Salon: The bitter tears of Johnny Cash

The bitter tears of Johnny Cash

The untold story of Johnny Cash, protest singer and Native American activist, and his feud with the music industry

In July 1972, musician Johnny Cash sat opposite President Richard Nixon in the White House's Blue Room. As a horde of media huddled a few feet away, the country music superstar had come to discuss prison reform with the self-anointed leader of America's "silent majority." "Johnny, would you be willing to play a few songs for us," Nixon asked Cash. "I like Merle Haggard's 'Okie From Muskogee' and Guy Drake's 'Welfare Cadillac.'" The architect of the GOP's Southern strategy was asking for two famous expressions of white working-class resentment.

"I don't know those songs," replied Cash, "but I got a few of my own I can play for you." Dressed in his trademark black suit, his jet-black hair a little longer than usual, Cash draped the strap of his Martin guitar over his right shoulder and played three songs, all of them decidedly to the left of "Okie From Muskogee." With the nation still mired in Vietnam, Cash had far more than prison reform on his mind. Nixon listened with a frozen smile to the singer's rendition of the explicitly antiwar "What Is Truth?" and "Man in Black" ("Each week we lose a hundred fine young men") and to a folk protest song about the plight of Native Americans called "The Ballad of Ira Hayes." It was a daring confrontation with a president who was popular with Cash's fans and about to sweep to a crushing reelection victory, but a glimpse of how Cash saw himself -- a foe of hypocrisy, an ally of the downtrodden. An American protest singer, in short, as much as a country music legend.

http://www.salon.com/entertainment/johnny_cash/index.html?story=/news/feature/2009/11/08/johnny_cash

Standing up to the man.

My old traveling buddy Ned Pachene -- Cree Nation -- used to do some coffee house gigs and styled himself, accurately, as "Johnny No Cash"

In a Hawaiian shirt.

Dave Letterman had a great Top Ten List of Things Overheard at Last Nights Country Music Awards (from the 1990s). One of them was, "Damn! Here's your 50 bucks! How did you know Johnny Cash would be wearing black tonight?"

TlalocW

do the bar circuit, the big stars and you could go see them. Mom said he was thin as a reed, had a HUGE assed guitar and was so drunk, he could hardly move. :) He came a long way, Our Johnny.

"Since Cash first recorded "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" in 1964, many musicians have recorded their own versions. Kris Kristofferson is one of those musicians. He summed up the spirit behind Cash's now nearly forgotten protest album in his eulogy for Cash, who died in 2003. Cash, he said, was a "holy terror ... a dark and dangerous force of nature that also stood for mercy and justice for his fellow human beings." Four years before his famous concert at Folsom Prison, four years before the American Indian Movement formed, and at the pinnacle of his commercial success, Cash insisted on producing an uncommercial, deeply personal protest record that was a close as he could come to truth. He would always cherish it. "I'm still particularly proud of 'Bitter Tears,'" Cash would say near the end of his life, while talking about the topical music he recorded in the 1960s. "Apart from the Vietnam War being over, I don't see much reason to change my position today. The old are still neglected, the poor are still poor, the young are still dying before their time, and we're not making any moves to make things right. There's still plenty of darkness to carry off."

There is one uplifting song of Cash's and I can't think of the title, but some of the lyrics are "I'll be back again and again maybe as a raindrop" it has a reincarnating theme about it, PBS has played it during their self-promotion ads. It's a fantastic song but I can't find it on youtube.

Thanks for the thread, Blue_Tires.:thumbsup:

search will bring you several different versions

:thumbsup: :hi:

Blue_Tires

OH, he deared to do that, in front of the US president too?.. Dam Johnny Cash was a brave man indeed... Far more brave than I know about, and I'm grown up with the mans music.. And have most of his records home too.. But I don't know him to be a brave man like that. And I know was a old fighter for the oppressed - Even some of his earlies songs is somewhat special... But that is maybe the times the songs was made in.

The man in black... The old man still impress me even after his death..

Diclotican

Blue_Tires

Indeed he was one of a kind person.. He stand he's ground, even if what he believed it was not popular by most others.. But it is many thing I don't know about the man, even that I more or less was growing up around his music.. He was popular home:P And he was to the end rather anti war demonstrator. And I'm not sure he was to happy about the "scrubs" administration either..

Diclotican

Nixon was culturally clueless.

that was a dick move even by nixon's standards...

as well as participating in a duet on Bob Dylan's first album.

I still play LP's and 'I Walk the Line' is one of my favorites...

It is interesting that the recent biopic with Joaquin Phoenix this side of Cash wasn't really brought out.