Johnny Cash

Years ago, I wrote a short paper on the music of Johnny Cash and the Vietnam war. I’m still rather proud of the paper, both of the research I did and the statements I made, but on rereading it, I find myself having less kindness for Cash than I did at the time. I still admire him as both a man and as a musician, but with the past seven years, his political - or lack-there-of - stances are not so easily brushed aside.

To recap the paper a bit, Johnny Cash was a man born during the Great Depression who was pushed in different directions by different parts of himself and the situations he found around him. He described in his autobiography that his family lived in “socialism-kind of” under the New Deal resettlement program.¹ He served in the Air Force during the Cold War and was a proud American. He wrote and performed an entire album, Bitter Tears, with Peter La Farge, speaking of the struggles of Native Americans and advocating for their rights. When radio stations refused to play music from the album, he took out an ad in Billboard calling them out.² He, or his record label, or someone, claimed he had Native heritage. He did not. He performed at prisons and sided with the prisoners openly. He often refused to talk politics, even when speaking to presidents. To call all these aspects contradictory would be going much too far, but to say some aspects were destined to be conflict would be accurate.

Cash threaded that needle of a life in part by sitting in the middle of many issues. He empathized for the soldier of the Vietnam war, but did not openly side with the protester. He performed for Nixon, but refused to play songs with anti-hippie and anti-black themes because of a lack of time to practice, scare quote placement left as an exercise for the reader (Cash, J., & Carr, P., 2003, p. 212).³ He lived a life so apolitical on the surface that a fascist at Unite the Right wore a Johnny Cash t-shirt to the hate rally, which the Cash family later condemned.⁴ This is not to say that any part of Cash’s work is in line with the nazi idiot, but to say that his public persona is so detached from politics that the nazi could be forgiven (although we won’t, because he is a nazi) for not realizing Cash’s true stripes were not in the shape of a swastika.

The truly sad thing is that Cash was more political than many contemporaries. He took steps others would not have for fear of losing their country music, and presumably conservative, listeners. This incomplete list of half-measures is leagues beyond other artists who never got beyond the teaspoon-measure, back then or today. But it is not enough. One cannot meet Richard Nixon and try to be apolitical. The meeting itself is political. There is no apolitics, there is only politics.