But true greatness transcends the banal units of market shares, record sales or arbitron ratings. For some, it was Johnny Cash's cultural impact. Critics have credited him with "strengthening the bonds between folk and country music so that both sides saw their similarities as well as their differences. Johnny Cash “liberalized Nashville so it could accept the unconventional and the controversial" He blow-torched country music's rhinestone glitz the day he showed up at the Grand Ole Opry dressed in flat black. Oh, and then there was his voice.
Bono once said, "Not since John the Baptist has there been a voice like that, crying in the wilderness---every man knows he's a sissy compared to Johnny Cash." Cash revealed America's brutal truth in the tale of a drunk found dead of exposure in a Pima reservation cotton field. The broken bag of brown skin and bones was once a man of valor; Ira Hayes, the Native American soldier who helped raise the flag at Iwo Jima. Johnny Cash also taught us the healing power of forgiveness. He spent so much time performing inside prison walls we assumed he'd done hard time---but he didn't. He went inside to heal the hearts of heartless men. Men like the one who "shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die". Cash taught us compassion. He understood firsthand that redemption was possible at anytime, for anyone, even the most abject cold-hearted killer.
He talked it, but he walked it too, using his gifts to uplift the human race, to repair the world, to honor his Creator. Johnny Cash petitioned us to feed the poor, save the child, forgive the criminal, help the drunk and remember the forgotten. His magnitude was also reflected in his character---in his devotion to his "poor valley girl," his bride and soul mate, June Carter, who died just last May. And in his spiritual generosity---in sharing his most personal truths; a soul-killing addiction and born-again salvation. He understood how human frailties defeated us, and how miraculously faith, love, family, work, and music redeemed us. It wasn't until the day he died, on that perfectly clear, crisp Friday, September 12, 2003, that I figured out what made Johnny Cash my American hero.
Because you're mine, I walk the line. I hadn't had a drink in almost seven years. But on that day, a familiar darkness closed in and I felt myself falling back. All I wanted was to be sitting on a bar stool again. Alone, holed up at some dusty old man's gin joint, staring into the bottles on the wall, drinking. Playing Johnny Cash songs on the jukebox, gazing at that familiar mirage of salvation found at the bottom of a glass. But God had another plan. My niece called.
"Auntie, Let's go for a ride!" Raina Mae (aka Ray Doll Hummer) sang in a rockabilly band, she sounds just like her idol, the born-again Wanda Jackson. Careening through the Bonac woods, North to Sag Harbor, Johnny Cash sang to us in that voice once described as "Locusts and Honey," praying for us through the speakers of Raina Mae's red '89 monster GMC Jimmy…I hurt myself today, to see if I could feel….
In 2002, after I got baptized in the crystal blue waters of Gardiner's Bay, East Hampton, my friend Anthony said, "Now that you're a Christian, Johnny Cash will be your Bob Dylan." I didn't grasp what Anthony meant until almost a year later, on the day Johnny Cash died. Anthony is a fully tattooed power lifter from the Florida Panhandle, an atheist. But he was so broken by Cash's death, he said, "I think I'm gonna call my Mama today."
Like Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash is someone who's words make us feel a little less alone, with their equally creepy voices-- alternately singing, crying, ranting, and begging us to be merciful and righteous. Both Dylan and Cash have loved God in their own way. They have reached out for light and brought back what they found in the cold wilderness. June helped Johnny through an early recovery and then she walked with him, arm in arm, right up to Jesus Christ. Dylan's startling born-again embrace of the Jewish Rabbi from Nazareth and his subsequent "Baal T'shuva" return to Judaism confused his fans--from Yeshiva boys to lefty agnostics, atheists and secular humanists. Either way, both men managed to transport us to higher ground.
As Anthony explained, where Dylan has traditionally ministered to well-educated, alienated intellectual, urban audiences, Cash served Los Olvidados of rural America---the truckers, farm workers, nickel & dimed country moms, hapless convicts, honky-tonk habitués. Both men hurled us into the dark caverns of the soul, exploring both existential terror and social misery. They've exposed our collective lies and soothed our psychic wounds. Each has understood that faith is a difficult, non-rational, haphazard, solitary process.
And this I command thee: to love one another. Where Dylan's road to salvation lies in the human connection, in the possibility of engagement, Cash's resides in a living, loving God, in the Lord Jesus Christ. But, my dear brothers and sisters, we are obligated either way. Whether we think of the body of Christ as a socially constructed reflection of the body social, or the body social as the body of Christ incarnadine, we all do have to serve somebody.
An earlier version of this essay appeared in First of the Month, New York, Winter 2004, Volume VI, Issue 1.
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