I've spent plenty of time chugging out that cool Johnny Cash train beat on the big red rockabilly guitar I souped up. And it's because, like many an American musician and non-musician alike, I've found Cash to be one of the ultimate purveyors of a wide swath of American-ness, from Old West flintiness to Memphis cool. When the strains of "Folsom Prison" or "I Walk the Line" start up, it's pretty much impossible not to get a little stirred up.
And so it was with great interest that I read this story in Salon. It covers a side of Cash that certainly complicates the picture of Cash as American symbol. It complicates it in a way I personally like very much–he apparently took his views straight to the top and didn't defer to some faux presidential nobility, or "respect for the office":
In July 1972, musician Johnny Cash sat opposite President Richard Nixon in the White House's Blue Room. As a horde of media huddled a few feet away, the country music superstar had come to discuss prison reform with the self-anointed leader of America's "silent majority." "Johnny, would you be willing to play a few songs for us," Nixon asked Cash. "I like Merle Haggard's 'Okie From Muskogee' and Guy Drake's 'Welfare Cadillac.'" The architect of the GOP's Southern strategy was asking for two famous expressions of white working-class resentment.
"I don't know those songs," replied Cash, "but I got a few of my own I can play for you." Dressed in his trademark black suit, his jet-black hair a little longer than usual, Cash draped the strap of his Martin guitar over his right shoulder and played three songs, all of them decidedly to the left of "Okie From Muskogee." With the nation still mired in Vietnam, Cash had far more than prison reform on his mind. Nixon listened with a frozen smile to the singer's rendition of the explicitly antiwar "What Is Truth?" and "Man in Black" ("Each week we lose a hundred fine young men") and to a folk protest song about the plight of Native Americans called "The Ballad of Ira Hayes." It was a daring confrontation with a president who was popular with Cash's fans and about to sweep to a crushing reelection victory, but a glimpse of how Cash saw himself — a foe of hypocrisy, an ally of the downtrodden. An American protest singer, in short, as much as a country music legend.
