Tony Tost - Johnny Cashs American Recordings

AMERICAN RECORDINGS

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We arent naive enough to think that were your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, youd do well to check out Continuums 33 1/3 series of booksPitchfork

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For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book

Tony Tost

2011

The Continuum International Publishing Group
80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

www.continuumbooks.com

Copyright 2011 by Tony Tost

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-7220-4

Typeset by Pindar NZ Auckland, New Zealand
Printed and bound in the United States of America

In 1967, he drove two separate cars off the high cliff at his Tennessee home and crashed them both into the sea.

Nick Kent,
The Conflicted Cool of Johnny Cash

for Simon and Wyatt

I would like to thank David Barker and everyone at Continuum for the opportunity to chase down my vision of Cash. It would be uncouth to not also thank the generosity of the staff of the Southern Folklife Collection at The Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The particularly warm and helpful aid of John Rumble at the Fisk Library at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville was much appreciated, as was the company of Mark Cherry and family during my happy trip through Tennessee. I would like to thank John Garst for his important research into the natural history of the Delia legend and for so generously sharing that research with myself and others. Charlotte Pence not only welcomed my piece on Thirteen for her anthology on the poetics of song lyrics, she also provided me with helpful close readings of both that piece and the longer Delia section. My gratitude also extends to Priscilla Wald, Fred Moten and the rest of my committee at Duke University for discreetly looking the other way the last eighteen months and pretending that I was only writing my dissertation that whole time. Some of this material was road tested at various readings at the instigation of Chall Gray (Asheville, NC), Michael Heffernan (University of Arkansas), Forrest Gander and CD Wright (Brown University) and the MFA program at George Mason University--thank you. I want to thank Brian Howe in particular for giving me the chance to read at length from the manuscript shortly before my family and I moved away from Durham, NC, as I also want to thank those friends who withstood the heat to hear me out and then generously respond; a new shape for the book came directly out of that experience. Nic Pizzolatto has the toughest, surest critical eye I know, so his early thumbs-up to the manuscript provided me with much needed momentum and courage: thanks. Finally, I want to thank Leigh, my sweet chicken, for not only enduring hour after hour of numerous hey I just killed my woman and hey they just let me into heaven songs being played in our house, but also for reading the book in its many incarnations. Her exacting intelligence not only helped me sharpen my arguments, it probably also helped me cut down references to Johnny Cashs mythic genitalia by at least fifty percent.

American Recordings was recorded in Rick Rubins living room and Johnny Cashs cabin, featuring only Cash and his guitar. Also, two of the songs were taken from a live performance at the Viper Room in Los Angeles. So much for the making of the album.

And so much for music journalism as well. This book concerns itself instead with the Cash myth and the elemental role American Recordings played in revitalizing and finalizing it. I have no interest, however, in debunking the Cash myth. First of all, it is a brilliant one, strange and necessary in equal measure. Secondly, one of the most insipid journalistic framing devices is the truth versus myth construction, as though myth did not also have a claim to make on the truth. Unless one is willing to exile, like a deranged modern day Plato, both emotion and imagination from the domain of truth, then one will need to go beyond data and facts and names and datesbeyond empiricism itselfall the way through story and out into myth.

So that is what this book endeavors, not to contrast the mythic Cash with the real Cash, or to conflate different Cashes together, but to try and understand how this once-living, once-breathing man authored one of the great American creations, the mythic version of himself. In attempting to understand and explicate Cashs achievement, I look not just at his greatest album but through it, regarding it as a great late chapter in an ongoing narrative, one in which Cash mingled his creative and biographical pasts with the creative and biographical pasts of his country. Like a stranger standing outside an enormous labyrinthas good of an image for the workings of myth as anyI pull on threads to see where they lead, intending to get to the beauties and beasts at the center of the Cash myth. In doing so, the book hopefully does not succumb to the random ragbag methodology increasingly prevalent in these sorts of studiesbooks in which everything from Hitlers mustache to the most recent viral video somehow illustrates the topic at handbut instead unearths the imaginative American terrain in which a figure like Cash most makes sense. To my mind, I am writing what Joseph Mali calls a mythhistory, full of verifiable data and buttressed by wonderfully tedious hours of research, sure, but also in touch with the spirit of Cash, gathering information not to explain or celebrate him at some remove but to crawl inside his head and love him from there.

In conceptualizing and writing this book, I thought of Cash as a kind of novelist, in possession of his one great character and eager to exploit the words and works of others to further that characters development. I do not delve into Cashs biographical and creative corpuses in order to retrieve an authentic version of the man but to see how he authored an everlasting self through the use of both private materials and cultural inheritances, very often mixing them to a point that they became indistinguishable.