Carrol
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Johnny Cash and Southern Post-Reconstruction History Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2003 11:55:06 -0400 (EDT) From: Mike Brand <MikeNOC at AOL.COM> Reply-To: Science for the People Discussion List<SCIENCE-FOR-THE-PEOPLE at LIST.UVM.EDU> To: SCIENCE-FOR-THE-PEOPLE at LIST.UVM.EDU
September 16, 2003
Why Johnny Cash mattered to me
I first heard Johnny Cash over the radio singing "Folsom Prison" when I was 8 or 9 years old. Like every other revelatory music I have experienced before or since, it represented a mystery that I needed to understand.
It was not until I read "Cash" - his 1997 autobiography that I began to fully realize the profound and tenuous connection to a disappearing reality that Johnny Cash represented.
When I went to school in Erie Pa. in the early 60's I was amazed that many of my black schoolmates had picked cotton only a few years before migrating north. What the hell was that!?? That was sharecropping, a reality that Johnny Cash - Carl Perkins and many other poor whites shared with their Afro-American brethren-A reality in rapid irrevocable transition.
Millions had and continued to trade the brutal marginal existence in the rural south for a slightly less brutal life in the factories of Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Oakland. The transformative energy released in this post WWII migration unleashed Rock and Roll.
Johnny Cash had a rock and roll heart. He did not romanticize "farm livin'" - he was getting the hell out of there! He was not hiding his light. He was not shuffling, and he was not apologizing-not apologizing for being what he was.
Johnny Cash tells a story in his book about the armed robbery of his home in Jamaica where young Jamaican toughs forced him and his family to the floor of his mansion at gun point. Cash amazingly reflects on this not with a vengeful mind but by identifying very personally with the robbers!!-what he may well have become! You won't hear many of the cornball fakers in today's Nashville scene do that. They are too busy roaring about kicking foreign butt or babbling about an idyllic south that never existed-and fuck them.
Johnny Cash was a giant and as conflicted and flawed as a giant has the right to be. But there is a reason he was loved by people of every race and nationality. There was a reason his life was threatened by the KKK. He sang our collective frustrated dream and he rolled across the stage kicking out the footlights, defying the authorities, and scaring hell out of every fool who got in the way. But you knew that if you treated him fairly and as an equal you would be respected, if not loved, in return.
The rural south that birthed Johnny Cash and the fire within him is basically gone and many who loved him haven't a clue where he was "coming from". But legends are legends after all. Those of us who long for freedom and hear the "train a coming" from our lonely places in the world will always welcome that Voice.
Long live the Man in Black!
Andy Willis _______________________________________________ afroam-l mailing list afroam-l at aas.duke.edu https://lists.aas.duke.edu/mailman/listinfo/afroam-l