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With few exceptions, what passes for country music these days is a rehashing of Eighties rock, Journey with fiddles and steel guitars, performed by a standardized collection of Barbies and Kens with interchangeable heads. You know something is wrong when the stuff that actually sounds like country music is labeled "alternative country." The soul is missing from country music, having been replaced by a marketing strategy. Cowboy hat? Check. Pick-up truck? Check. Yep, it's country.
No it isn't.
And this brings us to Johnny Cash. He was the real deal, one of the last of his breed. If the man's body of work isn't enough to convince you, you'll find ample proof in Steve Turner's THE MAN CALLED CASH, the authorized biography of country music's legendary Man in Black.
Turner draws on the personal recollections of an army of Cash's friends and family to present a detailed portrait of a complex, flawed, flesh-and-bone human being. Don't let that "authorized biography" designation get in the way. This is a warts-and-all look at Cash's remarkable life and equally remarkable music.
In many instances Turner's sources provide conflicting versions of anecdotes from various stages in Cash's career. In the delta between the various recollections of events, something both sobering and wonderful emerges --- a realization that, regardless of status or celebrity, we are all ultimately defined less by what we actually do than by how we are remembered. Memories are informed by context. In Johnny Cash's case, as presented in this book, that context is defined by Cash's ability to connect on a profound level with people, in both his personal relationships and in the creation and performance of his music.
But THE MAN CALLED CASH is no more an attempt to whitewash Cash's life and career than it is a superficial tell-all. Rather, it is an honest look at an honest man, an artist who drew equally on his demons, his faith, his joy, and his pain to produce music that spoke of and to working men and women on a visceral level. Throughout his career Johnny Cash put his soul into his music, without affectation (one would be hard pressed to find a photo of Cash in a cowboy hat). In channeling the memories of so many whose lives intersected with Johnny Cash's, Steve Turner has managed to put Cash's soul on paper. Read this book if you care anything at all about American popular music, and be reminded of what country music is really about.
--- Reviewed by Bob Rhubart
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