There’s a bonus interview attached to the brand new documentary DVD included the Legacy-edition box of Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison in which his daughter Rosanne confides, or at least tells us, that “I’m just not very interested in participating in the posthumous version of my dad’s career…Enough’s been said. I was gonna say no (to this interview)…and went to bed, and my window was open. A car came by with a CD blasting out of it – ‘I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die’ – and I immediately thought, ‘I’d better say yes to this.’ I’m kind of skeptical about messages from beyond, but it was a nudge!’
She’s laughing out loud telling this spooky story, undercutting just enough (and no more) how seriously we’re meant to take it, while simultaneously suggesting that the whole project might not be worth much, distancing herself from its afterlife “career” overtones – and yet fully taking part in it, providing detailed thoughts and sentiments. I’ve never seen her seem quite so much like her old man – so blatantly contradictory, and so openly promoting those contradictions.
How we’re all going to understand the man from now on is a subject very much on the table, as two new video explorations reach us at once (both on Columbia/Legacy). In addition to the Folsom Prison DVD, there is Johnny Cash’s America, an exploration of Cash’s role as an embodiment of many things American – a complex, messy variety of things. There’s a connection between the two films’ origins: The prison concert film is based on author Michael Streissguth’s 2004 book Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison: The Making Of A Masterpiece, and Streissguth is also a consultant and talking-head in the America story, which echoes some ideas about Cash’s range the raised in his assertively-titled 2006 book Johnny Cash: The Biography. Professor Streissguth’s general take on Cash is much focused on the poetic “friend of Dylan” balladeer and alleged rebel sides of the story, so you won’t see or hear very much in either of these films about the guy who did fit in to country music’s scheme of things, out there on the bus with George Jones.
Trailer for Johnny Cash’s America DVD
Johnny Cash’s America is designed around segments on Cash and broad American culture-related concepts such as “Land” and “Freedom” and “Truth” and “Protest.” More than once, the imagery overtakes the musical or biographical evidence – as when Cash’s very mild, broadly inoffensive “protest songs” such as “What is Truth?” and “All Of God’s Children Ain’t Free” are accompanied by “heavy” newsreel footage from the late ’60s anti-Vietnam war marches in Washington (which, unlike, say, Earl Scruggs and even the young Charlie Daniels, he did not take part in) or from the day of the killings at Kent State, as if Johnny Cash had written Neil Young’s “Ohio”.
What this film does not begin to get at – for all its intelligence, basic ability to hold attention, and ambitious efforts to go well beyond the standard-issue tearful dead celebrity bio rehash – is how all of the seemingly contradictory aspects of Johnny Cash got there. That would take a lot more biographical and musical-influence examination than there’s apparently time for; and more importantly, it seems to me, it would require a deeper look at how the connection between performer and audience around these themes was forged and worked.
It’s telling that running themes in Johnny Cash’s music not considered fitting alongside “Redemption” and “Faith” and “Truth” for this “Americana icon” take are Sex and Personal Love – as if the stuff of “Ring Of Fire” and “Flesh And Blood” and “Jackson” is not important or historical enough for Big Think, and not part of “Johnny Cash’s America.” This man was partly The Man In Black for the unelevated reason that he looked good that way; the various pieces of the Cash puzzle could hang together for those watching and listening, after all, to the degree that he seemed kind of cool and kind of hot.
The Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison DVD provides further glimpses into how the Cash magic worked. The event and its aftermath are treated, not without reason, as a keystone to Cash’s career resurgence of the late ’60s, and to his ability to last so long thereafter. What the Folsom Prison trip and record (and the response to it) was about, foremost, was connecting to his audience, and a larger potential audience, in a new way. The response of the pleasure-deprived prisoners was certainly sincere enough, but some of it, as the film and Streissguth’s book on the subject indicate, was also carefully contrived – cheers for certain of Johnny’s lines spliced into the record for effect, and the crowd being prompted on how to act before the show. It was also at this time that Cash’s own prison experience was deliberately exaggerated, and that myth perpetuated.
The point was to demonstrate a connection between the performer and the prisoners – not so much for the hard-core, blue-collar country music audience that was, on the whole, relatively likely to know a little something about somebody’s jailhouse experience, but for an expanding college-educated audience of LP buyers for whom this whole prison thing was in most cases, a vicarious kick received as a sort of literary metaphor.
Trailer for Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison Legacy-edition DVD
I was 18 when the record came out, and it was one of the first country albums – conceived as such, and not as a collection of hits and filler – that I bought myself. I happened to have a few friends who would before very long wind up in jail, and in fact die there (a couple of separate stories), but neither that nor most of the experiences sung about by Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison had very much middle-class background. (Well, maybe “Flushed From The Bathroom Of Your Heart”.) What the Folsom prisoners at the show really made of a song like “The Wall” is hard to tell, but it hit me hard and fast, with its existentially trapped prisoner who makes a “try” at an impossible jailbreak as a form of suicide. The metaphor had emotional potency, and the man providing that imagery to a general pop-record-buying audience damn well knew it. It was as much metaphor as reality for Cash too. As Al Gore, observer of his friend Johnny and a surprise potential music critic, puts it in the film, “I sometimes wonder whether or not his deep identification with prisoners might not have been somehow connected with some of the personal experiences that he had fighting addiction, and feeling that kind of imprisonment.”
What this all suggests is that much of the scope of Johnny Cash’s music, and much of what he made of himself for the world to see, happened in the realm of art and imagination – that his repertoire and the evolving Cash image, too, were constructs, however much the audience wanted (and may still want) them to be some sort of simple, direct reflection of his own experience.
The Folsom Prison DVD is provocative and getting further into these questions than Johnny Cash’s America, but, ironically, it has, quite literally, very little to show for it, since the milestone show in question was never filmed (as the later, less potent San Quentin show was). The songs Cash sings on this DVD are mainly accompanied by graphics and animations, some more inspired, many less so. Indeed, the most detailed exploration the film makes is of the sad tale of Glen Sherley. Cash sings this Folsom prisoner’s song “Greystone Chapel” at the show, takes him out to perform as a singer in a prison reform tour, and gets him a record contract, though Sherley is ill-prepared for life outside of prison walls. The story, in this context, is all the more an object lesson in the dark side of dealing with actual people as metaphors instead of seeing them as they are.
The best way to go regarding these two DVDs, then, may be to see both for what they do deliver, understanding that they’re but limited contributions to a posthumous story which – sorry to contradict you, Rosanne – still leaves much to be told, and a lot to be grasped.
