Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison

The Man in Black

Johnny Cash, who died last week just four months after his wife and soul mate June Carter Cash, was a decent, honourable man as well as being a great singer and songwriter, a man who helped pioneer rock ‘n’ roll.

Many Irish people can be forgiven for thinking that the song ‘Forty Shades of Green’, which Cash sang, was a contemporary of ‘Danny Boy’, or ‘Galway Bay’ on the subject of the emigrant pining for home:

I close my eyes and picture the emerald of the sea
From the fishing boats at Dingle to the shores of Donaghadee
I miss the River Shannon, the folks at Skibbereen
The moorlands and the meadows and the forty shades of green.

It was, in fact, written by Johnny Cash in 1961, after he visited Ireland, and five or six years after he broke through the country music scene. He could entertain at several levels, not least in the light-hearted way he sang about the boy who in a saloon eventually meets the father (“the dirty, mangy dog that named me ‘Sue’”) who deserted him when he was three and whom he pledged to kill.

They fight it out with knives and guns and are close to murdering each other when the father explains that in naming him Sue he left him the means to get tough and survive! At the end they make up, but Sue swears that if he ever has a son he’s going to name him, “Bill or George… anything but Sue!”

In another funny song, ‘The One on the Left is on the Right’, Cash ribbed at the musical troupe that broke up in a free-for-all on stage because of political incompatibility!

Well the one on the right was on the left
And the one in the middle was on the right.
And the one on the left was in the middle
And the guy in the rear was a Methodist.

Cash was born in poverty at the height of the Depression in a shack in Arkansas. His father was a hobo labourer, picking cotton, doing various menial jobs until a New Deal resettlement programme allowed the family to take possession of a five-room house on twenty acres of fertile land. Cash worked in the fields along with his three brothers and two sisters.

He was influenced by the spirituality of his mother and by his older brother and best friend, Jack, who was tragically killed at the age of fourteen by a circular saw while cutting fence posts. He was deeply affected by that death and it explains why once he said, “I taught the weeping willow how to cry.”

His recording career began in 1955. But unlike many other celebrity figures he refused to remain silent on social or political issues and recorded many protest songs, including ‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes’ about a Pima Indian from Gila River Reservation in Arizona. In the song, Cash’s anger simmers as he sings:

Down the ditches for a thousand years
The water grew Ira’s peoples’ crops
Till the white man stole the water rights
And the sparkling water stopped.

Nevertheless, Ira Hayes went to fight for his country during World War II and was one of those who appear in the famous photograph of US marines raising the American flag over the Japanese stronghold of Iwo Jima. Three of the six men were killed while raising the flag. It was at a time when the War Department needed visible, tangible heroes to raise war bonds and the three survivors returned to the USA to be feted and appear at official engagements. Ira resented the public displays in which they were treated as pawns and repeatedly said that the real heroes were “my good buddies” who died during the battles.

By the time he was released from duty he was an alcoholic and returned to the dried-up reservation where there was still no water or crops. On over fifty occasions he was arrested for being drunk and thrown into jail.

In 1954, at the age of 33, he fell drunk into an irrigation ditch and froze to death. The ditch where he died was the single source of water that was provided for his people by the US government that he had proudly served.

Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won’t answer anymore
Not the whiskey drinkin’ Indian
Nor the marine that went to war.

Due to the rigours and lifestyle of touring Cash himself became a drug addict, dependent on amphetamines and barbiturates. It ruined his first marriage and when he was close to death June Carter, the singer-songwriter whom he later married, saved him by persuading him to undergo treatment.

Cash sang blues songs, American Indian ballads, hymns and love songs about the dangers of temptation (‘I Walk The Line’, ‘Ring of Fire’). But for me he will always be the “King of the underdog” for his stories about the hardship of life, the underprivileged and the marginalized in society, including prisoners in front of whom in Folsom Prison and San Quintin he played live concerts in 1968 and 1969. There is a part when he sings, “San Quintin you’ve been livin’ hell to me” and the prisoners erupt with passionate cheers.

Cash’s anthem was ‘The Man in Black’:

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down.
Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime.
But is there because he’s a victim of the times.

And he goes on to include the illiterate, those who never heard Christ’s message about love and charity, the sick and lonely, drug-addicts, those in mourning and those killed in war. And he finishes:

Ah, I’d love to wear a rainbow every day,
And tell the world that everything’s OK,
But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back,
’Till things are brighter, I’m the Man In Black.

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