The Man in Black

JOHN CHIASSON — GETTY IMAGES DUET: Cash and wife June a year ago on the patio of their home in Hendersonville, Tenn. On June's last album, Wildwood Flower, the two sang Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

The three-day shoot for the video was about to wrap, and director Mark Romanek needed just one more shot from his singer star, Johnny Cash. As Romanek recalls, "I said to John, 'This is the last take. So if you want to get angry or smash something up, this is your last chance.'" Cash didn't get it. He thought Romanek meant this would be the final shot in the ailing star's life, so he had better make it good. Cash wouldn't, couldn't surrender to such defeatism. "I hope it's not the last take," he said in that baritone growl, which for nearly a half-century brought matters of death to musical life.

When Cash did the video for Hurt last year, he was hurting. Indeed, for 15 years he had been in near constant pain. Decades of drug dependency, since conquered, had sapped him. So had heart surgery, diabetes and the medication he took in 1998 for Shy-Drager syndrome, a fatal neurological disease. (The diagnosis was incorrect, and Cash weaned himself from the medication.) Failing eyesight made it difficult for him to read his beloved books on Roman and early Christian history. A dentist, tending to Cash's teeth problems, had broken his jaw and never fixed it properly, the singer once said. Cash was then told he could have surgery, which might end his singing career, or take pain-killers, which could retrigger his drug addition. He chose instead to live with the pain—all of it. "He told me that the only time he didn't feel pain," says author Charles Hirshberg, who spent much time with Cash in his last years, "was when he was onstage."

Moreover, the song Cash had to enact, by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, is an intense cry of pain dished out and taken—a dirge for a life misspent in rancor. "The facet of John that it explores is serious, somber and angry," Romanek notes. "But between takes, the John Cash I saw was someone more active and sprightly than he looks in the video." When Romanek asked the singer's wife June Carter Cash if she would appear briefly in the video, the Man in Black puckishly suggested, "Yeah, honey, why don't you dance naked on the piano here while I'm playing?" The room roared.

"I can't go on, I'll go on," wrote Samuel Beckett, whose plays and novels are no more depressing than your average country lament. John R. Cash (his first producer, Sun Records boss Sam Phillips, dubbed him Johnny) had every right to sing the country blues. Demons found him even when he wasn't looking for them. He dressed like a hip coroner and sang like a gunman turned Pentecostal preacher. His haunting songs perfectly matched his haunted voice. Rarely before Cash had a singer taken vocal pain—not the adolescent shriek of most rock singers but the abiding ache of a veteran victim—and made it so audible, so immediate, so dark and deep. Rarely, before or since, has a voice also shown the grit to express, endure and outlive that misery. His songs played like confessions on a deathbed or death row, but he delivered them with the plangent stoicism of a world-class poker player dealt a bum hand.

That—and his determination to transcend or ignore musical genres—made Cash's death last week, at 71, an event that provoked a serious sense of loss among people of all ages. Children of the '50s remember the startle of his first eminence: the one Southern star who was not a rebellious kid but a grownup with cavernous eyes and a voice to match. Kids of the '60s recall his pop hits, the TV show he was host of for two years and the easy alliances he formed with musicians beyond country's borders. The X and next generations know his old songs as if they were standards, and his boldly simple later work—especially Hurt, which was nominated for six MTV awards—as emblems of moral and musical purity, an antidote to the glitz and aggression of teen icons. Cash made patriarchal integrity cool.

He carried that integrity around the world. "He's loved in countries that don't even like Americans," says singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson, who was a janitor at a Nashville recording studio in 1965 when he first met Cash. "I've seen that firsthand in the places we've played. People love him because of everything he represents: freedom, justice for his fellow man. He is unlike any other artist I've ever known. He's as comfortable with the poor and prisoners as he is with Presidents. He's crossed over all age boundaries, all political boundaries. I like to think of him as Abraham Lincoln with a wild side."

The stature Cash embodies is not so much out of fashion as above it. His CDs are found in the country section of the music store, but he doesn't quite fit there. He came up with rockabilly phenoms like Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, but few of his songs were hard-driving rave-ups. I Walk the Line, Ring of Fire, Folsom Prison Blues—these are, if anything, contemporary folk songs. Cash sang of specific injustices and eternal truths; he was the deadpan poet of cotton fields, truck stops and prisons. He was a balladeer, really, a spellbinding storyteller—a witness, in the Christian sense of the word. Here was a man who knew the Commandments because he had broken so many of them.

As the decades wore on, and Cash notched his annual eight months on the road, experience and excess left their marks on his face, like a hammer pounding tin. He had the battered charisma of an action-movie star who did his own fights. Here was a man who had earned his craggy good looks, his Old Testament God voice, his unique hold on the pop-cultural imagination. Here, three generations of music lovers agreed, was a man—in all his imperfections and grandeur.

If a fighter is sucker punched by fate, as the characters in many Cash songs are, then the heroic thing is to punch back. Cash, as a man and an artist, had the strength to see that bad times may be not a curse but a challenge. His biggest pop hit, the Shel Silverstein song A Boy Named Sue, might be considered comic frivolity for a man whose voice and choice of material more typically dealt in darkness. But the story of a man searching out the father who gave him a girl's name has its own Cashian moral. At the end of a brutal brawl, the father mutters, "You oughta thank me before I die/ For the gravel in your guts and the spit in your eye/ 'Cause I'm the son of a bitch that named you Sue." Adversity made Cash a man, mature and honorable.

He was born into adversity, in 1932, as the fourth of five children of farmers in Kingsland, Ark. For his family, as with others in the Depression-wracked area, cotton was the Cash crop. "We planted cotton in the spring, and we picked it in the fall," says Merline Hall, 77, a childhood friend of the Cash children. "And you used your fingers. There were not any [mechanical] pickers back then. At least, none of us had one." She recalls John as "a good kid" who sang (while his mother Carrie played piano) at the Central Baptist Church. "It was not a false voice," says Hall. "How do you describe it? Let me just say that when he sang, he meant every word he sang. It was the Christian in him."

After high school, Cash worked at an auto plant in Pontiac, Mich., and in 1950 joined the Air Force. He came home, married Vivian Liberto and settled with her in Memphis, Tenn. This was in 1954, and by the next year he had a deal with Sun Records, which had launched Presley's career. Hey, Porter, backed by Cry, Cry, Cry, was his first hit. Around that time, with the help of Phillips and producer Jack Clement, Presley (who would shortly move on to RCA Victor and megastardom) and two other young men, Perkins and Lewis, would create the rockabilly branch of rock 'n' roll.

After Presley's contract was sold to Colonel Tom Parker for $25,000, Perkins had a pop-and-country smash with Blue Suede Shoes, and Lewis followed a year later with the primal boogie Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On. On Dec. 4, 1956, Cash joined the rockers, now known as the Million Dollar Quartet, for an impromptu jam session. Astonishingly, Lewis—the all-time most reckless rock 'n' roller, whom Cash flew in to comfort when Lewis nearly died in the '80s—is the last man standing. "You know," he said in sad wonder last week, "I'm the only one left." (Lewis interrupted his Jacksonville, Fla., concert last Friday night to perform the sacred song Vacation in Heaven in Cash's honor.)

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