Paint It Black

Big man, bigger hair: singer Johnny Cash. Courtesy Sony BMG Music Entertainment/Twentieth Century Fox.

At age 18, Johnny Cash escaped the cotton fields of the Mississippi delta by enlisting in the U.S. Air Force. He also started collecting songs and stories. Like the time he and a pal were play-wrestling before stepping out for a night on the town in Landsberg, Germany, and his buddy hollered, “Don’t step on my blue suede shoes.”

After his release from the Air Force, in 1954, Cash started to spend those songs and stories on Memphis producer Sam Phillips’s label, Sun Records. Everything he sang and some things he said became hits. Cash repeated the Landsberg incident to labelmate Carl Perkins, who promptly wrote Blue Suede Shoes. The song was still bobbing at the top of the charts months later when Perkins and Cash were asked how married stars resisted the temptations of the road. “I walk the line,” Cash snapped in his familiar rumbling bass baritone and then, half-smiling, advised Perkins he would look after that line himself.

This week, almost 50 years after I Walk the Line was recorded, the title to Cash’s hit finds itself repeated in two screen explorations of the singer’s life. On Nov. 16, CBS aired I Walk the Line, a one-hour special featuring Norah Jones, Dwight Yoakam and — what would a music tribute be without them? — U2. Then, on Nov. 18, the biopic Walk the Line opens, with Joaquin Phoenix playing Cash back when Johnny was skinny as a snake and the scariest, sexiest man in show business.

I Walk the Line was more than a great line for Johnny Cash (1932-2003). In a 48-year career that saw him carve out a legacy as a uniquely gifted interpreter of the American experience, Cash earned his living roaming the border between damnation and deliverance. Or as he explained to an interviewer, “My songs are about Saturday night or Sunday morning.”

Cash grew up during the Depression in Dyess, Ark., a one-stop-sign town near Memphis. At night, his mother sat out on the porch, singing gospel songs to keep away the panthers that stalked the nearby woods. Johnny offered up those same songs while picking cotton. But he didn’t smile as he was singing like his adored older brother, Jack, who carried a bible while working the fields. In truth, Johnny was small-town bored, edgily impatient for a more eventful existence.

Cash’s life changed when he was 12. After skipping chores one day he was intercepted by his father and a Baptist minister in a speeding car. “Get in!” Mr. Cash shouted, “Jack’s been hurt bad.” At home, his father took Johnny to the smokehouse, where he opened a blood-soaked paper bag and removed a torn shirt and severed belt. Jack fell onto a table saw, his father sobbed. “We’re gonna lose him, John.”

Hearing the news, young Johnny raced from the smokehouse. His wife, June Carter Cash, believed her husband never stopped running from the death of his sibling. Like James Dean’s bad-boy character in the film East of Eden, Cash attempted to fulfill his saintly brother’s ambitions. He would eventually break from Sam Phillips to record a gospel album. At the same time, Cash remained as nomadic and carnivorous as the panthers that ruined his mother’s sleep.

The conflict that ruled Cash’s soul made his music as taut and razor-sharp as barbed wire. Between 1955 and 1957, Johnny recorded 15 Top-10 singles forged out of bandmate Luther Perkins’s stuttering lead guitar and the singer’s boom-chicka-boom rhythm guitar accompaniment. (Cash accomplished this effect by inserting dollar bills between the frets and strings of his guitar.) Then there were Cash’s rough carpentered vocals and oddly surreal lyrics, which dealt with working men trapped by everything from jail (Folsom Prison Blues) to disappointed wives (Mean-Eyed Cat).

Johnny come lately: Joaquin Phoenix as Cash in Walk the Line. Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox.

After hitting it big, Cash went without proper food or sleep for a decade, living on nightclub applause and amphetamines. The hits continued and Cash could be noble, paying off the debts of impoverished country music heroes and performing charity benefits. But when his mood darkened, look out. Cash trashed hotel rooms with an untamable fury, reducing walls to smoke and pissing on steaming radiators. Singer Waylon Jennings remembers a lost weekend where the two hooked up with a rich fan who promised them a night on the town — all the pills and women they wanted. Cash was in the back seat of a Cadillac, purring about how great the businessman must be doing when Jennings looked back to see that Johnny was plowing the upholstery with a knife.

The Johnny Cash movie picks up the singer’s life when he’s got one leg in hell and is rescued by the love of a good woman, June Carter Cash (Reese Witherspoon). It’s a great story. A year after marrying June, Cash gave up drugs and enjoyed his greatest triumph. In 1969, Cash sold more records than the Beatles and swept the Country Music awards.

Joaquin Phoenix performs Cash’s songs in Walk the Line (take that Jamie Foxx!); the actor does a mesmerizing job capturing the potent fury of Cash’s live act. As a kid, I saw Cash in his comeback year and remember with a shiver how the country preacher dressed in a black swallowtail coat could turn into a hellion in an instant. How in the middle of Blistered, he pulled a guitar from behind his back and raked the audience with imaginary machine-gun fire as he snarled, “What she does simply walking down the sidewalk of that city makes me think about a stray cat gettin’ fed!” When the audience screamed, Cash collapsed in easy laughter with his blue suede shoed guitarist, Carl Perkins.

Hopefully, audiences who see Phoenix play acting Cash will check out the source, all those great Sun sides and Columbia hits from the ’50s and ’60s. There were also a few burning gems on Cash’s second comeback, the songs recorded in the last decade of his life with producer Rick Rubin — indelible portraits of conquest and despair like Hurt, Delia’s Gone, and I’ve Been Everywhere.

Bob Dylan thought of Cash as the village elder of American roots music. “Johnny didn’t have a piercing yell, but 10 thousand years of culture fell from him,” Dylan once wrote. “He sounds like he’s at the edge of the fire … full tilt and vibrant with danger.”

Stephen Cole writes about the arts for CBC.ca.