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Johnny Cash Is a Hero to Americans on the Left and Right. But His Music Took a Side.
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Country singer Johnny Cash records a track at Columbia Studios in Los Angeles in June 1961. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
In July and August of 1961, Johnny Cash recorded a batch of songs that became the basis for Blood, Sweat and Tears, a record many regard as merely a concept album about working people. But Blood, Sweat and Tears is a concept album about race in America, about the violent enforcement of racial hierarchies in America. It is the one great record made in support of Black lives by a country music star, even if almost everyone missed its message when it was released. To be fair, when we think of a civil rights album, we think of those freedom songs. If Cash had just recorded his own interpretation of Odetta’s “Freedom Trilogy” or, like Pete Seeger, brought news of the civil rights movement in song to a live audience—getting them to sing along on “If You Miss Me at the Back of the Bus,” “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,” and “I Ain’t Scared of Your Jail”—it would have been much easier to label Cash as an activist artist, to see the work he was doing. But as musicologist and folklorist John Lomax once argued, folk music could “provide ten thousand bridges across which men of all nations may stride to say, ‘You are my brother.’ ” To put down on record—both vinyl and historical—evidence of the shameful, despicable practices of white bosses against Black men and their families made for a bridge of understanding that better suited Cash’s temperament than the freedom songs. On Blood, Sweat and Tears, he sings of racial bondage, of racial violence, of racist murder. He recorded these songs not to inspire activists so much as to confront his mostly white listeners with the shocking, documented brutality their silence made possible. His civil rights work, if we can call it that, is complementary; he stands as witness.
Side One of Blood, Sweat and Tears possesses such cumulative power, rooted in violence, that it is hard to listen to it twice in a row. One really needs to flip the record to the other side to find some relief, even if it is in limited supply on Side Two. Cash most likely learned original versions of all three of the songs on Side One—“The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer,” “Tell Him I’m Gone,” and “Another Man Done Gone”—from Lomax recordings (though, in the case of “John Henry,” there were dozens of versions out there already). But, in each case, Cash arranged, adapted, and added his own lyrics.
Cash begins the album with an eightminute version of “John Henry,” following in a grand tradition of interpreting and reinterpreting the song about the steeldrivin’ man. In Merle Travis’ downhome introduction to the song on his album Folk Songs of the Hills, he says that people from different parts of the country—coal miners in Kentucky, ironworkers in Birmingham, railroad workers out West—have tried to claim John Henry. “I don’t know myself where in the world John Henry came from,” he says as he begins singing, and it is possible that, like a lot of white Southerners, he assumed that John Henry was white. By the time Cash considered recording “John Henry,” the subject’s identity as a Black working man, if not a Black convict, was well known. In their 1941 book, Our Singing Country, John Lomax and his son Alan described the “ballad of John Henry, the Negro steeldrivin’ man” as “probably America’s greatest single piece of folk lore.” Later, in the liner notes to Blue Ridge Mountain Music, one of the seven LPs in the Southern Folk Heritage Series that Cash committed to memory, Alan Lomax repeated that the Mountain Ramblers’ version of the song tells the story of “the Negro tunnel worker … who drove the steam drill down in a contest of the ‘flesh against the steam.’ ” Years later, when Cash made a 1974 television program called Ridin’ the Rails, he devoted two segments of his history of the railroad to honoring the work of Black men, showing gandy dancers and section men laying track, and John Henry himself (played by a Black actor) swinging a hammer. There is no question that Cash understood in 1962, as he sang about John Henry, he was singing about a Black man. We know today that John Henry was a real man, pushed into convict labor on a thin charge the way so many Black men were in the years after the Civil War, and who died on the job (though not before driving more steel than the steam drill). But even by 1962 there had been plenty of representations of John Henry wearing a ball and chain—enough that Cash, poring over Library of Congress recordings, could not have missed it.
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Read the article and conclusion at Slate:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/12/johnny-cash-politics-blood-sweat-and-tears.html
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14 replies
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He was a truly great artist and, more importantly a truly great human being
I love my CD collection, but I have to say I miss the liner notes from LPs.
