Wensley Clarkson - Johnny Cash--He Walked the Line

J ohnny Cash, six feet two, 250 pounds and closely resembling an outlaw Indian, was a strong presence on any stage. His long black hair swept over a satin collar. His left eye, weakened from a childhood bout of measles, drooped a little when he was tired. His nose was crooked, the result of a car crash one rainy night which also cost him six front teeth. His mean, pockmarked face was clearly unused to smiling. There was a scar on his right cheek caused by the removal of a cyst, although it was later rumoured to be a bullethole. He always sang from the right side of his mouth whopper-jawed, his beloved wife June Carter called it the left side hung on his face purely for balance. His battle with the elements left him looking far older than his years. He resembled a card shark out of the Old West or a New Orleans rakehell on his way to duel over a woman. But the inner strength was omnipresent, from the lines on his face to the dents in his cheeks.

Cash was a country megastar who always told a story; he chronicled the hard times, the unhappy loves, the tragedies, the disasters, prison life, sharecropping, railroading, lumberjacking and cowpoking. His creative abilities transcended the labels of country or western. Its hard to define it, really. Yet heres a man who neither sang very well nor played the guitar impressively. He just did his best to get the tale told.

Johnny Cash sang about a world thats now more of a myth than reality, the world of those poor Southern whites from the Depression closed, wary, brimming with gritty pride. That pain and suffering may no longer exist, but Cashs audiences pretty much always contained someone whod never forgotten it.

Cash appealed to all generations. Perhaps it was because he always referred to a simpler America. And those audiences all knew how much hed suffered personally; no wonder this haunted man survived the depths of drug addiction to sell more records and draw larger and wilder crowds than any other country singer in history.

Along the way there were some good times and many more bad ones. It wasnt until 1968, and the release of the album he recorded inside Folsom Prison, California, before a cheering audience of convicts, that Johnny Cashs name filtered into the non-rural corners of America. To convicts, hobos and no-hopers, Cash was a hero, even though he had little experience of prison himself. His songs of lost love, poverty, emotional homecomings and the Bible definitely hit the spot.

Jimmy Rogers may have been the father of country music (he died of tuberculosis in 1933 at the age of 35). The doomed, brilliant Hank Williams (dead at 29 after a life marred by use of drugs and alcohol) was undoubtedly its patron saint. But Johnny Cash was the uncrowned king. His life closely resembled that of Williams, but Cash managed through a massive effort of will and thanks to the help of people who loved him to triumph over his demons.

Cash was a multimillionaire thanks to vast record sales and lucrative concert appearances. He lived a luxurious lifestyle but never forgot his early suffering. Now that both he and his beloved wife June are no longer with us, hes left the memories of a rollercoaster life and the story of how one fine woman brought a man back from the brink on more than one occasion.

Johnny Cash always displayed the tendencies of a caged animal; constantly pacing up and down with nervous motion, his hands flitting like butterflies across his chest, shoulders and face, wiping away imaginary perspiration and tugging at his nose and ears. He was big and thick in the chest in the good old days, less raw-boned and gaunt than he had been when his life revolved around a nonstop diet of pills. The jet-black hair hung down over his collar back then and that trademark black frock coat and grey pinstriped trousers were there for all to see. By the time Johnny Cash came out of his drug-induced abyss in the late Sixties, his voice had taken on the tones of a nasal pipe organ with an Arkansas drawl. Cash decided that hard work was the only medicine thatd cure him of his drug addiction and thats what enabled him to overcome those demons in the end.

During the last twenty years or so of his life, Johnny Cash crossed the line to become the idol of a vast, popular mainstream audience. Tours through America involved luxurious buses, the superhighway, the limousine, the airport, the plane, the motel, the auditorium. At times it must have seemed as though he stood still while the backdrop raced behind him. Cashs personality, his talent, his social conscience and memory were ingrained in his growling, rusty-nail voice, which was as deep as an open wound, but could instantly convey another, older, America to any audience. At best his voice was something like smooth and mellow thunder. Earth-deep, occasionally ominous, resonant, virile, untrained and unconventional. It could also be lonely and haunting one minute and boomingly happy the next.

Hed constantly bend the tone, explained one music expert. He sang what was inside him, searching in a bewitching way for a note that wasnt always there. He decorated his melody according to his own interpretation. Some of his songs were akin to the old field cries of the Southern slaves, some were scattered with bass talk. They were bawdy, swinging poems.

Johnny Cash was an original perhaps the roughest diamond of all. But a diamond all the same.