In Death, Johnny Fades to Black

Three years after his death, Johnny Cash still hates to be pigeonholed.

The iconic country singer/songwriter spent his career defying any and all expectations of him. When labelled a bluegrass outsider, he married into the Carter family, country music royalty. When hooked on amphetamines and long removed from the music charts, he parlayed a prison concert into a 1968 hit LP and premiered a major network TV show.

Thirty years later and with his elder statesmen status locked up, Cash’s experimentalist dogma led him towards more musical risks. “American V: A Hundred Highways” is the fifth, the latest, and the last in a decade-long partnership with Rick Rubin, producer of the Beastie Boys, Jay-Z, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Their projects bucked Cash’s conventional gospel and country material, sticking mainly to alternative- and classic-rock cover songs.

However, this album is confessional in a way “American IV: The Man Comes Around” only began to broach. The collection of 10 covers and two original pieces is the sound of Cash coming to grips with his impending death, then helping his audience to do the same.

Despite Rubin’s minimalist production, the album has both the progression and the strength of a storm—and like a storm, desperation and fear shrouds its approach. “Help Me” is as subtle and as elegantly-orchestrated a cry of futility as Nick Drake’s “Cello Song,” all the more tragic for the Parkinson’s-induced trembling in Cash’s voice.

This physical debility from such a normally-imposing figure turns the next track, “God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” from a warning of divine punishment for sinners to an embarrassed admission of guilt. Cash isn’t the righteous prophet delivering the title message; he’s the “rambler, the gambler, the back-slider” he seems to be addressing. He’s neither as strong nor as sacred as he might claim.

However, Cash’s denial of his fraility changes into an outright confession during “If You Could Read My Mind,” a retooled Gordon Lightfoot song and the climax of the album. The lyrics describe how one might imagine a lover as beyond perfect, “just like an old-time movie ‘bout a ghost from a wishing well.” Where Lightfoot sang the lyrics with patent sarcasm, Cash treats them as an honest declaration: “you know that ghost is me,” he admits over a warm piano accompaniment, “and I will never be set free as long as there’s a ghost that you can’t see.”

Facing a slow death in the late stages of Parkinson’s Disease, Cash’s performance is a patient, sensitive rejection of the steeliness so many have ascribed to him. He is a ghost, a specter in the American imagination of the stoic hero, a musical John Wayne. Yet like Wayne, whose heroism faded when his off-screen WWII draft-dodging became public, Cash’s immortality is a fiction—as he puts it, “a paperback novel, the kind the drugstores sell.”

The main weakness of “American V,” though, is that Cash makes this point too early. Half the remaining tracks are ballads (the major-key “On the Evening Train,” “I Came to Believe”), with the narrator himself grappling with death. The rest are wakes (“Four Strong Winds,” “I’m Free from the Chain Gang Now”), urging others to do so themselves.

Cash’s gruff elegance is there in all of them, but he plods through them at a tortoise’s pace—or, perhaps, a grandfather’s. For those who think of Cash as family, this is comforting; for the rest, it’s vaguely condescending and distinctly boring.

Regardless, hearing an artist compose his own eulogy is rare, rarer still for an artist of such influence. Cash’s malaise can’t hide the complexity that made him legendary, and a legend’s swan song shouldn’t be ignored.

—Reviewer Nicholas K. Tabor can be reached at ntabor@fas.harvard.edu.