| |
|
|
 HILTONS, VA Shades of Black
A downside of growing up in the late 1970s is that by the time you finally learn good music is not defined by the Bee Gees, most of the acts you want to see are either broken up or dead. So, okay, the Rolling Stones are still together. Would you really pay $75 for the Bridges for Babylon tour? No way. You'd save the money and pray for a time machine to take you back to 1966, anyplace but Altamont. Robert Plant? You can't see him without John Bonham. You can hardly look at him, past 50 and still wearing tight leather. But for some musicians, you make exceptions. You accept their graying hair, even graying voices, because you know there's something about them that can never go gray. For me that musician was always Johnny Cash. Born to Arkansas cotton farmers in 1932, Cash's voice -- the only voice besides James Earl Jones' that could credibly pass for God's -- shaped American music. In the 1950s he shaped it along with The Tennessee Two and songs like "Cry, Cry, Cry," "I Walk the Line" and "Give My Love to Rose." In the 1960s he did it with songs like "Ring of Fire," and "Jackson." His driving rhythm and boiling baritone influenced outlaws like Merle Haggard, Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson. Stevie Nicks and Bono are among his disciples. Cash stood at about 6-foot-2 but he always seemed bigger, as if you should be measuring him in axe-handles instead of inches. His music seemed bigger, too. But in Southwest Virginia, where I grew up, you don't get to hear many of the big ones. The musicians who come through are either on their way up or on their way down. You get Def Leppard post-80s, post-Spandex. You get the Original Drifters and find out the s on the end is a lie. If I wanted to see Johnny Cash, I'd have to go somewhere else. With a time machine, I would have gone to Folsom Prison in 1968 where Cash recorded "Long Black Veil" in front of 2,000 sweaty inmates. With my Toyota, the best I could do was New York or Nashville or wherever Cash was singing with a voice weathered by hard living. I waited for the right show. I waited too long. In 1997, the news came: Johnny Cash was sick. Doctors said he had Shy-Drager Syndrome, a usually fatal illness that attacks the central nervous system. Victims have problems with breathing, muscle control, coordination and speech. They can't hold their coffee steady and the careful fingerings of a G-run linger desperately out of reach. Cash would never tour again. But Southwest Virginia's mountains, strong shoulders that block out late afternoon sun and the outside world, have their advantages, their magic. The Rolling Stones may not even spit at us from their tour bus, but these mountains are where country music began. And good people do not forget their beginnings. Flash back to August 1927, now known as The Big Bang in Country Music. That's when Ralph Peer, an A&R man for Victor Talking Machine Co., lugged his recording equipment from New York City to a warehouse in Bristol, which straddles the Virginia-Tennessee line. During a two-day session, Peer recorded family bands whose music never went beyond scratchy 78s. He also recorded Pop Stoneman, Yodeling Jimmie Rodgers and the legendary Carter Family. The Carters hailed from Hiltons, Va., just a few miles away, and the trio included Sara Carter, her husband, A.P., and her cousin, Mother Maybelle Carter. They sang in their farm clothes and over the years, Peer would record them again and again for the Victrola and for what was then a new medium: radio. The group was Depression-era successful. Songs like "Wildwood Flower," "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" and "Keep on the Sunnyside" soon became part of the music canon. In 1933, Sara and A.P. separated and it looked like the end for their marriage. They made music for another 10 years. Then that ended, too. Maybelle carried on with her daughters: Helen, Anita and June. And June Carter? You remember her. The first time Johnny Cash met her, she was 13 years old, an almost-woman with a strong, mountain voice and comic timing reminiscent of the Grand Ole Opry's Minnie Pearl. Johnny and June had a musical connection that lasted through Cash's drug-and-booze binges of the 1960s. He fell in love with her. Fell in love with God, too, and the bible. By the time Johnny cleaned up and married June in 1968, they were living far from Hiltons -- in California and Jamaica, mostly. But an old family homeplace is a magnet for Southerners. In 1999, I saw a pale yellow flyer, stuck to a community bulletin board. June Carter Cash had scheduled a special concert at the Carter Fold in Hiltons. If June would be there, I figured, so would Johnny. If he sang just one song, at least I could say that I'd seen him. June was no slouch, either. She had her own album that year, one she should have recorded years earlier. So what if I was a nice, Jewish girl and the Cashes were personal friends of the Rev. Billy Graham? I got in my Toyota and drove. The Carter Fold, run by A.P. and Sara's middle daughter, Janette, is an amphitheater and museum just off the A.P. Carter Highway, which is actually a two-lane road past mountains and country stores that have been touched by neither progress nor time. The museum, in the grocery store A.P. ran after Sara left him, has an attic's clutter. A lock of Sara's dark hair is coiled in a flowered dish. The outfits June and Johnny wore when they played at the White House for President Nixon are mounted on the wall. (Whatever you say about Nixon, you cannot knock his musical taste.) The covered amphitheater is next door, carved into the Poor Valley hillside. The structure's sides fold out during the summer and in during the winter, giving the theatre its name. The seats are rows of railroad ties, covered with a patchwork of aging carpet samples. The railroad ties were all taken the August afternoon that June played, so my husband and I leaned against the side of the fold, not far from a nest of yellow jackets. We didn't hear them buzzing when June took the stage to sing "Ring of Fire," the song she wrote for Johnny after she fell in love with him. "I felt like I had fallen into a pit of fire and was literally burning alive," she recalled. Her voice cracked like old china. It didn't matter. It mattered even less when she told us Big John was with her. He was tired, she said, but he'd be on stage for the second set, about five hours later. By then the yellow jackets would be asleep. Other bands played after June sang "Wings of Angels" and "Gatsby's Restaurant," solid tunes from her then-new album, Press On. Joe Carter did his animal impressions: a cow, a donkey and a mating pig. By then the crowd was thinning out, in search of supper. We snagged a railroad tie with a view of center stage. The carpeting didn't provide much of a cushion, but we weren't budging. We took turns buying tomato sandwiches and waiting for our chance, maybe our last chance, to see Johnny Cash. We weren't sure what to expect. Cash had always been a looming presence with a long coat and a John Wayne ruggedness, but when we'd seen him on a TV tribute show that summer he'd looked frail and smaller than usual. We waited for 8 p.m. We prepared for gray. It was 8:30 before June Carter Cash was back on stage, seated on a wooden stool. Another stool, beside her, sat empty in the spotlight. "Hmm," she said, all music and mischief. "Two stools. One for me and one for anyone I want." There was no question who she wanted. We wanted him, too. "Now don't mob him," warned Janette Carter, who was emcee. "Y'all don't make him nervous and don't mob him and don't ask for autographs. You just let him sing." "Yes ma'am." We knew who was in charge. A rustle of movement, then, and there he was. Sick as he'd been, I figured he'd make straight for that wooden stool, but he picked it up and moved it out of his way. He dressed the way he was supposed to dress, head to toe in black, like in the song. It was supposed to be for the poor and beaten down, for the prisoners, the lonely, the old.
Just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back Up front, he stood tall and straight, a guitar dangling where a preacher would wear a cross. He leaned into the microphone. "Hello," he said in that voice of the apocalypse. "I'm Johnny Cash." Applause, then, and it didn't stop until Cash picked up the microphone and brought it to his lips. "It's good to be alive." The Cashes opened up with "Jackson," their old trademark, then a Carter gospel tune, "The Far Side Banks of Jordan," which is where Cash said he thought he'd be by then. But he didn't go. He waited. "I came right back from that beautiful light," he said, reaching for his wife's hand, for love or strength or both. No one believed then that it was June who'd go first. When she died in May of this year, we knew it wouldn't be long before he'd follow. But that night, when he was singing about a dying man in Reno, the blood was still racing through his veins. He was, as he said, alive. He didn't take a guitar solo, his shaking hands relegated now to rhythm. But he still had power, the same power that helped him sell more than 50 million records. In the audience, my husband and I sat, the imprints of shag carpeting etched into our rears after too many hours on railroad ties. Or not enough hours. We sat there and we felt like we were alive, too, because we' were seeing something that wasn't sold at Wal-Mart or created for prime-time TV. This was real -- real like carved wood or the velveteen rabbit, in the end. Johnny Cash played casual, loose and honest. He sounded older, sure, but he didn't sound diminished. He didn't sound gray. In the years since that concert, Cash's diagnosis of Shy-Drager Syndrome was changed to autonomic neuropathy, a disease that's debilitating, but not fatal. He recorded new albums for the American Recording series, introducing him to a new generation of fans. Then, on Friday morning, the news came: Johnny Cash was gone. Dead. And that was real, too. He will never play again, unless it's with some angel band, but it's hard to picture him on the harp and I'm not sure angels are allowed to wear black. But if time-machine technology advances, country music fans can still go see him. They might go back to San Quentin or Folsom Prison. Or maybe they'll go to that Poor Valley hillside, where the words "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash," still hang in the air, as if time hasn't passed at all. 
|
|
|
