Jerry Lee did not have many doubts about anything, including his position as the greatest entertainer of his generation, if not always. Johnny wanted to be like Elvis after hearing him outside a Memphis store, and his self-deprecating humor multiple times expressed itself by exclaiming Elvis as practically the entire music industry. But not so Jerry Lee, who told biographer Rick Bragg that Elvis personally ceded the rock and roll crown to him before shipping off to Germany with his Army unit, and who also once postulated that the only thing Elvis had on him was access to better dope. So, when Jerry Lee assured Johnny they would see each other in hell for singing the devil’s music, Johnny could only hope to abbreviate the impossible debate by yielding, “Maybe you’re right, Killer. Maybe you’re right.” If Elvis saw any use of his talents as God-glorifying, and if Johnny was aware that his songs could point one either to God or the devil, teetering somewhere on the connection between troubadour and tempter, then Jerry Lee shows the odd but extremely powerful perspective that one can do God’s castigating work by singing the devil’s tune, ripping away all ambiguity as any sinner’s excuse, and leaving bare the consequences of one’s choices before God and everybody else by whether one embraced rock and roll. Play with great balls of fire, and you will get burned. 

In 1958, Jerry Lee was excoriated by the British media who learned that he had married his 13-year-old cousin while not yet divorced from his second wife. Elvis was grieving the death of his mother and preparing to ship to Germany with his Army unit. Johnny had left Sun Records for Columbia so he could release gospel music, but he was also commencing a love-hate affair with amphetamines. The first great era of rock and roll was unraveling, but its pioneers had long lived in crosshairs. Elvis still sought divine love; Johnny still demonstrated the need for hope to survive, and Jerry Lee still was a living reminder of holy justice. In a different part of the south, another rocker of a different hue, “Little” Richard Penniman, actually left his music career for a time to be an evangelist. That was then. Who could imagine such a thing happening now? Today, though we have more things to entertain us than the world has ever known, our children still complain of boredom, and un-placated rage bloodies our streets. Social media reduce our public participation, perhaps semi-mercifully, to 280 ranting characters at a time, with riling and bile-ing coming from the same high office whose holder once wrote Profiles in Courage. But rather than raise the level of public discourse through example, opposition media treat this bane of their existence in the same self-immolating way that Captain Ahab pursued Moby Dick, “If his chest were a cannon, he would have fired his heart upon it,” and the result is the pulling down toward death the very notion of a “more perfect union.” 

In response, in a 2018 commencement address described online as “antidotes for outrage,” President Nathan Hatch of Wake Forest University implored, “I call upon you to pursue ‘both…and’—to hold out your hand, look into the eyes of your sisters and brothers, open your ears and listen.” Yes, listen particularly to Johnny Cash, in tribute bands and in the classroom, on CD, streaming, and on an over-air satellite radio station that needs to become reality. For while, as Nashville star Marty Stuart says, Johnny, Elvis and Jerry Lee all perceived themselves as preachers in some sense, Cash became the one most capable of reaching others outside both their commonly beloved south and its magnolia smelling Christianity. He seemed to be aware of this and, without seeking acknowledgment, accept it. Biographer Michael Streissguth strongly believes that “[Cash] is molding who he becomes to the popular audience…and that desire to make a bigger statement, have a theme to his career, a philosophy behind what he was doing, very much set him apart from other artists.” Cash’s particular embodiment of the “walking contradiction” of human nature is more clearly perceived when viewing his dark attire as the mantle of the modern Socrates. For, as Professor Greg Johnson contends, through probing the dark and hypocritical edges of life through his songs, Cash “closely follows Socrates” in seeing if such effort might not ironically rebound a person into life anew, and with better self-understanding. Living with who we really are, Johnson says of Cash’s style, may get us out from under who we are. 

First, Cash came to reimagine through his inner experiences the frank, Socratic assessment of the human psyche. Socrates knew that such a topic would in some sense always defy full description and even comprehension, but the self-knowledge gradually revealed in the collective effort was the only basis for establishing justice. Who could know how to treat others fairly, Socrates wondered, who did not know the nature he shared with his neighbor? He rendered his diagnosis most famously in the allegory of the chariot, recorded in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus:

Let me speak briefly, and in a figure. And let the figure be composite--a pair of winged horses and a charioteer…. One of them is noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to him…. The vicious steed goes heavily, weighing down the charioteer to the earth when his steed has not been thoroughly trained…. The charioteer … is carried round in the revolution…[;] not being strong enough they are carried round below the surface, plunging, treading on one another, each striving to be first; and there is confusion…; and many of them are lamed or have their wings broken through the ill-driving of the charioteers…. [The noble steed] is unable to follow, and fails to behold the truth, and through some ill-hap sinks beneath the double load of forgetfulness and vice, and her wings fall from her and she drops to the ground…, but… the soul which has seen the most of truth shall come to the birth as a philosopher, or artist, or some musical and loving nature…. 

For Socrates, therefore, each human being stands atop a chariot, holding the reigns of two very differently minded horses. Coincidentally, Johnny called the disparate personalities within his own self “J.R.” and “Cash.” It only takes one unruly horse, the one he self-labeled “Cash,” to jolt off course and overturn the whole unit. The task of the charioteer is not to remove that ignoble horse, whose strength is indeed vital to the progress of the whole. It is to channel her raw power into constructive purpose. 

In modern equinology, such a process is called “natural horsemanship,” and in it, teaches renowned trainer Pat Parelli, “The attitude of justice is effective.” What Parelli is saying, essentially, is that the responsibility for the horse team lies not with the horses themselves but with the trainer, whose task it is to help the horse realize that voluntary cooperation is beneficial to all parties. This non-verbal communication, explains Monty Roberts, the “horse whisperer,” is never violent, which would be completely counterproductive anyway since the trainer would gain nothing by battering out of the horse if it were possible to batter out of the horse the drive that he very much wants to retain. The “natural” approach commences by allowing the horse to hear and experience, within the safety of a pen, sounds and motions that resemble predators. The wild horse can either flee or draw close to the trainer, who has turned his back not to shun the horse but to make the risk for the horse seem less threatening upon approach. Roberts calls the preference of the horse to team with the trainer rather than face the potential of confronting actual predators alone “Join-Up.” There is little a trainer can do actually to teach the wild horse, Roberts says, much like Socrates tried to explain in the Phaedrus that what seems learnable from the outside world really is more of a capacity already within one’s being. For both, the philosopher and the horse trainer, the teacher realizes that he largely helps stage the environment in which the pupil’s self-discovery can more confidently occur. When the subject is more comfortable over having her will respected rather than broken, and thus far less likely to choose flight over cooperation, then progress for all becomes possible. And it is uniquely the philosopher-musician, Socrates prophesied, who can woo us, much like Roberts does horses, not to shame the “darker” aspects of ourselves but persuade the savage beast to cooperate for its own survival. Only slightly less wild but much freer in its willingness to receive direction now, the once unruly horse, “Cash,” lends propulsion to the meeker horse, “J.R.” Darkness does not have any existence of its own in the Platonic tradition but is the decay of good. It does not deserve death, therefore, although the willingness to yield to it does. It can actually begin to heal itself through its readiness to be “harnessed” to another. While still indulging the cleft within himself in 1960, Cash laughingly warbled, “Come on you guys and listen unto me, lay off that liquor and let that transfusion be.” But “Transfusion Blues” was not really that funny, and the true lesson would not come until later.

On December 8, 1994, Cash explained in a concert in Austin, Texas, the motivation behind his first album on the American label. He did so in Socratic fashion, with but a twist on the analogous animal species used to explain bifurcated human nature. “The theme of it, really, is sin and redemption, and there are two dogs on the cover. And one of them is black with a white stripe; one of them’s white with a black stripe. Neither one of them’s quite all the way, kinda like me, I guess. Got redemption coming. Redemption is coming! But right now…, ‘O, “The Beast in Me” is caged by frail and fragile bars….’” Cash had long been in the habit of confessing to audiences that in his music he imprinted the travelogue of his life’s journey. He regularly admitted, for instance, that he sang often of the hungover lover of children’s church songs in “Sunday Morning Coming Down” because he needed its reminder of where he had been if he ever hoped to find a north star to lead him home. Cash’s obsession over knowing his own psyche was in truth not what made him unique from his hearers and subjects; he was rather their voice, and they came to trust him to tell their story for them when their own darkness scared them. We all pull two horses; we are all splotched with the opposite of our better natures. As Cash’s daughter Rosanne said of him, “He could hold two opposing thoughts at the same time and believe in both of them with the same degree of passion and power.” This is precisely why Cash is such a vital voice for a bifurcated world; by admitting we all have darkness, we loosen our light to shine more intensely. This is seen in Cash’s “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” which laments the true story of an Iwo Jima Marine hero who had seemingly died in disregard. It is how the town bum “Abner Brown” can prove to be the most loyal of friends—and illustrates the peril of avoiding self-examination when “Smiling Bill McCall” the radio star finally prefers self-disgusted suicide to another day of hollow privilege. We are “patently unclear,” Cash declares in “The Beast in Me,” and full of both “good ideas and complications,” according to “The Big Light.” “I am a sinner,” Cash admits, in “You Can’t Beat Jesus Christ,” and “I ain’t sayin’ I beat the devil,” he recites from Kristofferson’s pen, “but I drank his beer for nothing. Then I stole his song.” One does not have to choose which Johnny Cash to enjoy, the outlaw or the crusader. Neither exists without the other, just as no member of a true republic exists without any other.

Nor does one have to share Cash’s religion to see that his music, though often cloaked in Christian garb, is essentially about the changes we can all make here and now through the power and freedom of self-awareness. “Know thyself” is a maxim that surely connects the native Arkansas with the Athenian. Cash has little patience for those who are “so heavenly minded, they’re ‘No Earthly Good.’” The song “Man in Black” calls us to “get a few things right” and see that the humanity of the dispossessed and the prisoner, the sick, lonely and the reckless, has not become so much invalidated but imbalanced, as “a victim of the times.” “I ain’t preaching,” Cash says improbably yet believably in a song entitled honestly “Looking Back in Anger,” for this is but “The Human Condition:” “waiting and wishing / Ain’t nothing else you can do / So shine up a smile and look on the bright side / Sometimes the wishes come true.” Being honest about our constitution generates compassion and turns it into action, even if it at a pace no more progressive than “Half a Mile a Day.” “Would you give a little more than you take? Will you shine your little light on the children of the night? ‘What on Earth Will You Do (For Heaven’s Sake)?’” If Cash could find this same prime directive understood by Bob Marley, the Rastafarian whose god was not in heaven but on earth, he would sing that too: “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery…. How long shall they kill our prophets? ... Won’t you help to sing / Those songs of freedom?” “Redemption Song” should be a chorus, not a solo.

Marley’s anthem speaks of escaping the bottomless pit, and Cash certainly knew the difficulty of the challenge. In October 1967, having, he said, lost “every stabilizing force in my life,” he drove to Nickajack Cave, near Chattanooga, with the intention of allowing his darker nature to drive his entire life toward its seemingly inevitable course. “I crawled and crawled and crawled,” he recalled, “until, after two or three hours, the batteries in my flashlight wore out and I lay down to die in total darkness. The absolute lack of life was appropriate. … The deepest and most ravaging of the various kinds of loneliness I’d felt over the years, seemed finally complete.” Some have questioned the accuracy of historical details in Cash’s recollection of this event. What is indisputable is that unruliness had run away with his virtue, that he was ready to die, and he knew even in this troglodytic prison that he was soon bound for the company of “wherever [God] puts people like me.” He also was paradoxically close, at the same time, to embodying Socrates’ most famous parable of all. It is found in Plato’s Republic and is known as the allegory of the cave.

“Let me show you in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened,” Socrates tells his young friend Glaucon. “Behold! human beings living in a underground den …, their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move.” Socrates wonders what would happen if light enters the cave from both ends by the lighting of fire, casting shadows against the wall. Being unable to move and see that these specters were but reflections of fellow prisoners, each person could only presume that the shadows were not only substance but the only moving reality there is. However, if any of them could be miraculously unshackled, pulled out and released, although that person would at first have to face the tremendous confusion and even pain expectable when one’s constricted irises absorb intense, unexpected stimulation, in time, he would not only grow accustomed to the light but eventually learn the true nature of things and indeed pity those who remained. The lesson, Socrates explains, “is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort,” but those thus enlightened volunteer even against their own comfort to return to the cave, quit the petty struggles of those foolishly still shadow boxing for power, and govern themselves and their principalities peaceably. Johnny Cash believed that someone entered into Nickajack Cave to set him free. He began to feel his way out; “I began to see light,” the southern Socrates remembered, “and finally I saw the opening of the cave. … During the following days I moved through withdrawal to recovery. … At first it was very hard for me. Eventually--slowly, with relapses and setbacks--I regained my strength and sanity…. I was … surprised, almost shocked, to discover that the stage without drugs was not the frightening place I’d imagined it to be. … I was relaxed…. I amazed myself.” Expectedly, Cash believed that the force of his emancipation was God. He once called it “Godshine.” But he continued to accept a hand up whatever its source, including June Carter, Rick Rubin and the Betty Ford Center, and his lyrics kept shining a search light that those who know their darkness for what it really is might follow toward hope.

So it is no surprise that less than a year after his cave rescue, Cash learned to perform the same night that he first read it a song by Folsom Prison inmate Glen Sherley, called “Greystone Chapel:” “Inside the walls of prison, my body may be / But my Lord has set my soul free.” Indeed, on the matter of offering and receiving help as the maintenance practically of human refinement itself, much less an otherworldly hope, Cash seemed particularly willing to welcome other persons’ songs for his own albums. For instance, he covered Bruce Springsteen’s outlook, “If there’s a light up ahead, well brother, I don’t know / But I got this fever burnin’ in my soul / So let’s take the good times as they go / And I’ll meet you ‘Further On Up the Road.’” In the song “The Wanderer,” Cash spun the story written specifically for him by U2’s Bono, about a post-apocalyptic searcher for both a woman and Jesus who realizes along the way that the reason for the cataclysm was that “no one … trust[ed] no one.” By contrast, in the uplifting “The Big Light,” Elvis Costello was actually the one who wrote what sounds like Cash’s autobiography in its refrain: “The big light came through my window, and it opened up my eyelids / And it snapped them up like roller blinds, and it told me things that I did / I can’t face another day and night of good ideas and complications / And I’m thankful that I didn’t open another bottle of inspiration.” Cash even made poignant use of Loudon Wainwright’s satire “The Man Who Couldn’t Cry,” who has the last laugh against those who commit him to an asylum when the friendship of his fellow inmates frees him to see that tears are as natural as raindrops. But the widely acclaimed perfect ending to Cash’s career was his cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” whose raw, gut-wrenching power garnered Grammy, MTV Video and Country Music Association awards. That power, however, is largely proportional to how plaintively Cash’s version conveys the Socratic view of human value.

On the surface, the video is all about decay: a withered Cash, whose tourist museum and piano lid are both closed, can no longer reenact the vivacious memories replaying behind him, where also his wife June stands, an eerie premonition that she would die less than three months after the filming of the “Hurt” video. The striking contrasts of the tall baritone now reduced to stooping and croaking seem to indicate that the era of Cash and his rockabilly milieu was great once but is only a relic now, like the shards of the “Ozymandias” colossus in Percy Shelley’s poem. The bittersweet farewell earned “Hurt” the honor of greatest music video of all time from New Music Express in 2011. But when understood in context of Cash’s overall oeuvre and particularly his Socratic perspective on human nature, the confession, “I will make you hurt” could never be his closing word to surviving hearers. In acknowledging that all the honors he amassed count for nothing but dirt in the end, and that he self-administers a hypodermic now to feel still alive at all, Cash acknowledges the unruly horse of his nature, which must be named to be redirected. He rides his ghosts across the sky of our collective memory, but especially in view of his loved ones, whom he knows he has disappointed repeatedly, as only one sufficiently aware of his filths for what they are can confidently do. And as he draws closer toward the end, he tosses behind his double-portioned inheritance, like the chariot-riding prophet Elijah does to his pupil Elisha in biblical lore: “If I could start again / A million miles away / I will keep myself / I would find a way.”

No, Johnny Cash did not always walk the line. But he did prove that the dirty coal of one’s life can still make a diamond, and hence it is far more useful dug up than buried. And one cannot draw very near to Cash’s body of works without toppling somewhere into a tributary that can carry one, by twists and turns, to water that tastes like life. After all, who could avoid at some point finding oneself summoned into these seas by our modern Triton, whose choice of subjects connects to all of us? “I love songs,” Cash mused, with a noteworthy first entry, “about horses, railroads, land, Judgment Day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak and love. And Mother. And God.” In this breadth is the perceptiveness that turned a southern crooner raised on gospel into everyone’s singer- philosopher, singing both to and for believers and skeptics, cowboys and natives, patriots and rebels. At some point in the 1970s, Cash composed only for himself a poem called “My Song,” but thanks to his son John Carter Cash’s publication of it in the collection Forever Words, one can see now that Cash was actually long wishing that his music could be our Socratic guide: “I wish I owned / A great high mountain / With people below / Every way I turned / I wish they’d look up / And ears could hear me / And I’d sing my song / To the hearts that yearned / I would sing it loud / I would sing it long / Straight from the heart / I would sing it true / Then I’d come back down / From my singing mountains / And your life would be better / Cause I sang for you.”