Johnny Cash Was Woke
Hear me out. I don’t have a Ph.D in Johnny Cash. Heck, I just discovered Johnny through his eponymous Live at Folsom Prison album. But after immersing myself in the music, swimming through all the tangled storylines and piercing the surface for air, Johnny Cash was one woke individual!
Until six months ago, my recognition of and ambivalence for Johnny Cash was limited to his two most famous songs, Walk The Line and Ring of Fire, and his posthumous biopic starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon. This probably isn’t that unusual since I grew up on electric guitars and flannel shirts. Could I at least appreciate other types of music or was I doomed to relive my twenties like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day?
Expanding Musical Horizons
Before the pandemic changed everything, I decided to expand my musical horizons a few years ago by subscribing to vinyl services that mail a record every month. What a perfect way to force myself to focus on something new instead of letting a Spotify algorithm sprinkle in cupcakes for my ears.
One day, a new country music track was announced for the vinyl subscription service Vinyl Me, Please. Their first reissue was described as one of the best country albums of all time: Johnny Cash — Live at Folsom Prison. I wasn’t immediately filled with excitement until I read the following line from their album introduction:
“This singer had never actually done time, but he does what no one else does to you: He treats you like a man, like a person. He cracks lame jokes, he swears for a cheap pop, and he seems to actually understand what you’re going through, the type of longing, dread, and inertia that makes prison life awful and terrifying.”
Ok. Interest piqued. How could someone who landed in jail seven times, but never went to prison, make the inmates feel this way? This really feels like some next level emotional intelligence, right? Providing hope in the face of hopelessness is a sign of an exceptional leader. What did I do next? I solicited feedback from my network:
A Moment In Time
Once the album arrived, I saved it for an evening when I could just sit, listen and focus on a moment in time. From the moment the album started with Cash’s famous opening line, “Hi. I’m Johnny Cash.” through the inmate’s departure to close the album, I felt like I was there, in 1968. It feels like the proverbial fly on the wall. How else to describe what transpired for those forty-five minutes?
There are so many storylines weaved throughout this album, but Johnny Cash showed his wokeness in three key ways:
1. Cash had been playing to prison inmates for more than ten years before recording this album. He wasn’t exploiting the inmates, he was talking to them. He was talking with them. So many of the songs are about an the inmates life or from the inmate’s perspective. The title song even has Cash’s most famous line: “I killed a man in Reno, just to watch him die.” That’s not the action of the average fan.
2. Cash commented on the poor conditions in the prison when he talked about the water looked like it rolled off “Luther’s boot”. Cash didn’t have to thumb his nose at the warden, but he did it right to his face and all recorded for those outside the prison to hear.
3. Cash learned and performed an inmate’s song to a surprised crowd. In one simple action, Cash provided a post-prison path to one inmate and hope to hundreds of other inmates that day and millions later on. Glen Sherley even had a short song-writing career after doing his time. Cash had no obligation to lift up one songwriter, but did.
Walk Across The Line
Johnny Cash testified before a Senate committee on prisons after his record became a smash. In spite of his outlaw image of the man in black, he was a supporter of second chances and dignity as a human right: “A first offender needs to know that somebody cares for him and that he is given a fair shake,” Cash said. “The purpose behind prison reform should be to have less crime. The prisoner has to be treated like a human being. If he isn’t when he gets out, he won’t act like one.”
Back then, convicts received little sympathy or humane treatment. With such primitive communications tools, once you were in prison, you were largely forgotten. Yet Cash, already a famous musician who stuck to his musical guns in the face of the changing musical tastes, went to the mat for those less fortunate. And that, my friends, is why Johnny Cash was woke and why I’ve become a fan.
