JOHNNY
CASH'S
The title is, not
surprisingly, a misnomer. Yes, the song “Rockabilly Blues” ( Texas
1955) came from the pen of J.R. Cash. Certainly the 1980 album that took
its name from that song was probably meant (at least by Columbia
marketing department) to suggest his early years on Sun Records. But
Johnny Cash was not then, nor after, a rockabilly singer by any useful
application of the word. (Nor, certainly, a bluesman, for that matter)
Well, it wasn’t the first
time Cash was misunderstood by his label. He had moved to Columbia
in 1958, when Sun wouldn’t let him record a gospel album, after all.
Born February 26, 1932, in
Kingsland Arkansas (and raised on 20 acres of government munificence in
Dyess Colony) Cash emerged from the same hard-scrabble Depression South
that produced label-mates Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley and
so many others.
Racial lines blurred out in
the killing heat of those cotton fields. No wonder the music that
subsequently exploded from Memphis in the 1950’s had a raw, fully integrated urgency about it that must
have been even more starting when it arrived plop in the midst of the
Eisenhower years. Remember that senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist
hearings dominated the news; so did the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown V.
Board of Education of Topeka ruling, the Cold War with the USSR, and the
Korean War and its confrontation with the other emerging superpower,
China. Plus the bomb, all that, Elvis supplanted Sinatra and Eddie Arnold
on the radio. No wonder bomb shelters sprouted in suburban back lawns.
By comparison, Johnny Cash
presented fairly modest challenges to the establishment. Sure, the man in
black’s persona was steeped in film noir, but that, at least, was
something the culture could make sense of. More importantly, remember that
Johnny Cash was hardly a navie, un-traveled, inexperience talent when he
first he first burst upon the scene. Not a rube. But Cash had spent a
month in the north working on a were new Pontiac, MI assembly line, then
enlisted in the Air Force and was stationed in Germany as a radio
operator. When he cut his first sides for Sun, he was married and taking
night classes through the GI Bill. So Cash’s life experiences were
substantially different from those of 19-year-old Elvis Presley, who still
lived at home when he came bursting through the doors of the Sun Studios.
No wonder Johnny Cash’s voice arrived with a dose of gravity. Elvis wore
pink black. Simple as that.
Even back in the spring of
1955, when vacuum salesman/apprentice DJ J.R. Cash cut “Hey Porter”
and “Cry Cry Cry” for the yellow Sun label –when one night have made
the case, at least by association that he had something to do with that
short-lived musical phenomenon that came to be called rockabilly he
didn’t quite fit. None of the madness is there, none of the unmistakable
bent, frantic genius that permeates early Elvis, Wanda Jackson, Charlie
Feathers, Jerry Lee Lewis, or (especially) Little Richard. All that is
high-spirited, libido-tinged music of adolescence, given an edge that has
ever after stayed a part of Rock N Roll the very real possibility that the
singer was about to come unplugged in front of you.
Unglued though Johnny Cash
may have become in later years (and even then, mostly in private) even
early on his singing voice has a stately, measured quality to it. Grave,
world-weary, wise, (if still uncertain). And unmistakably country “Hey
Porter” is about the powerful to pull to return home; early rockabilly
was mostly about leaving that same place (or getting plenty likered up on
the outskirts), and not looking back. And Johnny Cash was simply a country
artist who opened that tradition to a broader spectrum of sound and
subject matter than most did.
By 1980 and release of this
record, however, rockabilly had become a singularly obscure sub-genre. It
was seen principally by the younger, record –buying generation, if they
took notice at all, through the curious lenses of revivalists like Robert
Gordon (the singer, not the critic) and the cramps; the Stray Cats would
follow shortly, cementing the revivalist archetype. (Ah, and let’s not
forget the rose-tinted glasses of several million Elvis devotes, but Elvis
put out enough records to keep them satisfied, or so it seems.) Today
rockabilly is about vintage clothes and classic street rods, and whatever
songs those punk-adopted figures stumbled upon in late 70’s have long
since ossified into a rigid, unrevealing canon.
“Rockabilly Blues” Then
is one of several albums (including the recently reissued “Johnny 99”
Cash recorded in between the chart success of “One Piece At A Time”
(1976) and “Highwayman” (1985) the collaboration with Waylon Jennings,
Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson that ultimately produced three
albums. Always able to tour to appreciative audiences, Cash struggling in
interest his record label in his career, and to interest his audience in
buying his current releases.
Maybe his frustration was
showing, or, perhaps, Cash was beginning to become restive with his own
mortality. In any event “Rockabilly Blues” begins on a singularly grim
note, One Of These Cold And Lonesome Mornings” “You’re Going To Kill
Me” “I’m Going To Lay There” “And
I’m Going To Die,” he sings Cold Lonesome Morning” was another new
song from his pen, but his voice has changed little from “Folsom Prison
Blues” still a bluntly frank instrument.
Which is to say that Johnny
Cash has always sounded exactly like Johnny Cash, and little enough like
anything else. And it’s worth nothing that “Rockabilly Blues” Texas
1955 was the first song recorded for this album, the last track in five
sessions that began in December of 1979 and ended in July of 1980 one cut
each was produced by Nick Lowe and old friend Jack Clement, the balance by
Earl Ball.
That hardly means Cash is
noted in, nor wishes to root around, his own past. From the subtitle
“(Texas1955)” to the chorus of the title track, “There’s A Sad
Song Coming” “ With the Rockabilly Blues” it’s pretty clear that
Cash is carefully using the idea of Rockabilly to center a specific image
in a very specific time, and title and a little beyond that. Even the
instrumentation make no effort to replicate the conventional sounds of
rockabilly.
“Cold Lonesome Morning”
is followed immediately by “Without Love” written by then son-in-law
Nick lowe. At the time one of the darlings of power pop/new wave. Yes,
it’s a trifle up tempo for Cash, but love was and is a gifted
songwriter, and this one sounds precisely and effortlessly like a Johnny
Cash song. Whatever that may be.
Indeed, Cash has always had
a good sense of what material best fits his distinctive voice.
“Rockabilly Blues” features two cuts by the outlaw poet laureate,
Billy Joe Saver – “The Cowboy Who Started The Fight” a wonderful
urban cowboy morality tale, and the penultimate “Ain’t Nothing New
Babe.” Add in one song from the “other” outlaw poet laureate, Kris
Krisofferson’s Tejano-flavored “The Last Time” and one gets a better
sense where Cash’s sensibilities are really centered on strong songs
period.
Perhaps the most engaging
track on the set resonates most today because its title is now hard upon
us. The Steve Goodman/John Prine meditation , “Twentieth Century Is
Almost Over” is a curious thing to have written back in 1977, Nixon (and
Gerald Ford) driven from the White House, Jimmy Carter’s New South on
the rise. It’s a jaunty, almost gospel number, with wordplay reminiscent
of Roger Miller and the chorus ringing “Twentieth Century Is Almost
Gone” “All Over The World” in the end, it had a survivor.
Few Johnny Cash outing are
complete without a visit from his wife June Carter. Here, they duet
through the song of another son-in-law. Rodney Crowell’s “One Way
Rider” complete with a swinging horn section. Their voices twine
together sweetly, and one can almost see them walk hand in hand off the
stage together when it’s over.
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