Johnny Cash Remains a Hero

By ROB PATTERSON

I decry how the term hero has been so overused in recent years that it’s become all but debased. This may be due to the fact that I don’t have many heroes myself.

Hero is a term I use sparingly. There are quite a few people I admire that don’t quite qualify as heroes. There are people who I admire for being heroic at points in their lives.

But to me, heroes are people of extraordinary lifelong courage and character that inspires me. Nelson Mandela is one I can cite, alongside Martin Luther King Jr. And Mahatma Gandhi. I’d cite Franklin Delano Roosevelt as another. All people who changed the world.

Calling entertainers heroes is something I generally eschew. But there is one I’ll hail as just that: the late Johnny Cash.

Yep. A man who was also a drug addict at times in his life. Because heroes are not without their flaws and foibles; that no one is perfect is a primary truism of life. And how they deal with their imperfections can also be heroic.

My near-lifelong esteem for Cash as a human and creative soul to the point where I considered him a hero was recently underscored and crystalized by the book “House of Cash: The Legacies of My Father, Johnny Cash,” published in 2011, by the son he had with wife June Carter, John Carter Cash. It’s hardly the first book I’ve read on the man. My dear friend and at one time roommate Patrick Carr co-wrote the Man in Black’s 1997 autobiography, Cash.

Carr’s esteem for him, which we often discussed some years ago, certainly enhanced my own. But there are few measures of a man more crucial than his role as a father, and especially the father of a son (he previously had four daughters, including the very talented singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash, with his first wife Vivian Liberto).

And John Carter (no slouch himself as a musical artist and producer) highlights what a loving and supportive father he had. Plus his father’s abiding faith, musical and personal integrity, modesty of ego and compassion for others, especially those less fortunate. And his devotion to his wife June. Plus, as the book adds to my knowledge of the man, his loyalty to his true longtime friends.

Few people I know have lived such an exemplary life. Even if he did have his struggles with pills and as a result brushes with the law. But Cash was also never one to deny his foibles.

Since his passing in 2003, Cash has become something of an American icon, respected by young and old alike, admired by people from across the political and cultural spectrum. And deservedly so.

And then, of course, there is his music, which in many ways reflects Cash’s values and philosophies. It’s a rich and rewarding catalog through the decades from his initial releases on the famed Sun Records to his years as a leading country star in the 1960s into the ’70s to the coda of his most personal work with producer Rick Rubin up to his death.

It will be a treasure trove for listeners to hopefully enjoy in the future. If, in the times to come, people will get past Cash’s iconography – the photo of him throwing the middle finger seems to be his most popular image in today’s pop culture – and really come to understand his considerable measure as a man and musical artist.

Populist Picks

Documentary Film: Jaco – Bassist Jaco Pastorius was likely the greatest electric bassist that ever lived, and certainly the instrument’s most virtuosic and exciting player. His solo albums in the 1970s and ‘80s, as well as work with the jazz band Weather Report and Joni Mitchell made him a musical legend. His sad personal descent due to psychiatric issues and death in 1987 only burnish that mythic stature. This tale of his life gives both his artistry and eccentricity its just due.

Documentary Film: Mommy Dead & Dearest – Truth being stranger than fiction is borne out in the truly bizarre story of mother Dee Dee and daughter Gypsy Rose Blanchard, in which the latter was abused and infantalized from birth by her mother as a result of Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy, passed off as suffering from multiple diseases and disorders. When the 24-year-old Gypsy helped in her mother’s 2015 murder, it became a strange case of liberation from the shackles of insanity and twisted family love. A gripping tale of dysfunction.

Rob Patterson is a music and entertainment writer in Austin, Texas. Email orca@prismnet.com.

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2018

Populist.com