Review: Johnny Cash - Sings Hank Williams (1960)
Tracks: 1) I Can’t Help It; 2) You Win Again; 3) Hey Good Lookin’; 4) I Could Never Be Ashamed Of You; 5) Next In Line; 6) Straight A’s In Love; 7) Folsom Prison Blues; 8) Give My Love To Rose; 9) I Walk The Line; 10) I Love You Because; 11) Come In Stranger; 12) Mean Eyed Cat.
REVIEW
Honestly, having never held the full-size non-virtual LP in my non-virtual hands, I cannot even tell with certainty that it is Johnny Cash on the front sleeve — could just as well be Hank Williams, or some nameless janitor at Sun Records whom they dressed up appropriately and set up in the classic «country boy goes out to conquer the world with his hot acoustic guitar against the sunset» pose. In any case, the cover is totally phoney-baloney, as is the title of the album, as is pretty much everything about it — one of the most, if not the single most embarrassing travesty to ever be committed by Cash’s original label in Cash’s name.
The idea of Johnny Cash as the spiritual heir to Hank Williams might have some degree of sense — to the extent that any great artist could ever be defined by his relation to another great artist — and it is hard to judge Sun Records for attempting to exploit its commercial potential, but there were just two tiny problems with it: (a) during his tenure with Sun, Cash had apparently only recorded four Hank Williams songs and (b) all of them had previously been released on various Sun LPs. How could those be circumvented? Simple as heck. First, fill the remaining space on the album with non-Hank Williams songs; then, when the customer flips the record over and looks real hard (if he looks real hard, that is), there’s the ...And Other Favorite Tunes added in the proverbial small type — the oldest trick in the book since the invention of typescript, if not writing itself. At the end of the liner notes promoting the Cash-as-next-Williams idea, Sun’s publicity agent Barbara Barnes «humbly» adds: "Included in the album also are some of ‘Johnny’s million sellers’ – the choice records that are most in demand by the collectors of Cash records". Umm, if they were ‘million sellers’ in the first place, what’s the deal with putting them on yet another LP instead of just re-releasing the originals?
Reading on, we find this: "The popular Gene Lowery Singers provide an added element on several of the selections in the album". Ah-ha! That’s the secret: these are not just the original recordings re-released, these are the original recordings with new overdubs — and boy, you really haven’t lived until you’ve heard ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ sung with a mighty chorus going "wah-ouh-waaaah, oo-waah oo-wah oo-waaaahh!" to fill in all that empty space between the individual lines in each verse. I can only hope that the Gene Lowery Singers were well paid for their meaningless butchering jobs, so that at least some of them, after yet another tormented night spent crying into the pillow, could redeem themselves by thinking "well, yes, I did go ahead and spoil a perfectly good song, but at least I managed to pay off my mortgage!" Seriously, that particular vocal style, I think, went out of fashion even before 1945, and while I could visualize The Gene Lowery Singers adding some color to, say, a Duane Eddy instrumental, having them creep behind Johnny Cash is a stylistic incongruence on the level of having Yoko Ono creep behind Chuck Berry (as did actually happen in 1972).
In the end, what we have here is: (a) four previously released songs by Hank Williams, none of them particularly good next to the originals and most of them spoiled further by the addition of backing vocals; (b) three previously released songs by The Bastard Son And Spiritual Heir of Hank Williams (‘Folsom Prison’, ‘I Walk The Line’, and ‘Next In Line’), all of them spoiled by the addition of backing vocals; (c) two previously released obscure B-sides (‘Come In Stranger’, ‘Give My Love To Rose’), with the second one also spoiled by the addition of backing vocals; (d) finally, three previously unreleased outtakes from the bottom of the barrel, which Sun would also release as singles (‘Straight A’s In Love’, ‘I Love You Because’, ‘Mean Eyed Cat’). Only the last five songs are worth discussing on their own, and even that discussion shall have to be cut short, since most of them add little to what we already understand, respect, and love about the man.
Easily the oddest one is ‘Straight A’s In Love’, which, in terms of lyrical content and general swagger, feels like a blueprint for AC/DC’s Bon Scott — "if they’d give me a mark for learnin’ in the dark I’d have straight A’s in love" would have nicely fit in on Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap or any of those other early albums. Given that Cash was usually described as a near-perfect student in high school, we may assume the song is not exactly autobiographical, and honestly, he should have probably given it away to somebody like Jerry Lee Lewis — it’s possible that that was exactly what he intended to do, except that those nasty Sun people found the demo, beefed it up and released it as a Cash single, forever ruining his good boy reputation in the process (not really). For the B-side, they chose Johnny’s cover of Leon Payne’s ‘I Love You Because’, a song that probably requires crooning to be effective, so there’s little hope of Johnny’s version rubbing out the memories of the classic Elvis cover from way back in 1954.
Not surprisingly, the best songs here are the ones personally authorized by Johnny, i.e. the original B-sides released while he was still under the Sun contract, and, fortunately, the best of the two is included here without the awful vocal overdubs. ‘Come In Stranger’, the flipside to ‘Guess Things Happen That Way’, is another classic example of how, with minimal effort on his side, Cash can convey that touching combination of quiet suffering and soulful warmth, and from a female perspective at that — we never get to learn where exactly the "stranger" in question is coming from, and we apparently do not even need to as long as "the one I love is not a stranger to me", a sentiment of forgiving endurance that might probably feel completely alien to modern day young audiences but is, in fact, directly derived from the "prodigal son" trope. The melody is completely generic — no big surprise here — but the hookline of "she said come in, stranger" is delivered in just the right tone, with that particular mix of tiredness, scorn, and empathy that few people could convey on Johnny’s level.
‘Give My Love To Rose’, the 1957 B-side to ‘Home Of The Blues’, is a little worse for wear, because (a) it has the awful vocal overdubs and (b) it’s a bit more of a generic Western ballad, portraying a tale that you could easily see in the cheapest Western soap rather than a classic John Ford movie. This did not prevent it from — actually, more like encouraged it to — become a popular favorite, going on to even bigger fame when he performed it at Folsom Prison a decade later and everything. Not my favorite sub-genre of the world-according-to-Johnny-Cash, but if it helped brighten up the day of a bunch of inmates at least once — hey, whatever works.
Finally, ‘Mean-Eyed Cat’ is the oldest of these songs, going all the way back to 1955 and telling a rather twisted story of two lovers’ relationship being (almost literally) crossed by a feline — unless the "mean-eyed cat" is really a metaphor, in which case the reconciliation finale ("and now we’re curled up on the sofa, me and her and that mean-eyed cat") could look like an early veiled celebration of ménage à trois, pretty daring for a down-to-Earth, God-fearin’, old-fashioned gentleman like Mr. Cash but then again he was only twenty-three at the time. On the other hand, the song has little interesting going on other than its narrative yarn, so it is not difficult to see why it stayed in the can for so long before getting exhumed by Sun. Again, thanks at least for not letting the Gene Lowery Singers walk all over it.
Returning to the album title, it would not be too difficult to make the case that, even if most of the songs on the album were not written by Hank Williams, quite a few of them could be inspired by Hank Williams, as they explore pretty much the same themes that Hank was obsessed with for most of his life. Change the verb Sings in the title to just about anything else ("Remembers", "Honors", "Pays His Dues To", "Commissions A Church In The Name Of", etc.), and the record might make better sense, though definitely not before all of the Gene Lowery Singers have been placed on the chain gang and hauled away to Folsom Prison for some healthy rock-breaking. On the other hand, overrating the connection between Hank and Johnny does no good to either of them — the differences in their musical personalities far outweigh the commonalities, and it would be just as hard for me to imagine Hank Williams, had he managed to hold on to life for another decade, to give a convincing performance of ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ as it is for me to enjoy Johnny covering ‘Hey Good Lookin’, without an ounce of Hank’s vocal charisma. As a story-teller, visionary, and «encyclopedist of Americana», Cash moves on to heights that Hank never even thought of scaling; as a vocal snake charmer, he relates to Hank the same way a $25 bottle of wine relates to a $250 one, and that’s putting it mildly.
In short, the existence of this record probably tells us a lot more about the desperate situation at Sun Records in 1960 than it does about the artistry of Johnny Cash — but then, it is always just as instructive to learn about the lows as it is to learn about the highs. Maybe even more instructive, not to mention more entertaining. Who really cares about the rise of the Roman Empire? I’ll take the decline and fall any day, thanks so much.
Only Solitaire reviews: Johnny Cash