September 13, 2003

Tracing the Line Cash Walked

ohnny Cash was as down-home as they come. Born in a shack in Arkansas to a family of farmers and living most of his life in the vicinity of Nashville, he sang about venerable country subjects like trains, work, cowboys, jail, temptations, guitars and God. But what made him an American icon were the ways he was like no country singer before or since.

Long before M.B.A.'s began advising pop acts about branding, Mr. Cash set out to make himself a symbol. His wardrobe as the Man in Black — for perpetual mourning and perpetual sympathy with humanity's suffering — was just the most visible sign of a deep and consistent gravity. He started his career as a rockabilly singer in Memphis, where country reaffirmed its connection to the blues, and in the hundreds of songs he recorded, he was never far away from an awareness of tragedy and death.

Of course he was an entertainer, too; he even had his own television variety show. He was no stranger to the Nashville system that has long turned out professional, increasingly homogenized country hits. But while good country singers have been content within that system, the great ones have defied it, and Mr. Cash, who died yesterday in Nashville at 71, was among the mavericks. His allies through the years have included Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Lee Lewis, Kris Kristofferson and U2. Eventually he found old country values in places most country singers never thought to look.

Older American rural music spoke directly of hard times and mortality. Songs about romance and honky-tonking were always around, but they were the Saturday-night respite from rugged lives.

Mr. Cash's music didn't flaunt its rural roots; he never allied himself with bluegrass revivals, new traditionalism or any other overt throwbacks. His trademark arrangements, with his steady-picked guitar and the marchlike beat of his longtime backup group, the Tennessee Two, were more like sobered-up rockabilly than anything else. But the songs he chose throughout his career stayed close to the hardscrabble perspective of the music he grew up hearing. When he selected a three-CD compilation of his own songs in 2000, it was called "Love God Murder" (Sony), with one topic per disc.

In his long career, Mr. Cash wasn't always downhearted. Among his biggest pop hits were "A Boy Named Sue," which neatly played against his long catalog of songs about manly exploits, and "Jackson," a cheerfully bickering duet with his future wife, June Carter. But in recent decades, country music has traded confrontations with the abyss for mild flirtations and clever wordplay. And when country got cute, Mr. Cash turned his back on it.

He had always had rockers among his fans. They saw in Mr. Cash a fellow outsider and, in his later years, a connection to the defiant spirit of early rock 'n' roll. They respected the unsentimental bluntness of songs like "I Walk the Line" and the terse narratives of songs like "Folsom Prison Blues," in which he plays a murderer. Many of his songs contemplated the darkest, most violent human impulses with realism and remorse, and in them the struggle against sin was never an easy one. He sought relief in gospel songs and patriotic songs, which spelled out the moral code that his characters found so difficult to keep.

In his last decade, on a string of albums that began with "American Recordings" in 1994, Mr. Cash found songs he wanted to sing among the bleakest rock. The country mainstream had long ignored him; he once said that he had been "purged" from Nashville. But on those final albums, he completed his self-invention as a rock-ribbed avatar of tragedy.

Genre mattered less to Mr. Cash than ever. He sang alone with an acoustic guitar, like a porchside picker, and he sang backed by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (on "Unchained" in 1996, which won a Grammy award as Best Country Album). His voice, deeper and more scarred than ever, brought an adult's sorrow to the grunge defiance of Soundgarden's "Rusty Cage" and to the bitterness of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt." The last face Mr. Cash showed the public was the creased, gray, weary closeup in the video clip for "Hurt." It was the face of a man who knew he was mortally ill, with all vanity gone.

In the liner notes to "Unchained," Mr. Cash wrote, "I love songs about horses, railroads, land, Judgment Day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak and love. And Mother. And God." Mr. Cash knew himself well, and he did not flinch.