Johnny Cash – American V: A Hundred Highways

Johnny Cash will have been gone three years this September, but not so much that you’d notice. His ghost lingers. Every time you turn around, there he is again…in an album-length goodbye from his daughter Rosanne, in an Oscar-winning major motion picture, in a newly unearthed Personal File of acoustic solo recordings, and in a half-dozen or more compilations of rarities, hits and other previously released sides…all of which declare, to borrow the title from one recent four-disc set — Johnny Cash: The Legend.

What we are witnessing here is the final transformation of a complicated life into a mostly one-dimensional legend, and of that legend into a logo: CASH. This process, at once expansive and reductionist, began with the first of Cash’s Rick Rubin-produced albums, American Recordings in 1994, a disc that rehabilitated the Man in Black for a new “alternative” generation after years of near-constant touring for longtime but now aging fans, and after the release of many, many mediocre recordings. Tracks such as “Delia’s Gone” and “The Beast In Me” found Cash in arresting voice, dark and brooding and dangerous, but the disc also presented Cash laughing and fanciful, wistful and sweet. It was, along with 1959’s The Fabulous Johnny Cash, among the finest albums of his career.

In that same category was Unchained, the American follow-up with Rubin and Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, an album that once again found Cash threatening and hip, as on his cover of Soundgarden’s “Rusty Cage”, but also playful, nostalgic, boastful, corny, reverent — full of just as much (if not more) of the bright and sunny side of life as the dark and stormy. It was the latter quality, of course, that got most of the attention.

American III: Solitary Man and American IV: The Man Comes Around continued the variety, albeit with increasingly formulaic results, while reinforcing the singular focus upon the gothic Cash with Trent Reznor’s “Hurt” (IV) and Will Oldham’s “I See A Darkness” (III). There were innumerable comparisons of Cash to gangsta rappers, and somewhere along the way, Murder became inaccurately elevated onto equal footing with Love and God in the cataloguing of the Cash sensibility.

As this process moves forward, it will be up to those of us who think it essential to remind, as often as necessary, that, sure enough, Johnny Cash sang “Delia’s Gone” and “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”…but wait! He also recorded — he mostly recorded — sweet love songs such as “Flesh And Blood” and the randy “Jackson”, folk tales such as “The Legend Of John Henry’s Hammer”, wonderful goofball novelties such as “Oney” and “One Piece At A Time”, songs of the south such as “Hey, Porter”, songs that are all about rhythm and sound such as “Get Rhythm”, and rousing, spirit-sustaining gospel numbers such as “That’s Enough”.

The Man wore Black, he told us, “for the poor and the beaten down,” for the prisoners of a world without freedom, for each of us one and all. But he also smiled and danced and loved, filled his days with so much life. I think he thought we all should.

Now we have American V: A Hundred Highways, and it is filled, understandably, with so much death, with so much life coming face to face at last with the death that was bearing down all along. “You can run on for a long time,” he reminds us, or maybe he is reminding himself. “Sooner or later, God’ll cut you down.”

Presumably the last will and testament of John R. Cash, American V finds the man’s voice, in the months between his wife June Carter’s death and his own, to be thin and frail, airy and cracked but still game to go. Even so, quite often, as on the gospel standard quoted just above (“God’s Gonna Cut You Down”), the words come fast, too fast for him really to keep up like we can imagine he could hear himself doing in his head.

Rick Rubin knows this. He places his friend’s voice in delicate and sympathetic settings, constructed mostly after the fact, that let Cash pull us in tight to him when he can’t reach out to us as he would like. The results are gorgeous, haunting. The moaning, tolling cellos that assist Cash down to his knees on the prayer “Help Me”, for example, transform this album opener into one of Cash’s most moving performances ever. “And with a humble heart, on bended knee, I’m begging You,” Cash gulps. “Pleee-ease. For help.”

Cash knows his one-of-a-kind voice is fading, too, of course. On “Like The 309”, which we’re told is the last song he wrote, an a cappella Cash is waiting for a train but still rasping: “It should be a while before I see Dr. Death, so it would sure be nice if I could get my breath…Load my box on the 309.”

“Talk about luck,” he adds later, “well, I got mine. Asthma coming down like the 309.” Then he exhales, thin but deep: “Haaaaaah…”

The poignancy of virtually every line on American V is intensified by the knowledge of Cash’s losses, and of ours — as of course Cash, forever the artist, knew they would. “It’s hard to know she’s gone forever,” he weeps on one old Hank Williams song. “They’re carrying her home on the evening train.” He promises us, by way of songwriter Bruce Springsteen, that “I will meet you further on up the road.” On the album’s final track, he declares, “I’m free from the chain gang now,” returning more poignantly than ever to a song he first recorded decades ago.

There are two tracks especially, though, that I keep returning to. The first is his self-deprecating version of Don Gibson’s “A Legend In My Time”. As he sings the lines, “If loneliness meant world acclaim, everyone would know my name,” there’s a twinkle in his eye, only just beginning to fade; Cash understands how legends can hide us from one another as much as they can inspire us to live free.

The other is his reading of Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind”. Why on earth, on his last album, is the Man in Black singing us this song of “an old-time movie ’bout a ghost in a wishin’ well”?

“With chains upon my feet, you know that ghost is me,” he tells us as acoustic guitar chords and a tolling piano plead with us, demand us, to listen close. “And I will never be set free as long as I’m a ghost that you can’t see.”

Johnny Cash is telling us, I think, that we can be free if we listen to what he is saying, if we really listen, if we hear all of it. And that he won’t be free until we do.