Johnny Cash Is Family:
The Unforgettable Voice
Celebrates The Man In Black

Celebrating the human sound. This is The Unforgettable Voice. Part of the Electric Secrets variety podcast. I'm your host, Scott Leon Smith.

This is such a personal episode for me. I do not know of any person of my generation that they don't hear Johnny Cash and think of some strong male figure in their family. For me, it's my dad. For others, it might be their grandpa, an uncle, a cousin. There's just something about Johnny Cash's voice that makes him part of your family.

I can't recall any artist, whether it's a singer or an actor or a writer who, when they passed from this earth, I actually stopped what I was doing and spent some time, this was when I was living in Chicago. I spent some time just the rest of the night sitting on the deck with my roommate just listening to Johnny Cash and drinking some beers and talking about our dads. You know, it's just, there's something about his baritone and the way he tells a story that just makes him seem like somebody that you're related to, somebody that you love. And that doesn't happen often with singers. Usually, we put singers on a pedestal. People whose talent is beyond us. But Johnny Cash is part of our world, at least for my generation. 

So, what makes Johnny Cash's voice unforgettable? In the last episode, I talked with my friend Lori Turner about storytelling when you're singing. And this genre of music, all the lyrics that you hear are overtly telling a story. They're not trying to hide anything. It's an honest portrayal of a character and what that character is going through. And I think it's always interesting when people complain about country music that it all seems to sound the same. And sure, they're right. But 12-bar blues sounds the same. It's about the person singing. It's about the story that's being told. So, as you're listening to Johnny Cash in the background here, you hear the same type of rhythm with his earlier stuff, this chugging, driving rhythm. And that's to be expected. That's what you expect when you hear Johnny Cash song. In fact, you hear that rhythm and you expect it to be Johnny Cash. If it was somebody else, you would think, oh, who's this? But it's that train-like rhythm that lets us know a really cool stories about to be told. And that's what we expect. We hear that rhythm and we go, oh, I'm in for a great story. And of course, this has been said over and over about Johnny Cash. It's really the first time we are hearing the stories of what we might call anti-heroes, people that are on the fringes of society, those who are in prison, or those who are marginalized by the government or by society or by some other force. He's speaking for people that genuinely and generally don't have a voice or have a voice that people don't want to hear. And that's interesting that that comes out of country music because country music seems to have this reputation of being really, really conservative and not catering to any other voice, but conservative white Christians. And sure, there's an argument to be made for that, but there's also an argument to be made for the consciousness of country music. And Johnny Cash was definitely part of this consciousness of the '60s and the '70s, and his voice was a unique form of protest, especially with the stories he was telling, asking us to think about the poor and the forgotten and those who have or those who are paying their debt to society for a crime they have committed and the suffering that they're going through. So, Johnny Cash is singing about people that maybe normal society doesn't want to hear from, and that's an important part of being an artist. And his voice is a unique carrier of that message and of those struggles because that baritone seems to be very stoic and very conservative. His voice seems to evoke an older way of life or something that a person growing older wants to hold on to. As we get older, we start complaining, oh, it's not like when I was growing up, the world was different, the world was better. And that seems to be a world that Johnny Cash's voice is evoking, but at the same time, there is this very healthy mistrust of authority. If it seems like his voice evokes something of the traditional country love song.

Well, when it's Johnny Cash, it's about the pain of that love. It's about the struggle of that love, the burning love, the ring of fire, walking the line, right? Trying to do all that is expected of a man but being in love at the same time, the conflict of that. So that's a powerful thing about Johnny's voice is that it seems traditional. It has the quality of traditional singing, but it's breaking ground at the same time. It's breaking ground in terms of song, subject matter, and its breaking ground in terms of the introspection of the person telling the story and the personal struggles that they're going through.

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Returning to the storytelling aspect of Johnny Cash, the speak singing is always fun to talk about and to analyze because some people might say, oh, this is the beginnings of hip-hop. I don't think so. Hip-hop has to have an urban element to it. And Johnny was not urban by any stretch of the imagination. And again, thinking about his singing as evoking traditional values, but at the same time, doing something unexpected or against the expectations of a genre, how many singers of his time were actually telling a story in rhythm without singing it.

Something like “Rock Island Line” or “A Boy Named Sue,” two of my favorites where he's narrating the story in rhythm, but then bringing in his singing for the chorus or for different parts of the song. You get this sense of oral history happening. And whenever somebody's telling a story, a wise person is relating a story, and they tell it well, you feel like you're there. And you're experiencing what the narrator's experiencing. And “Rock Island Line” and “A Boy Named Sue” are two songs that are just like that. You can smell the smoke of the train. You can kind of feel the tracks vibrating as Johnny in the band or amping up the tempo. You can smell the beer and the blood and the dust of the saloon when in “A Boy Named Sue” he's confronting his father and beating him up. You're there in the middle of the story, and that wouldn't happen without his voice. It's like a baritone bedrock of storytelling. 

And we can't talk about Johnny Cash without talking about the color black, the man in black, the black clothes. I mean, when you look at him, the man is a walking requiem. Not for any established way of life or established way of looking at things. It's a requiem for compassion and understanding, I think, since he clearly chooses to make himself the voice of the marginalized and the forgotten. And the voice of those who don't know how to express their grief and their regret. Those are my favorite Johnny Cash songs, the ones that are deeply personal, where it's a character or a narrator looking at themselves and what they've done and asking God for forgiveness or asking his family for forgiveness. That's something that a lot of people can't express, the dark or black qualities of their own soul, really. And having a singer express it for them is something that draws a person toward that singer, an artist who's able to express the things that they can't. And that's why I think fans of Johnny Cash really take his music personally, not in terms of feeling insulted, but in terms of being accountable for themselves.

In a way, Johnny's kind of the tough love dude in your family that sits you down, you know, tells you, yeah, I know that was fun, but now you've got to be accountable for it. It's such a wonderful, ironic combination of ideas, joyous, rebellion, and at the same time, accountability for the things you do wrong. It creates empathy. And one of my favorite ways that Johnny gets empathy from the listener is his humor. And you can hear it in his voice. It's this home-spun, lovable rejection of anything that resembles authority, especially when he's singing about stealing parts to build his own car in “One Piece At A Time.” Or that irony of the anti-hero, the famous, you know, probably his most famous lyric. 

“When I was just a baby, my mama told me, son, always be a good boy, don't ever play with guns, but I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” That compelling irony of, yeah, I loved my mom and my mom loved me, but I'm still a bad guy. We in America love our anti-heroes, and we, you know, we kind of glorify the violent outlaws in our history. And Johnny Cash's voice is evocative of those types of things, of bootleggers and bank robbers and Bonnie and Clyde and things like that. But I think, again, there's always an irony in Johnny Cash's singing that even though those types of things tend to be glorified by our culture, there really is a more serious aspect to it when you have to, you know, face your maker and beg forgiveness for your sins. Johnny Cash is incredible at living in both those worlds, the anti-hero world and the struggle for absolution when you do the bad thing.

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Taking things back to my dad, I mentioned earlier in the episode that Johnny Cash reminded me of my dad. My dad passed about a year and a half ago and toward the end of his life, he started unapologetically stocking up on stuff from his youth, Hank Williams, Patsy Klein, and Johnny Cash. It was just great to see him buying CDs so cool because that's my generation and playing them in the garage while he could still do things around the house and take care of the lawn and things like that. He'd just be working in the garage with that great music playing.

I got a chance to see him rediscover Johnny Cash, especially the series of American recording songs that Johnny Cash did with producer Rick Rubin, where it is just everything stripped down and stripped away. It is just Johnny and his guitar on the first album, especially in the fourth album. There's a couple of albums where they add a band in. But hearing Johnny Cash and his voice with just a guitar behind it, especially in the live tracks that they put on the album where he is performing in Hollywood, at the Viper Room in front of a bunch of heavy metal rockers. He shows them how it's done. And I would often hear my dad humming or singing those tunes from that first American recordings album or the classic Johnny Cash stuff, the Folsom Prison Blues, all that stuff.

And of course, there was the video that they did with him covering the 9-inch nail song Hurt, which really shows the depth that age had added to his voice. All of this stuff really struck a chord with my dad. And it was great to see him rediscover the old stuff and to listen to the new stuff. There is something about that voice that is, I think, an escort to the next world. It is that, again, we're talking about absolution, forgiveness, the end of life. Even those songs like, “Give My Love To Rose” and “Bury Me Not,” where it's a narrator observing a death, listening to somebody's last words, where they tell them what they've done wrong and that they were on their way to see their family and get forgiveness and get to know the children that they never knew. And they're dying at the side of a railroad track or in the dust. There's a lot in Johnny Cash's music that is therapeutic, I think, for people who are at the end of their lives and are getting older. My dad got a cancer diagnosis and it was like he was in prison. He was a very active guy. Fortunately, he didn't have a lot of pain, but he did get weaker and weaker and weaker, and his body just became a prison. He could barely move. And as he deteriorated, we had to take care of him. The pain, I think, was emotional pain, just not being able to do anything or take care of himself. And I hope, I can only hope, that in his mind as he was going, he was hearing some Johnny and he was hearing that voice and hopefully it was giving him some comfort and some safe passage across the great unknown, I guess. 

I'm thinking it would be quite unforgivable for me to end this episode about Johnny Cash without including his incredible wife, June Carter. And as you listen to “Jackson,” their greatest duet, you get a feeling that you just can't explain their voices were made for each other. Just like they were, you can hear the joy of the conflict between the characters in this song, and June Carter's voice not hen pecking or inasculating just amused. Amused at her man and what her man wants to do and providing that sarcastic voice of consciousness that a man like Johnny needs to keep things in perspective, but of course Johnny is not having any of it. And that's the beauty of the song and the beauty of their relationship and the relationship of these characters is that, yeah, I know you're going to do the bad thing, but I'm still going to try to keep you from doing the bad thing even though you enjoy doing the bad thing. And I kind of enjoy watching you do the bad thing because it's funny when you come back with your tail between your legs. And by the way, that whole stream of consciousness that I just did is exactly the way you should describe why these voices are unforgettable. Just you just can't stop talking about them. You just have to have a stream of 

consciousness because they're so good. And what they do is so honest. And that's what people look for in their music and Johnny and June Carter can't get more honest than those two.

Thank you so much for listening to The Unforgettable Voice part of the Electric Secrets variety podcast. I certainly encourage you if you have not started a collection of Johnny Cash to do so or add to your collection, decades of material to choose from, and all of them just wonderful examples even when they're overproducing Johnny's voice like it's a megaphone or putting too much music behind him. Even then, even then, he is just a timeless example of the human sound. 

Until next time, I'm Scott. Always go out singing.

From the back door of your life, you swept me out, dear. On the river of your plans, I'm up the creek. 

Oh, I will never be Johnny, but that's okay. We'll let Johnny be Johnny.