It’s an incredibly uncommon privilege to be able to spend your last days on earth lovingly carving your own tombstone.
I’ve written before in this column about Icons and Iconoclasts, few men can be both; Johnny Cash is one of those few. Johnny’s music has always prescribed and described both his life and his listener’s lives; Rockabilly, mainstream country star, singer, songwriter, Man-in-Black, spokesman for the
down trodden and Everyman. What I’ve left out of this edited outline could easily define the career’s of most other artists. However, American VI: Ain’t No Grave is a document, a testament to a life spent singing, playing and being the music.
His extraordinary talent was to internalize a song and make you believe that the lyrics applied directly to you. Johnny always sang to you and you alone. – Jeff Markunas, CWG Magazine
They say that if a great musician were to stick his finger and let the blood drop on a piece of paper, a song would instantly write itself – The heart pumps it, the brain thinks it, the hands play it and the voice sings it. The life force that courses through a musician’s veins is music – not blood – This was Johnny Cash. The only way that force can be denied is to shut down the brain, stop the heart and still the soul… Johnny knew this, and he spent his last measure of life doing what he had no other choice but to do – Being a Musician.
Johnny was perhaps not the greatest singer in Country; his extraordinary talent was to internalize a song and make you believe that the lyrics applied directly to you. Johnny always sang to you and you alone.
When Johnny Cash sang, he had something to say and you damn well better listen up. Johnny was the aloof Man in Black, but also a famous star. He never served a full day in prison, but any inmate of Folsom or San Quentin would call him ‘brother.’ Johnny sang what he was and was what he sang. That applies to everything he performed, but perhaps even more on this album. This is the last note Johnny will ever leave us.
It’s an incredibly uncommon privilege to be able to spend your last days on earth lovingly carving your own tombstone, and it’s even more uncommon to use that monument not to glorify or aggrandize yourself, but to leave a final gift of eternally lasting value to your fans and the world.
Johnny, if your career was a day or 100 years long – it was too short.
Rock Bottom Line:
This performance spans an amazing range of human emotion – pathos, sadness, hope, resignation
and satisfaction. Only joy is missing. There is no joy in a noble death –Happiness belongs to the living. Music can never die, but it can be forgotten, so I know Johnny will understand when I put down this keyboard and plug in the Tele; I’ll be playing his “Orange Blossom Special.” – Just to remember a little Joy that Johnny sent my way.
CWG Rating: 3.5 Guns
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