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The Man Came Around: Johnny Cash
By Steve Beard

One imagines that when Johnny Cash first reached the pearly gates, he looked for his wife June Carter, and asked for directions to the nearest recording studio. The Man in Black was working on an album of old hymns and spirituals, entitled “My Mother’s Hymnbook,” when he died on Friday, September 12. With all his fame and notoriety, all Johnny Cash ever wanted to do was sing gospel songs—the songs he heard his mama sing as he grew up.

It is strangely fitting that his last album, The Man Comes Around, will epitomize his legacy. It deftly embodied the gritty and brooding sound that marked his remarkable career.

Although Cash justifiably received numerous accolades for his rendition of Trent Reznor’s song “Hurt” and its accompanying video, the title track of the album has been widely heralded as one of Cash’s greatest songs. “The Man Comes Around” is about the Day of Reckoning and the notion that there will be an accounting for the way in which we live on earth.

“Everybody won’t be treated the same,” Cash wrote, “There’ll be a golden ladder reaching down when the Man comes around.” The swinging ladder from above never was an unfamiliar sight to Cash—dodging death numerous times from drug-related addictions earlier in his career to health-related maladies in his later years.

If American music had a Mount Rushmore, Cash’s distinctive profile would be prominently chiseled into the rock. Launched into fame because of hits such as “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Ring of Fire,” and “I Walk the Line,” he sold more than 50 million records and won eleven Grammys. He is the only person to be inducted into the rock and roll, country music, and the songwriting halls of fame. Cash worked with legends such as Elvis and Dylan and performed before presidents and prisoners.

Throughout his illustrative life, he wrote books, hosted a popular television show, starred in and produced movies, and recorded 1,500 songs that can be found on 500 albums. The crowned king of blue-collar troubadours, Cash had the lurching height of a NBA power forward, the swagger of John Wayne, and the perceived moral authority of Moses.

His appeal is recognized by everyone from gangsta rappers to roughneck steel workers. Cash is, after all, an American original with few peers. His charismatic magnetism spanned five decades of popular culture. “Locust and honey…not since John the Baptist has there been a voice like that crying in the wilderness,” is how U2’s Bono summed it up in liner notes to God, (Legacy). “The most male voice in Christendom. Every man knows he is a sissy compared to Johnny Cash.”

Cash wrote songs the man on the street—or perhaps more appropriately, the guy hanging out in the alley—could relate to. He loved prisoners, the working man, and the welfare mother—those found on the outskirts. “Those are my heroes: the poor, the downtrodden, the sick, the disenfranchised,” Cash told No Depression magazine.

His songwriting orbited around the universal human condition of sin and redemption, murder and grace, darkness and light. What you saw is what you got with Cash. There was never a manufactured feeling to his art. When he sang, you could almost taste the hillbilly moonshine, smell the gunpowder of a smoking revolver, and feel the drops of blood off the thorny crown of a crucified Christ.

 

Can you hear the angels sing?

Cash was brought up as a Depression-era Arkansas farm boy. His family scraped at twenty acres of government-granted land, depending on soil and sweat to eke out a living. He had Baptist blood racing through his veins and the echoes of Pentecostal fire and brimstone preaching reverberating through his soul.

“The first preachers I heard at a Pentecostal church in Dyness, Arkansas, scared me,” Cash wrote in the liner notes of his album Unchained. “The talk about sin and death and eternal hell without redemption, made a mark on me. At four, I’d peep out of the window of our farmhouse at night, and if, in the distance, I saw a grass fire or a forest fire, I knew hell was almost here.” That deep sense of everlasting accountability was etched deep into the soul of Cash.

The young Cash loved music, especially hearing his mother Carrie singing gospel songs in the cotton fields or hearing her strum her guitar and singing “What Would You Give In Exchange for Your Soul?” by the Monroe Brothers. “The music in the Pentecostal churches in the early years was wonderful. They were more liberal with the musical instruments used,” Cash recalled. “I learned to sit through the scary sermons, just to hear the music; mandolins, fiddles, bass, banjo, and flattop guitars. Hell might be on the horizon, but the wonderful gospel-spiritual songs carried me above it.”

While Jewish boys reach their age of religious responsibility at thirteen for their bar mitzvah, Baptist boys in Cash’s family had to make the decision at 12. Once the time had come, he already knew that he had reached “the age of moral and spiritual accountability.” While the congregation sang the invitational hymn, “Just As I Am,” Cash walked down the aisle of the church and “accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.”

Only a few months after that experience at the altar, he was confronted with the horrible death of his older brother Jack. While he was cutting fence posts, one got tangled up in the swinging saw and jerked him into it, cutting him severely. Jack was rushed to the hospital, but there wasn’t much that could be done. His mother and father were on their knees praying when Jack awoke and asked, “Why is everybody crying over me? Mama, don’t cry over me. Did you see the river?”

“No, I didn’t, son,” Carrie replied.

“Well, I thought I was going toward the fire, but I’m headed in the other direction now, mama. I was going down a river, and there was fire on one side and heaven on the other. I was crying, ‘God, I’m supposed to go to heaven. Don’t you remember? Don’t take me to the fire.’ All of a sudden I turned, and now, mama, can you hear the angels singing?”

“No, son, I can’t hear it.”

Jack began to squeeze her hand and said, “But mama, you’ve got to hear it.” The tears began to fall from his eyes as he said, “Mama, listen to the angels. I’m going there, mama.” The family at his bedside listened with stunned attention.

“What a beautiful city,” he said. “And the angels singing. Oh, mama, I wish you could hear the angels singing.” Those were Jack’s last words before he died, according to Cash’s Man in Black (Zondervan).

“It was like a burden had been lifted from all of us,” remembered Cash, “and it wasn’t just the eight day burden of fighting for Jack’s life. Rather, we watched him die in such bliss and glory that it was like we were almost happy because of the way we saw him go. We saw in our mind’s eye what he was seeing—a vision of heaven.”

That vision would be long lingering in his psyche and spirit. “The memory of Jack’s death, his vision of heaven, the effect his life had on the lives of others, and the image of Christ he projected have been more of an inspiration to me, I suppose, than anything else that has ever come to me through any man,” he would say.

 

Never ignore the gift

When he renewed his faith in the 1970s, Cash said Billy Graham advised him to keep singing “Folsom Prison Blues” and “A Boy Named Sue,” and “all those other outlaw songs if that’s what people wanted to hear—and then, when it came time to do a gospel song, give it everything I had. Put my heart and soul into all my music, in fact; never compromise; take no prisoners,” he wrote in Cash. He subsequently sang in the sold-out honky-tonks of the world and the jam-packed arenas of Billy Graham evangelistic crusades—never allowing himself to be too easily pigeonholed by the holy or the heathen.

“I believe what I say, but that don’t necessarily make me right,” Cash told Rolling Stone. “There’s nothing hypocritical about it. There is a spiritual side to me that goes real deep, but I confess right up front that I’m the biggest sinner of them all.”

Johnny Cash was an irreplaceable American original who will be remembered as a cross between an outlaw and an Old Testament prophet—an enigmatic man in black, with a heart of gold, and a voice that could raise the dead. Now that the Man has come around, one imagines he will be a welcome addition to the heavenly host.

 

Steve Beard is the editor of Good News and the author of the chapter on Johnny Cash in Spiritual Journeys: How Faith Has Influenced 12 Music Icons (Relevant Books).

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