Law and Gospel According to Johnny Cash

I hate country music. I hate its general lack of musical and lyrical depth and its snivling whine over the same worn out issues. There is one exception to this paradigm: Johnny Cash. To me there is something mystic, something possessing, something downright hymalaan about the music of Johnny Cash (though he is still country enough to include the obligatory song about a man who’s dog died and wife left him). I recognize that the music of Cash is a benign experience for many (mostly those with a hole in their soul such as my wife, Emily), but when you are among those caught by it you know that you owe something to it and it demands payment. Cash demands that you be stripped of your excuses and forces you to confront what’s inside yourself – not because he preaches from a platform of elitist piety – but because he is a man stripped of his own excuses and unfolding before you is a man confronting himself. When you listen to his music, you are evesdropping on his own internal conflict and sometimes his own wrestling with God and when the dust settles you find that you were somehow dragged into it. When you witness a confession and the laying bare of so much humanity it incites you to join in the guilt and shame.

But guilt and shame are not unique to Cash. Lady MacBeth incarnates herself in a vast array of musicians, many to a cartoonish sort of melodrama. Shame is nothing special. We’ve all got it. But Cash confonts his shame without any defiance. He goes down where it takes him and makes sure that you’re going with him.

Still, he doesn’t wallow in shame. In fact his shame does not incite him to the kind of doom or despair found in the music of so many other artists (think of Modest Mouse and their sure confidence of our hopelessness in their album, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank). What sets Cash’s music apart from the rest is its ability traverse the chasm between humanity’s plight and humanity’s redemption.  The redemption he sings about is real because the guilt is real. Cash doesn’t hold out redemption without first telling you the curse you’re under. No one in pop music (or contemporary Christian music for that matter) makes you know the damning work of God’s law the way Johnny Cash does. From lyrics like:

Go tell that long tongue liar/ Go and tell that midnight rider/ Tell the rambler, The gambler, The back-biter/ Tell ‘em that God’s gonna cut ‘em down.

to his lyrics about the judgment of the second-coming of Christ:

There’s a man going around taking names/ and he decides who to free and who to blame./ Everybody won’t be treated all the same./ There will be a golden ladder reaching down when the man comes around.

Any bright-eyed optimism that your guilt before God and your own conscience might not be so bad or can be remedied with some work of your own is shattered. It’s worse than any of us think. He’s damned, you’re damned, we’re all damned, and there’s not a damn thing any of us can do about it.

Any redemption from this state of things is going to have to be real redemption. And this is precisely what we find in his music.When so much of contemporary Christian music sounds like a Jesus on Ice performance in Disneyland, any redemption that they sing about seems cheap, trite and artificial.

Those who are disgusted (both Christian and non-Christian) by the debacle that is today’s Christian music sense an authenticity and humility in Cash’s faith that is conspicuously absent in many Christian artists performers. Listening to Cash’s music leaves you with no doubt that this man lives in the real world with all of its ugliness and pain.

To make the point further, when Johnny Cash’s popularity on the Columbia music label hit its lowest point in the late 1980’s Cash decided to drop Columbia rather than succumb to the pressure from producers to artificially reinvent himself. During a time in which many artists from previous decades were busy reinventing themselves (often to a hilarious spectacle [think Pat Boone singing heavy metal]), Cash moved to American recordings – a much smaller label - and his music experienced something of a renaissance. Teenage listeners who had little idea who Cash was before began to discover the music of a man old enough to be their grandfather. Many in Cash’s new audience (such as myself) had little to no interest in country music, but they recognized something relatable, authentic and unique in his music that was missing in an industry where artists often take on an image or style that is assigned to them by their producers or other media moguls.

What they recognized is no doubt what I’ve been talking about: Cash’s real understanding of our plight mingled with his hope in redemption. Whether its the plight that we all share as humans under the judgment and terror of God’s law and our conscience or whether the specific plight of the convicted felon in his prison cell, Johnny Cash knows the terror of the law and the triumph of grace.

“Folsom Prison Blues,” was written by a man who had never spent a night in jail, and yet it captures all the angst felt by a prisoner sitting on his bed mulling over in his mind what his life has become. He hears a train whistle blow in the distance and feels both the shame of what he’s done and the punishment of loneliness when he thinks about the freedom of the passengers on the train.

 I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die./ When I hear that whistle blowin’/ I hang my head and cry.

Cash hardly got a taste of the jailbird’s life. In his lifetime, he spent only about six nights in a jail cell, but countless prisoners wrote to tell him how much his song connected with their experience, many of them reporting that they came to faith through his music, which once again evidences Cash’s profound understanding of both law and gospel.

Sometimes the song selection on an album seems completely contradictory unless it is examined from the perspective of law and gospel. Consider the choice to include a song like “Down There by the Train” (which sings about the redemption of everyone from Judas Iscariot to John Wilkes Booth) on the same album with ”Delia’s Gone” containing lyrics such as:

First time I shot her I shot her in the side/Hard to watch her suffer/But with the second shot she died/ Delia’s gone, one more round Delia’s gone.

So if you woman’s devilish/You can let her run/Or you can bring her down and do her Like Delia got done/ Delia’s gone, one more round Delia’s gone

The terror of living in this fallen world under the judgment of God through the law and the human conscience is felt in nearly every aspect of life. As creatures in a fallen world, our existence is drowned in futility. This is true not only from a fallen perspective but even from a redeemed perspective. For Cash, redemption in this life does not remove the futility. Instead, it gives us grace to cope with it. He recognizes the truth so profoundly expressed in Ecclesiastes that there is no escape from the meaningless events of this life until the curse of the fall is completely overcome.

Cash’s theology doesn’t proclaim a naive and artificial Christian experience found in many hymns such as: “since Jesus came into my heart, floods of joy o’re my soul like the sea billows roll…” or “…at the cross where I first saw the light…and now I am happy all the day.” For Cash:

The beast in me Has had to learn to live with pain/And how to shelter from the rain/And in the twinkling of an eye might have to be restrained/God help the beast in me.

In Cash’s voice there was always pain mingled with hope. With dramatic ease he could be full of rage, followed by sorrow, then penitence and finally thankfulness because he knew that all of these experiences are a real part of life – even a life lived under grace.

In 2000, the anthology Love, God, Murder was released dividing his music into these three categories. If we take away most of the love songs we could easily categorize his music according to Law and Gospel. The Law is never ignored but it is not the final word. Though Cash was not a Lutheran he knew the proper distinction between Law and Gospel in Lutheran theology better than many Lutherans.

I never thought I needed help before/I thought that I could get by – by myself./Now I know I just can’t take it any more./With a humble heart, on bended knee,/I’m beggin’ You, please for help.

He was a life-long Baptist, but the hopes of law-keeping found in much of Baptist theology does not fit with Cash’s music. Incidentally, Cash didn’t fit with Baptist theology in many ways, evidenced in his practice of taking Communion every day for the last few years of his life, believing that it imparted grace and even life-preserving power.

Story-telling on a Train

Of course Cash’s theology wouldn’t go very far in the music industry apart from his uncanny skill for telling a story with music. It seems that nearly every other song is about traveling on a steam-engine, often weaving his voice, the rhythm, and the lyrics to capture the the mystique and the nostalgia of traveling on a train (for an impressive list of his songs about trains, click here). Though he is often categorized as a country musician, no single music artist of the twentieth century transcended musical genres the way the Man in Black did (not even Elvis). As Mary Elizabeth Ladd states in her article “Deconstructing Cash”:

Maybe this has something to do with the fact that Cash, of all of them, is the most convincing preacher, the best, most dramatic storyteller. This is undeniably the key to Johnny Cash’s biggest hit, “A Boy Name Sue.” In The Guardian, Joe Dennis says this song “demonstrates Cash’s rapport with his audience, his great timing and storytelling skill.”

When a story is told with conviction and with drama it is universally recognizable and entertaining to all. Cash’s music is a generous slice of Americana. It’s history. It’s legend. It’s folklore. It’s family. It’s campfire. It’s the kind of music you want to pass on to your children. It’s latent with the power to make even the most metrosexual cityslicker wish they were running barefoot at the fishin’ hole casting a cane-pole line on a warm summer day, and it creates a hunger in the pencil-pushing cubicle farm manager to trainhop his way around the savage, wide-open West sleeping under stars.

It’s impossible to capture the life and work of a towering man whose legend is as large as that of Paul Bunyan and story as rich as that of John the Baptist. I don’t imagine for a moment that I have done so. But as inadequate as our tributes will certainly be (though some are much more inadequate than others), we can offer them with confidence that Johnny would appreciate them since he had no sense of entitlement to human appreciation. He knew who he was apart from grace.

I couldn’t manage the problems I laid on myself/And it just made it worse when I laid them on somebody else/So I finally surrendered it all brought down in despair/I cried out for help and I felt a warm comforter there.

If you have made it this far in the post, reward yourself by listening to my personal selection of several of Johnny’s songs.

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