by Drew Reid

From his rockabilly beginnings at Sun Records in Memphis to his recent lionization as an icon of the new music genre “Americana,” Johnny Cash hit all the stops in between. An uncompromising trailblazer, during his nearly 50 years in the limelight Cash recorded some 1500 titles that have been released…so far. (They say there’s a virtual vault of unheard music at his Hendersonville, Tennessee estate.)

SIDEBAR: HENDERSONVILLE, Tennessee (AP) — Johnny Cash’s longtime lakeside home, a showcase where he wrote much of his famous music and entertained U.S. presidents, music royalty and visiting fans, was destroyed by fire on Tuesday [April 10, 2007]…Cash and his wife, June Carter Cash, lived in the 13,880-square-foot (1,289-square-meter) home from the late 1960s until their deaths in 2003…Richard Sterban of the Oak Ridge Boys lives on the same road as Cash. “Maybe it’s the good Lord’s way to make sure that it was only Johnny’s house,” Sterban said…The property was purchased by Barry Gibb, a former member of the Bee Gees, in January 2006. Gibb and his wife, Linda, had said they planned to restore the home on Old Hickory Lake and hoped to write songs there. They had not yet moved in to the home, which they bought for a reported $2.3 million… —CNN

He was an author, an actor, and a spokesman for the national conscience. His distinctive voice and phrasing is part of our musical language. Everybody does a Johnny Cash imitation.

Shel Silverstein, writer of A Boy Named Sue which earned Cash one of his first Grammys in 1969 (the most recent being in 2003), used to say that John would take a song and play it over and over endlessly, molding and shaping it, until it became uniquely his, and no one else’s after that. Once he put his mark on a piece of work, it was forever a Johnny Cash song. This is borne out in his recent album American Recording IV: The Man Comes Around, where in addition to venerable songs like Danny Boy and Streets Of Laredo, he makes instant classics out of songs like Nine Inch Nails’, Hurt, and Sting’s, I Hung My Head. You will never listen to The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face or Bridge Over Troubled Water the same way again. Similarly, no one else could write lines like “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die…” and get away with it in this ostensibly sensitive day and age.

Born in the depths of the Great Depression in Arkansas, J.R. Cash was chopping cotton by the time he was five years old. From a hardscrabble set of origins, he became one of the most famous people in the world. With only a high school education, he developed into an intellectual and a compassionate campaigner and political force for the downtrodden. A very private man, he led a very public life in the most intensely scrutinized business there is. A seeker of spirituality who found solace in his religion, he also wrestled with a multitude of demons throughout his life. An uncanny talent whose music made countless people happy, he carried a deep melancholia inside.

Above all, Johnny Cash was Real, and his was a distinctly American career. As friend Merle Kilgore (co-writer with June Carter Cash of Ring Of Fire) said when he got the news of Johnny’s death, “…every place I’ve been in the world, and I’ve just about been all around it, they all know Johnny Cash.”

In the same way that Woody “This Land Is Your Land” Guthrie’s hopping freight trains or Leadbelly singing his way out of prison is the stuff of modern legend, so is the story of a sharecropper’s son rising to become one of the most beloved and influential musical forces in American history. There is no one whose work cuts across all the boundaries of blues, country, gospel and rock & roll like the body of work “The Man In Black” has bequeathed us. The fact that he is in the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame gives an indication of his impact. With the passing of Johnny Cash, we are leaving an era when giants walked the earth. There is no one of his stature, no one to take his place.

As she so often does, being a genius in her own right, Dolly Parton has said it best. “Johnny Cash has only passed into the greater light. He will never, ever die. He will only become more important in this industry as time goes by.”

Of course, the world keeps turning and life goes on. But for now, there’s a huge void in the world, even as heaven’s fold has increased.