No music is as sincerely American as country music. The Brits whitewashed rock 'n' roll and then painted it again, jazz moved to Europe and then to South America and emcees are as much a Caribbean creation as our own. But country music is ours and only ours. We lay claim to its blue-collar authenticity, to songwriters whose voices scrape rust off with each verse, to the sound of whiskey and dirt. This is our sound. These are our chords. This is our music.
Like most people my age, I did not listen to much country growing up. Long gone was the dignity that had been harvested for the genre by men with names like Willy, Hank and Boxcar. Years earlier, playlists and focus groups had drowned country music in the tactless compromise of artificial pop sensibility. Grit had become Billy Ray Cyrus, ten-gallon compassion had become the Dixie Chicks. The East Coast never really got country; neither understood it or even received it. We never knew country music, just what mimicked it in our time.
We are a nation without real country singers. We are a generation without a true cowboy, without that mythic musician who oscillates between outlaw and saint. They are extinct, like the blues-man or genuine folk singer.
America has lost all the men who needed only a story and guitar to generate real emotions. The soul of music, once full of subtlety and inflection, has become a game of simple cues. We have suffered 20 years where loud music means anger, soft means sorrow and acoustic means sensitive. We live in a time where John Mayer can be confused with sensitive and musicians with real heart go hungry.
Johnny Cash lived through generations of disingenuous music; the saccharin angst of heavy metal, the self-satire of glam rock, the awkward, albeit danceable mess of disco, the exploitation of folk, punk and hip-hop. From the sidelines, Johnny Cash watched as the virtues he brought to music were forgotten by the industry. He watched as the public moved on and dumbed down.
A cowboy bard, Johnny Cash was as much a storyteller as a musician. His songs always flowed with unparalleled honesty and conviction, his voice a charismatic scraping which always endeared his audience to the narrator of each song. Johnny Cash could sing a love song to a prison and pull it off. He could make audiences cheer and cry and laugh with six strings. Johnny Cash's connection with his audience was anything but an act. The famous Folsom Prison recording of \A Boy Named Sue"" came only the second time he read the lyrics, a day after Shel Silverstein handed them to him.
It took very little for Folsom Prison to begin cheering Johnny Cash on stage, but for our generation, it took a miracle. A pack of grunge rockers and aging punks, the music scene that Johnny Cash eventually infiltrated had little other contact with his music than the occasional antacid commercial with ""Ring of Fire."" But the payoff of having Johnny Cash play to people our age is immeasurable. He was the last cowboy. He was our era's only connection to honesty in music.
With dwindling popularity, Johnny Cash released his first installment of in 1994. With a cover of the Soundgarden hit ""Rusty Cage,"" Johnny Cash demonstrated to a new audience that he had more to offer than our current heroes. Soundgarden recorded the song with little more than rage; Johnny Cash made it sound personal and kinetic, as if he wrote the song with an event in mind.
This would become a pattern in the albums in his later life, recording Spain's ""Spiritual"" with the conviction the half-hearted jazz ensemble could never have and recording ""Hurt"" with the self-loathing and introspection Trent Reznor could only simulate. Johnny Cash tours became odd mixtures of pierced boys and their grandfathers, ex-cons and their sons.
Johnny Cash died last week from complications relating to diabetes, and the best that American music had to offer died with him. He will be sorely missed.
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