You can never know too much about Johnny Cash, one of the few icons who stands up to repeated listenings, readings, late-night and early morning considerations. You come home from a bad night out, a great night out, sort through the Cash catalogue, and I guarantee there’s something there to send you off to dreamland and get you up and going in the morning.
Still, when that black and white American Recordings vintage photo caught my eye in the bookstore, my first thought was of Rob, the narrator/protagonist of High Fidelity, the 2000 film starring John Cusack and based on Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel: “Hey, I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I’m certainly not the dumbest. I mean, I’ve read books like Unbearable Lightness of Being and Love in the Time of Cholera. . . . but I have to say. . . my all-time favorite book is Johnny Cash’s autobiography Cash by Johnny Cash.” With a recommendation like that, and a recycled price of seven bucks, I couldn’t resist buying the book, although I didn’t intend to read it, at least not immediately, at least not until I got home.
And Cash, by Johnny Cash–or depending on your degree of familiarity, John, or J.R.–is an intriguing look at the development of the man and the artist. Read this and Bob Dylan’s Chronicles and you’ll see that partially understanding how they became Bob Dylan or Johnny Cash in no way reveals nor strips the mystery or magic.
Johnny is a little more forthcoming regarding (or perhaps just more interested in) his childhood than Dylan, although other subjects, ex-wife Vivian and the early years with his young daughters, are addressed fairly briefly. In any autobiography the reader is expected to indulge the author in what most interests him or her regarding self as subject, and Cash is no exception. As compensation, we manage to avoid much of the speculative by-necessity tone of unauthorized biographies (see Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, by Charles J. Shields) or biographies based on historical figures (see Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, by Stephen Greenblatt) and learn how Johnny Cash achieved the rare feat of staying basically true to his aesthetic principles, with the occasional exception (see “Chicken in Black”), and achieved fame and wealth and eventual contentment and even happiness. Cash deals honestly and at some length with Cash’s lifelong processes of overcoming addiction and remaining a man of faith; inspiring or instructive if you go in for that sort of thing.
For a fan or anyone with literary or musical aspirations, it’s worth considering what young Will thought if he saw Queen Elizabeth from a distance at Kenilworth in 1575; worth wading through a Coney Island swamp with Dylan in search of boxes of Woody’s poems and songs; worth considering what Nelle Lee might have said to Truman Streckfus Persons or his tormentors in the mid-1930’s; worth a description of a ride along a Jamaican beach in a golf cart with Billy Graham, for the glimpses of alchemy that produced Blonde on Blonde and To Kill a Mockingbird and Macbeth and Live at San Quentin. Cash, the Autobiography, by Johnny Cash. Well worth seven bucks.
