Johnny Cash Dies at 71: ‘Man in Black’ Obituary in Brief

Johnny Cash, the “Man in Black” whose six-decade career produced more than 1,500 recorded songs, died on September 12th, aged 71, four months after his wife, June Carter Cash.

Obituary in brief. Reporting credited to Reuters.

Johnny Cash and the “Man in Black” image

At his debut on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee in 1957, Johnny Cash bucked a trend, probably not for the first time and certainly not for the last. While other performers appeared in flashy, custom-tailored outfits, Mr Cash took the stage dressed in black.

The moniker “Man in Black”, which suited both his outlaw image and his austere plain-spokenness, stuck throughout a six-decade career in which he recorded over 1,500 songs. His outlaw image faded when he became a fundamentalist Christian in the late 1960s, but never disappeared.

One key to his broad appeal was the intimacy of his inner demons and angels, and how close to his surface they wrestled. Mr Cash credited his wife, June Carter Cash, with helping him tame the beast; he died four months after she did.

From Arkansas to Sun, Columbia and the prison concerts

J.R. Cash, the son of Arkansas dirt farmers, became Johnny thanks to Sam Phillips, a producer with the Sun Records label. Sun released Mr Cash’s “I Walk the Line” in 1956; but two years later he signed with Columbia Records when Sun would not let him record gospel music. He stayed with Columbia for 28 years.

They released his live concerts at San Quentin and Folsom prisons, as well as “A Boy Named Sue”, one of his biggest hits. Throughout his career, Mr Cash refused the strictures of genre or labels; among the many artists he performed with were Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, and U2.

Perhaps no other American artist could do as he did at Madison Square Garden in 1969, and follow a patriotic song like “Remember the Alamo” with Bob Dylan’s anti-war “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream”.

Late revival with Rick Rubin

Though Mr Cash’s popularity waned in the 1980s, he reached a generation of alternative-rockers late in his career when he signed with Rick Rubin, a heavy metal and hip-hop producer, in 1994, and made four critically acclaimed albums for his American Recordings label.

On these records Mr Cash mostly sang other artists’ songs—sometimes performing duets with the original artists—with the barest of accompaniments: usually just a guitar, occasionally a bass or barrel organ in the background.

He won a Grammy in 2003 for his rendition of “Give My Love to Rose”, and he won an MTV Video Music award for “Hurt”, a song by a heavy-metal band, Nine Inch Nails. The video featured clips of him as a younger man interspersed with him as he was this year, staring straight into the camera, aged and frail but unbowed.

Voice, contradictions and legacy

Age seemed only to strengthen his voice. What it lost in precision it gained in resonance; it was limited in range, granite-strong but tender, expressive and numinous. The contradictions of such a voice mirrored the contradictions in his character—Christian outlaw, down-home world traveller, hell-raising family man.

His one-time bandmate Kris Kristofferson thought of him as “Abraham Lincoln with a wild side,” and said that “people love him for what he represents: freedom, justice for his fellow man”.

Mr Cash represented America as Americans—and to judge by the mourning his death inspired in other parts, more than just Americans—would like it to be.

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