Johnny Cash had one of the greatest second acts of American music. By 1969, the legendary recording artist was doing The Johnny Cash Show, a family-oriented variety hour that aired on CBS for less than three years. While the show had some brilliant moments, it was ultimately cancelled in the “rural purge” of the early seventies, a coordinated move among television broadcasters to eliminate programs like Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies. And just like that the “glowering outlaw” of At Folsom Prison (1968) ended up in the Hee Haw bin.[1] As Tony Tost explains in Johnny Cash’s American Recordings, the rural Cash may well have been the Cash we remembered, if not for the 1994 Rick Rubin-produced American Recordings. With American Recordings, Cash finally had the opportunity to strip his art down to its elementary particles: his voice and his acoustic guitar. Featuring revisions of American folk songs, new renditions of his earlier work, and covers of other musicians’ songs, American Recordings was a wild critical and commercial success. But more importantly, it also invented the Cash persona that everyone now knows: the Man in Black, back from the grave to deliver a sermon on life lived at the crossroads of damnation and redemption.
Tost’s American Recordings is a book in Continuum’s 33 1/3 series, in which writers from a variety of backgrounds examine one album from the perspective of their choice. Tost, a poet who recently received a PhD in English from Duke University, joins the rigor of academic research with an appreciation of the fine mythic texture of American music. The result is a fascinating and important account of how Cash achieved permanence by rewriting his mythic self one last time with American Recordings. In this late-career reinvention, Tost shows, Cash did what he had always done: intertwine his own fate with the fate of the republic. But, according to Tost, the ever-increasing largeness of Cash’s mythic self wasn’t merely a matter of vanity or commercial self-interest (Rubin took care of that part) but a literary invention that allowed him to “span the distance between the holy and the American, between the promises a country makes at the front door and the accumulation of bodies out behind its pleasant orchard greens.”[2]
Tost has published two books of poetry, Invisible Bride (2004) and Complex Sleep (2007). The author’s background is, however, less evident in the book’s lyric fixations than in a pervasive poetic ethos. There is some close reading of Cash’s song lyrics but less than you might expect. In interviews, Tost has claimed Charles Olson—the poet and Melville scholar who founded an important branch of postwar American poetry—as an influence, and American Recordings follows Olson’s advice in “A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn” to do a “saturation job” on one area of inquiry, “to dig one thing or place or man until you yourself know more about that than is possible to any other man.”[3] The weight of extensive research strains just beneath the surface of this concise book.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Tost’s chapter on “Delia’s Gone,” a searing murder ballad and the first track on Cash’s American Recordings. Tost traces the song’s circum-Atlantic route, from historical event (the 1901 murder of Delia Green in Savannah, Georgia) to American folk song (the relic of “an irretrievable, unshakable American past”) to calypso song (Blind Blake’s Bahamian version) to Cash’s late rewrite.[4] While it’s easy to dismiss “Delia’s Gone” as a song that glorifies violence against women—the speaker ties Delia to a chair and shoots her twice, apparently without motive—Tost argues that such songs are deeply ethical works, parables that turn our attention to the “commingled blood of love and murder [that] has darkened centuries of American song.”[5] Cash tells the story from the murder’s perspective both to express his own shame and self-contempt and to make a larger point about everybody’s complicity in violence and cruelty. Moses Houston—who murdered the historical Delia, a 14-year-old African American girl—showed no remorse and got off with a light sentence. As Tost puts it in a different context, the first-person narrative of “Delia’s Gone” is a rebuke aimed at a cheaper form of social commentary: “grieving for the downtrodden while ignoring how one’s boot heel leaves a mark on their throats.”[6] What is striking about Tost’s American Recordings, then, is not that it’s a poetic work but that it’s a work of poetics. He puts the full force of his deep reading into demonstrating that Cash was ultimately a literary figure who spoke through his characters in order to inhabit them and, in doing so, experience and understand the wages of American sin.
The 33 1/3 books tend to be either straightforward works of rock journalism or attempts at creative criticism. American Recordings shouldn’t be shelved among any of these books. It ultimately belongs in the long, rich tradition of texts like Constance Rourke’s American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931) and Greil Marcus’s The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (1997), ostensibly academic studies of American culture but also works of mythopoesis in their own right. Like Rourke and Marcus, Tost hauls up a bucket of primordial ooze, inspects the contents with a discerning eye, and scrupulously rearranges them in creative fashion in order to make sense of it all.
But American Recordings deftly avoids the major pitfall of this kind of study: the impulse to trace American myth back to a single point of genesis. For Rourke, “American humor” emerged as the result of a primary encounter with the harsh wilderness of the new world and continued to develop as a way to cope with the social upheavals of the early republic. In Marcus’s account, the pool of themes, characters, and vernacular speech patterns in Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes can be traced back to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, which in turn rooted Dylan in “the old, weird America.” Tost shows little interest in digging down to the bedrock. He pursues the circulation of Cash’s mythic vocabulary backward but also forward and sideways. Tost rightly implies that America never stopped being weird. But he also shows how Cash was able to reveal this code, if only in flickers, by giving voice to the songs of musicians like Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits, who came along a generation later.
The book ends on a mournful note, not because Cash was the last relic of the old republic but because he had been there—he contained and embodied the past—and could detect its fugitive traces. He knew them when he saw them, and he amplified them. “As a people,” Rourke explained in justifying her attempt to invent a usable past, “the Americans are said to have had no childhood, and the circumstance has been shown to contain pathos as well as loss.”[7] Cash’s great contribution was to show that pathos and loss were always inherent in the old, weird America. Its very existence was underwritten by a perpetual passing away. Like Cash’s coffin in the antepenultimate chapter of the book, if we try to lower a microphone down into the penetralium of American myth, we’ll discover that it’s empty. The contents dispersed a long time ago. There is no there there. Or, rather, in America, there is everywhere.
Notes
- [1] Tony Tost, Johnny Cash’s American Recordings (London: Continuum, 2011), 102.
- [2] Tost, 9.
- [3] Charles Olson, Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1997), 307.
- [4] Tost, 39.
- [5] Ibid., 37.
- [6] Ibid., 143.
- [7] Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of The National Character (New York: New York Review Books, 2004).
