“I love songs 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, heart-break, and love. And Mother. And God.”
I don’t remember when I first heard Johnny Cash sing. With most musicians there is a distinct before and after, but with Cash it was as if his music had always been there. “If America as a nation could speak,” Time Out wrote when he died, “it would sound something like Johnny Cash.” A sense of timelessness clings to Cash’s music. It touches the deep issues of life in a way the ordinary person can understand, and when Cash sang, there was an authenticity to it: Listeners knew that he had experienced pain and tasted grace.
Country music, like rap, was birthed not in high-class concert halls before audiences of wealth and privilege, but in the streets where ordinary people live, work, fail, love, and die. Though he became a star, Cash never forgot the people that society prefers to keep out of mind, out of sight.
Well, you wonder why I always dress in black,
Why you never see bright colors on my back,
And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone.
Well, there's a reason for the things that I have on.
I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,
But is there because he's a victim of the times.
I wear it for the sick and lonely old,
For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold,
I wear the black in mournin' for the lives that could have been,
Each week we lose a hundred fine young men.
That was written 35 years ago, but the newspaper headlines from Iraq make it an anthem for our time. It could be argued that dressing in black was a gimmick, a means to boost sales. Image is important in popular music, but it was not merely a gimmick. Johnny Cash sang about the reality of life in a broken world because he was convinced it was fallen and in desperate need of grace.
Cash never hid the myriad struggles in his life—addiction, divorce, failure—but faced them with disarming honesty. “Cash was an inspiration to Christians,” Steve Turner writes in The Man Called Cash, “because of the candid way in which he discussed the problems that had affected his life. By admitting his mistakes he gave hope to the spiritually battered and abused. He also suggested a way of living the Christian life that was uncompromising yet compassionate, dedicated to timeless truths yet relevant to contemporary issues, in the world yet not of it, orthodox yet hip.” Cash believed in grace, because he had experienced it, in his marriage to June Carter, in agonizing recovery from addiction, and supremely in Christ, whom he worshiped as Lord and Savior.
One of the ways Johnny Cash testified to his faith in Christ was in singing gospel music, which he did even in periods when his life was a mess. Gospel was part of his roots, not only in terms of the Southern culture in which he was raised, but in the roots of his music. One of his final albums, My Mother’s Hymn Book, was his favorite. It’s simple music --just Cash, a guitar, and an old hymn book, “kind of dog-eared and ragged, a little like I am,” he says in the liner notes.
There is another way that Johnny Cash witnessed to his faith that is easier to miss, but is perhaps even more strategic in our increasingly post-Christian world. Throughout his long career he took songs by other artists and made them his own. It’s common for musicians to make covers of other artists’ music, but Cash did it differently. Rather than simply repeat the song in his own arrangement, style, and sound, he tended to infuse them with a glimpse of grace. Nick Cave sang about a man on Death Row condemned for his crimes. “In Cash’s hands,” Turner says, “The Mercy Seat became not only a song of compassion for those facing the electric chair but the testimony of anyone under a death sentence.” More recently, Cash took Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor’s song, Hurt, about addiction to heroin, and to transformed it into a song of sin and redemption:
I wear this crown of thorns upon my liar's chair
full of broken thoughts I cannot repair
beneath the stains of time the feelings disappear
you are someone else
I am still right here
what have I become?
my sweetest friend
everyone I know goes away in the end
and you could have it all
my empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt
The music video Cash made to accompany Hurt won an MTV award, the images speaking as loudly as the lyrics. There is something deliciously subversive when a Christian takes something that echoes with the hopelessness of this sad world, imbues it with hope and grace, and does it with such quality and authenticity that even those who do not share his faith take notice.
In 1993 Johnny Cash recorded The Wanderer with U2. Bono and Cash were drawn to one another out of respect for one another as musicians, but also because of a shared faith. Bono says Cash has “this great voice which loves certain words; I just wrote those words for him.”
I went out there in search of experience
to taste and to touch and to feel as much
as a man can before he repents
I went out searching, looking for one good man
A spirit who would not bend or break
Who could sit at his father's right hand
An echo of the ancient book of Ecclesiastes, The Wanderer fit Cash perfectly. “Ecclesiastes is one of my favorite books,” says Bono. “It’s a book about a character who wants to find out why he’s alive, why he was created. He tries knowledge. He tries wealth. He tries experience. He tries everything. You hurry to the end of the book to find out why, and it says, ‘It’s good to work,’ ‘Remember your Creator.’ In a way, it’s such a letdown. Yet it isn’t. There’s something of Johnny Cash in that.”
On May 15, 2003, June Carter Cash died. She and Johnny had one of those rare marriages which demonstrated true faithfulness. She stood by her man even in the dark times, of which there were more than a few. Cash adored her, respected her, and was heartbroken at her passing. Educator John Seel correctly notes that the primary spiritual yearning of the postmodern generation comes in a question: “In the end, will anyone be there for me?” Cash was convinced that the answer to that question is “yes,” and is fulfilled in Jesus Christ. He and June Carter, not content merely to sing about it, demonstrated something of that gracious faithfulness in their Christian home.
We saw houses falling from the sky
Where the mountains lean down to the sand
We saw blackbirds circling ’round an old castle keep
And I stood on the cliff and held your hand
We walked troubles brooding wind swept hills
And we loved and we laughed the pain away
Living in a mansion on the streets of gold
At the corner of Grace and Rapture Way
In sweet ecstasy while the ages roll
Will you meet me in Heaven someday
Four months later, on September 12, Johnny followed his beloved June into the presence of their Lord.
Ellis Potter, a Zen Buddhist who became a Christian and a worker at Francis Schaeffer’s Christian retreat center, L’Abri, was fond of posing a thought experiment. Imagine asking ten non-Christians this question: “If you converted to Christianity today, do you think your life would be larger, fuller, richer, more attractive and creative, more involved with the people, circumstances, art, and culture around you? Or do you think your life would be smaller, narrower, more withdrawn, judgmental, and negative, less winsome and creative, less involved with the people, art, circumstances, and culture around you?”
The point of the exercise, of course, is to consider how they would respond. The answer, sadly, is pretty obvious. Where did they get this impression? Certainly there is an offense to the gospel, but more is going on than that—in most cases, non-Christians haven’t heard enough of the gospel to be truly offended by the demands of the cross. Jesus never compromised the truth and called people to repentance, yet attracted sinners in droves. True righteousness is profoundly attractive because we were created for it as creatures made in God’s image.
In a world in which biblical Christianity is increasingly deemed unattractive, negative, and uncreative, Johnny Cash showed that it needn’t be that way. Each time I listen to him sing, I pray that somehow, by God’s grace, I may have a measure of his authenticity.
Denis Haack is a ruling elder in Trinity Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Rochester, Minn. He and his wife have a writing and speaking ministry, Ransom Fellowship, designed to help Christians develop skill in discernment (www.ransomfellowship.org).
