Tracks: 1) Seasons Of My Heart; 2) Feel Better All Over; 3) I Couldn’t Keep From Crying; 4) Time Changes Everything; 5) My Shoes Keep Walking Back To You; 6) I’d Just Be Fool Enough; 7) Transfusion Blues; 8) Why Do You Punish Me; 9) I Will Miss You When You Go; 10) I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry; 11) Just One More; 12) Honky-Tonk Girl.
REVIEW
The very existence of this record is a good excuse to once again remind myself that I am including Johnny Cash in this somewhat straightjacketed variant of popular music history not because he is a «country artist» — as a rule, I hold little interest in country artists — but because his importance and his spirit transcends the formulaic understanding of country as a genre defined by certain strict musical, aesthetic, and image-related conventions. There is a very fine line drawn between Johnny Cash and the rock’n’roll world of Carl Perkins, or the Nashville pop world of the Everly Brothers, or the folk world of Greenwich Village, and every once in a while that line is erased altogether. Who is this man a better friend of — Hank Williams Jr. or John Fogerty? There is no single way to answer this question, and I’d rather not try. Additionally, I just like Johnny Cash — not everything Johnny Cash has ever done, no, but I like the idea of Johnny Cash, and ultimately that’s enough.
I do not like this album a lot, though — actually, I might like some of its sound, but I do not like the idea of this album. First and foremost, I do not like its title. Perhaps it was supposed to reflect Johnny Cash’s natural humility — implying that on here, he is bowing down to the old masters of the craft, submissively agreeing that everything he — and, apparently, all of his contemporaries as well — is doing here in 1960 is inferior to the amazing artistic revelations of country music in the previous decades. (Actually, most of the songs covered here date back from as late as the 1950s, so we’d have to surmise that some sort of revolutionary artistic degradation must have taken place over the past two or three years.) Frankly, I do not know all that much about the state-of-the-art of the general country scene in 1960, but surely things could not be as bad as the title implicitly suggests.
Second, it has already been established in previous reviews that Cash is rarely all that hot when interpreting songs that were not either written by him or, at least, directly for him by other artists. All of his Hank Williams covers add nothing to the pain or the joy of the originals (and this might just as well include the cover of ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ on this record) — so what’s to be said about his covers of artists decidedly inferior to Hank Williams? In most cases, these just come across as polite, respectful versions that tell us much more about Johnny’s admiration for his predecessors than his ability to add some new, fresher angle to their dusty message. And while that’s a nice human quality per se, it does not bode well for the longevity of the actual album we are talking about. It is basically a «tribute» album, and Johnny Cash was no David Bowie when doing tributes: he was way too much of a gentleman to make the primary point of his tribute album to make the listener go all «what the hell am I listening to?» or «this is so stupid it’s actually unforgettable!».
I do concede one point: the album, on the whole, sounds very nice. Although the Tennessee Two still follow Cash on every track, the record is dominated by the sounds of Floyd Cramer’s instantly recognizable «glass-house» piano, Don Helms’ lap steel, and Gordon Terry’s fiddle — all three sometimes going on at the same time. It makes perfect sense, for instance, to compare George Jones’ original recording of ‘Seasons Of My Heart’ — which also featured some pretty decent piano and steel guitar playing — with Johnny’s arrangement, just to see how far the smoothness, versatility, and mutual chemistry of piano, lap steel, and fiddle playing had advanced from 1955 to 1960. And, of course, I’m partial to any recording that is honored to feature Don Helms on it — anything that the man who created that gorgeous sound on Hank Williams’ ‘Hey, Good Lookin’ decides to do with his steel guitar is alright by me.
Some listeners have expressed dissatisfaction with Cash’s shift of sound on the album, bemoaning the loss of the classic minimalistic boom-chicka-boom vibe and seeing this larger, more flowery sound almost as the beginning of a «sellout». Technically, that may be so, but after five years of incessant chick-a-boom, a man’s gotta get a little weary, no? Even the Ramones surrendered to Phil Spector after five years of non-stop chainsaw buzz, and we never saw Johnny taking an oath of eternal loyalty to the Tennessee Three Musketeers. In the end, it all depends on who precisely is there to embellish your sound, and if it happens to be the finest piano and steel guitar players Nashville ever saw, what exactly is the problem?
No, if there is a real problem, it is that after a song or two, these pretty — sometimes downright beautiful — arrangements become a bit routine, and the endless flow of broken-hearted ballads turns into mush. When you can hardly remember the difference between all the ‘I’d Just Be Fool Enough’s and the ‘I Will Miss You When You Go’s, and not even the perfect timbre of Floyd Cramer’s ivory tinkles and Don Helms’ sexy sliding can help you with this, how is it at all possible to believe in the alleged superiority of these old songs? They’re all the same song, more or less. Maybe that’s precisely how we are supposed to understand the title — thinking of A Song as a collective term.
Things get a bit more exciting when the band picks up the tempo: Kenny Rogers’ ‘I Feel Better All Over’ (first recorded by Ferlin Husky, I think) gets a little proto-rock’n’roll vibe going, with Gordon Terry really revving up the old fiddle and even Johnny himself caught up in the excitement to the extent of actually raising his voice (!) on the final verse. But they do it very rarely indeed, and the only song in that vein that really matters on here is the first appearance on record of what would go on to become one of Cash’s signature numbers — here still called ‘Transfusion Blues’, respecting the unwritten laws of musical censorship, rather than under its original title of ‘Cocaine Blues’, by which it still dared to go in Roy Hogsed’s seminal recording from 1944. (To be fair, the truly original title is ‘Little Sadie’, first recorded by Clarence Ashley in 1929, but the «cocaine»-related lyrics were added later). Here we see some of the same gritty vibe that fueled ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ — no big surprise Johnny would later take both of these songs with him to Folsom Prison in 1968 — and the censored lyrics are not much of a bother, since the original meaning of the song remains exactly the same.
Interestingly, it is precisely on ‘Transfusion Blues’ where all those classy musicians take a back seat — Cramer and Terry are very quietly grinding out inobtrusive lead lines in the background — and just let Johnny tell the story, as articulately as possible so that we can easily memorize all the details in the life of Willy Lee, a fascinatingly unique person who shot his woman down while under the influence of a «transfusion», was captured and sentenced to 99 years of imprisonment. (At least this time around the hero has a real motive — not just "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die", but "I thought I was her daddy but she had five more").
I do have to say that Roy Hogsed’s original version is still superior in a way: the very point of this song is to tell a gruesome tale of substance abuse and murder to the most lightweight and humorous musical backing and vocal performance possible, and since «lightweight» is not a word that can easily find itself in the same sentence with «Johnny Cash», there is absolutely no way that his cover may be completely free of a bit of moralistic sheen to it, even if he makes no moralistic additions to the lyrics whatsoever. With Hogsed, you’re supposed to let your brain work out all the implications by itself; with Johnny, it’s always a «children-don’t-do-what-I-have-done» vibe the moment he opens his mouth. That’s just the way God planned it, and there is nothing we can do about it. When Johnny finishes the song on that (slightly censored) "come on you guys and listen unto me / lay off that liquor and let that transfusion be!" lyric, he’s no longer a story-teller, but a vice officer stepping down from a freshly delivered high school lecture on upholding morale.
As for ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’... all I can say is that, despite the miriads of covers, I have never heard a single one that could do anything truly outstanding with the song — simply because it was written to precisely fit the unique timbre of Hank Williams’ voice. There are decent versions, there are horrible versions, but it was designed to work on one certain frequency, and that frequency went off the air on January 1, 1953. In comparison, the quality of Johnny’s voice is such that it is largely impervious to either crying or laughing — all of its emotions are implied rather than openly exhibited — and that makes it hard to believe that he could actually be so lonesome he could cry. (Certainly not on record.) Do I really need this version? I don’t really need this version. I don’t need anybody covering Hank Williams, unless it’s something like, say, Fats Domino rockin’ ‘Jambalaya’ because he happens to know very well what «fillet gumbo» is, and can really wash it down with style on that piano.
As for George Jones, Marty Robbins, Tommy Duncan, Melvin Endsley, and all those other guys to whom Johnny is paying his dues on the album, I wish them all well, and if Now, There Was A Song! ever played a small part in preserving their legacy (well, it certainly got me to listen to George Jones’ ‘Seasons Of My Heart’ for the first time in my life!), then the album truly had a purpose and at least partially fulfilled it. But as far as Johnny’s own musical and spiritual journey is concerned, ‘Transfusion Blues’ feels like the only important piece of that puzzle that ended up landing on this LP.
Only Solitaire reviews: Johnny Cash
"I just like Johnny Cash — not everything Johnny Cash has ever done, no, but I like the idea of Johnny Cash, and ultimately that’s enough."
Yeah, that's what I and a lot of people who came to find Johnny through the back door of rock and backroads of Americana would say Amen to. I admire these concept albums as collective cycles as opposed to individual titles. The song truly as a collective idea.
"with Johnny, it’s always a «children-don’t-do-what-I-have-done» vibe the moment he opens his mouth. That’s just the way God planned it, and there is nothing we can do about it."
As strange as it sounds, I always got this vibe from Ozzy. The difference is that whereas Johnny is the righteous rebel/Man in Black, Oz is the Snowblind Madman/prophetic fool. Both are drawn to crawl into the abyss, survive with their skin intact, and speak cautionary tales of its horrors.