Review: Johnny Cash - Hymns By Johnny Cash (1959)
Tracks: 1) It Was Jesus; 2) I Saw A Man; 3) Are All The Children In; 4) The Old Account; 5) Lead Me Gently Home; 6) Swing Low, Sweet Chariot; 7) Snow In His Hair; 8) Lead Me, Father; 9) I Called Him; 10) These Things Shall Pass; 11) He’ll Be A Friend; 12) God Will.
REVIEW
I have a strong suspicion that the majority of people who idolize Johnny Cash as the quintessential spirit of Genuinely Virtuous Americana usually do so on the strength of a handful of Johnny’s radio hits (‘I Walk The Line’, ‘Ring Of Fire’, that sort of thing) plus, of course, At Folsom Prison, the only Johnny Cash LP most people have ever listened to, for reasons only tangentially related to the music itself. The ironic fact is that at least in the early days of his career, the one thing Johnny Cash wanted to be more than anything else is the «Godfather of Christian country»; faith was such an integral component of his being that it took the collected effort of all his record labels and managers to keep steering him in the direction of a more secular path. Had Sam Phillips not expressly prohibited him to record straightforward gospel during his years at Sun, that Folsom prison setlist might have looked just a tad different — and, most likely, significantly harder to endorse and worship by progressively-oriented art lovers all over the country.
So how many people have actually heard this record — Johnny’s first all-around gospel album, recorded for Columbia after his deal with the label expressly set the condition that he would be allowed to record gospel songs from time to time? Not too many, I guess, judging by such things as the number of ratings and reviews at RYM, for instance. Yet if you actually love the early, classic style of the Tennessee Three, there is hardly a serious musical reason why one should bypass it in favor of The Fabulous Johnny Cash or anything else he did for Columbia at the time. The arrangements are largely the same, the melodic structures of both covers and originals are not particularly different from Johnny’s secular songs, and the level of passion and commitment, if anything, is even higher than on the secular stuff — after all, when Johnny entered the studio in January 1959, this was finally like a dream come true: two complete recording sessions where he could finally settle ‘The Old Account’ and deliver the Lord’s message to his flock directly and concisely, rather than through moralistic ballads of teenage queens and subverted reinventions of the story of Frankie and Johnny.
The typical complaint about Hymns goes something like «I’m not necessarily against Christian music as such, but this record is just so dang monotonous!» News flash — all Johnny Cash records, and particularly the early ones with the minimalistic format of the Tennessee Three, are monotonous; creative variations of melody and arrangements were usually the last thing on Johnny’s mind when he entered the studio. The real reason, of course, is not that the music is monotonous, but that the lyrical aspect of this particular album is understandably restricted. On his casual secular days, Cash keeps you interested with his little lyrical stories and cleverly engineered vocal hooks, but when you know in advance this next song is going to be about Jesus Christ our Lord, too, yes, that is precisely the moment when you realize — «hey, that boom-chica-boom sound is actually getting on my nerves, you know?»
This psychological illusion is most likely responsible for Hymns getting one-star ratings in such editions as The Rolling Stone Album Guide and The Encyclopedia Of Popular Music — which, I think, reeks of hypocrisy, because the only thing that really makes these songs musically less impressive than their predecessors is the simple fact that the predecessors were there first, and that this stuff sounds like a bunch of re-writes in comparison. Yet with Cash, you can hardly operate within this logic — the man has always run on story-telling ideas and a sense of devotion, rather than the urge to push country and roots music into unexplored directions, and from that point of view, Hymns By Johnny Cash was every bit as innovative for the artist as any of his previous records.
I mean, let’s face it, ‘It Was Jesus’ is catchy as hell. That simple "who was it, everybody? who was it, everybody? it was Jesus Christ our Lord" chorus will almost certainly make you feel as embarrassed as a first-grader standing before a demanding teacher in Sunday school, but if you have already accepted Johnny Cash as your teacher in other subjects — and if you have not, you have no reason to listen to the man in the first place — hey, one extra lesson about the man from Galilee won’t hurt. "Pay close attention, little children, it’s somebody you ought to know". Not every artist in the world gets the right to address his (mostly grown-up) audience as "little children" at the age of 27, but if there was one such artist in 1959, well, you know who it was. It was Johnny Cash, our Lord. He healed the sick and he raised ’em from the dead... oh, wait a minute.
Anyway, it’s actually interesting that, in addition to covering old gospel classics, Cash himself wrote not less than four songs for the album. ‘It Was Jesus’ was the first of these; two more are upbeat country-rockers (‘He’ll Be A Friend’ and ‘I Call Him’) and one is a slow prayer — ‘Lead Me Father’, melodically a rewrite of ‘Long Black Veil’ and lyrically quite clichéd, but then wouldn’t putting an original lyrical twist inside a prayer be a sign of excessive pride? Hymns is an album supposed to celebrate humility in the face of the Lord, and that’s precisely what it does.
Of the covers, a few seem to evoke the Christmas spirit rather than anything else, despite the album being released in sunny May: Craig Starrett’s ‘Are All The Children In’, for instance, is a slow, piano-driven waltz with a heavenly gospel choir, on top of which Johnny recites the lyrics rather than sings them — and the same gentle backing vocals (I think it’s not just the Jordanaires, but the credits list nobody else) return on ‘I Saw A Man’, ‘Lead Me Gently Home’ and other tracks, weaving a gentle midnight carol atmosphere rather than an air of agitated exuberance. If there is any exuberance to be shown, in fact, it is subtly revealed in Johnny trying to reach and sustain the topmost part of his range while belting out ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ — if you actually doubted that the man could properly «sing» at all, this recording will certainly prove you wrong, because, well, if the Lord tells you to sing, you sing, goddammit. If the Lord could feed five thousand people with five loaves and two little fishes, surely he could provide his humble servant with a singing voice as well.
To sum up, if you are one of those ‘Ring Of Fire’ + Folsom Prison types, you shouldn’t even be browsing this review, let alone listening to this album. But if you «get» the collective charisma of the Tennessee Three in their classic years, there is no reason to specifically stay away from it just because of the gospel lyrics, the angelic choirs, and the (strictly relative) lack of original songwriting. This is something that Johnny really wanted to do, did with as much fervor as anything else he did, and is actually not any more «moralistic» than anything else he did. If you are moved by ‘I Walk The Line’, you might as well be moved by ‘Lead Me Father’ — both songs want equally strongly to help make you a better man, and both do so by celebrating humility and self-sacrifice above everything else. Personally, I think I am more of an admirer of the «Johnny Cash Style» rather than individual Johnny Cash songs which all ultimately tend to merge into one anyway, highlights and lowlights alike — so hey, if we need to throw a bunch of «hymns» into the equation, then I guess hymns it is.