Review: Johnny Cash - The Fabulous Johnny Cash (1958)

Tracks: 1) Run Softly, Blue River; 2) Frankie’s Man, Johnny; 3) That’s All Over; 4) The Troubadour; 5) One More Ride; 6) That’s Enough; 7) I Still Miss Someone; 8) Don’t Take Your Guns To Town; 9) I’d Rather Die Young; 10) Pickin’ Time; 11) Shepherd Of My Heart; 12) Supper-Time; 13*) Oh, What A Dream; 14*) Mama’s Baby; 15*) Fool’s Hall Of Fame; 16*) I’ll Remember You; 17*) Cold Shoulder; 18*) Walkin’ The Blues.

REVIEW

Of all the famous artists who recorded for Sun in the 1950s, Cash was the odd one out. While he clearly did not have anything against the rockabilly style as such, being always open to a bit of fast, danceable, and moderately aggressive playing, he never intended to be marketed along the same lines as Elvis or Carl Perkins — yet his struggle to record more and more country and gospel tunes was always met with negativity on the part of Sam Phillips, and by 1958, with Sam mostly preoccupied about the career of Jerry Lee Lewis, his biggest star at the time, Cash was clearly ready for bigger time.

Not «big time» as such — for Johnny, stardom and popularity in general were only important in that they allowed him to spread the message to larger groups of people. But there is hardly any doubt that he did want to spread the message, and that the move from the smaller Sun label, where it was hard for him to do his thing, to the much larger Columbia Records where he was relatively free to pursue his own muse, was an inspiring move at the time: he would stick with Columbia for almost thirty years after that, releasing the absolute majority of his classic songs and albums for the label. He probably did not have a say in picking the album title — few artists would have the gall to use the word fabulous as a self-reference, and none of them could be named Johnny Cash — but the music on the record is clearly all Johnny, doing exactly the kind of schtick he’d wanted to do all along.

Unlike Hot And Blue Guitar!, which had enough rocking power to it to be labeled as a rockabilly album with shades of country and folk, The Fabulous Johnny Cash has precisely one song that could bear even a faint resemblance to the rockabilly style (‘One More Ride’), and can fairly safely be classified as country — minimalist country, lo-fi country, even «proto-country-punk» if you so desire, but country it is, albeit with shades of general folk and gospel as well. Where it does not depart from Hot And Blue Guitar!, however, is in the overall approach to its sonic effect: the Tennessee Three are still chugging out the same boom-chicka-boom attack, making all songs sound very similar to each other and extremely dissimilar from everybody else’s. In all honesty, precious little has changed, except that this time around, it is clear that you are invited to sit while listening to the songs — otherwise, you might miss something important.

The most important thing is, of course, that it is on this album that Johnny Cash fully discloses himself as the conscience of rural and small-town America. The very first couple of songs that open it already deliver a lesson in morality. ‘Run Softly, Blue River’, on which Cash is backed by the angelic-sounding Jordanaires, is a love song, but not just any love song — like ‘I Walk The Line’ before it, it is a love song about fidelity and family, the main motive of it all being "I pray that as peaceful as you is our life", in which love is seen as an element that brings peace and stability, not excitement and chaotic passion. The next track is even more telling: ‘Frankie’s Man, Johnny’ is Cash’s own inversion of the old murder ballad ‘Frankie And Johnny’, with lyrics which, instead of a tale of faithlessness, jealousy, and revenge, tell a tale of temptation, redemption, and happiness — because, according to Johnny, that’s precisely the way it should be.

Further along the line, we have ‘Don’t Take Your Guns To Town’, a song that does for country-western music more or less the same that those Gregory Peck-starring movies like The Big Country did to the Western genre — the «anti-outlaw» country, debunking the myth of the gunslinging hero for all it’s worth. And then, even when we get to the songs that Cash did not write himself, it is still clear that he largely favors those with a healthy dose of preachiness in them: ‘I’d Rather Die Young’ is a variation on one’s wedding vows, ‘Shepherd Of My Heart’ is a recognition of one’s significant other’s moral guidance (rather than, say, physical hotness), and Dorothy Coates’ ‘That’s Enough’ is a gospel tune, plain and simple — I mean, family is important and all, but let’s not forget who is really in charge.

The magic of Johnny Cash is that he was one of the very, very few people who could make this stuff work — at least, to a certain degree. One could, of course, always point out that the man himself was far from an ideal example of a devoted and loyal family man, with a long story of drug abuse and outside affairs and what-not, yet this is completely irrelevant because he clearly believes in what he preaches — at least, as long as he is preaching it, and "that’s enough". Much more important is the way he preaches — the one-of-a-kind combo of his powerful, booming, earthy vocals and the minimalistic, unadorned, scratchy, crunchy musical backing, so crude and simple compared to the capabilities of slick and sturdy Nashville country professionals. Discussing the actual notes that are played is meaningless — you might as well dissect and overanalyze the compositional genius of the Ramones; what is somehow miraculous is that the songs, no matter how simple they are or how similar they are to each other, tend to stick with you after they are over. I myself thought that I was deadly bored with the record after I first heard. After I heard it for the third time, I was surprised to understand that I actually remembered most of the tunes as individual entities with individual musical and emotional personalities. «Fabulous» indeed.

At the same time, while the album is not formally a conceptual piece, it can easily be construed as one — an album about finding inner and outer peace with oneself, about overcoming and outgrowing youth’s passion and settling into maturity, saying a nostalgic goodbye to one’s past (‘One More Ride’) and quietly preparing to meet your maker (‘Supper Time’), all of these topics being just as alien to the youthful rockabilly genre from which Cash had just freed himself as they are integral to the roots music of America. Yet it is precisely by setting all of them to the essential components of that same rockabilly music that Johnny is able to breathe new life into the old values — and thus setting a sort of proto-example for people like Bob Dylan, who would do the opposite thing, setting modern words to old-fashioned music rather than old-fashioned words to modern music. This is what makes him such a non-standard artist in the country genre, and, ultimately, why I bother writing about him at all when straightforward country has always been low on my list of priorities.

Picking out highlights from this collection — or even from the expanded CD edition, which adds on six more outtakes from the July-August ’58 sessions for Columbia — is pretty useless: ‘Don’t Take Your Guns To Town’ and its B-side, ‘I Still Miss Someone’, may be the best known tunes but this does not really mean that they stand head and shoulders above the other selections. Just about every song is modestly catchy, dropping a tiny lyrical hook to keep you intrigued, or maybe even enchanted. Songs that feature the Jordanaires on backing vocals are just as soft and sentimental as the ones that don’t — because, I think, Johnny’s vocals and Luther Perkins’ softly chuggin’ electric guitar resound with even more tenderness than the backing band’s soft lullaby vocalizing. Don Helms, the famous steel guitarist from Hank Williams’ Drifting Cowboys, contributes one or two extra parts on songs like ‘Supper Time’, but it does not really even matter — by the time they come along, the sound of the Tennessee Three is so deeply rooted in your brain you might not even consciously realize there is an extra instrument out there. Honestly, I do not know how to write about these tunes individually — I only feel it in my guts that they are all loaded with different «micro-emotions», but trying to explain these differences with words is a gargantuan and most definitely ungrateful task.

Some of the critical opinions I have encountered on the album actually condemn it for being too soft and unremarkable — a tough opinion to hold if you desire to «get» Johnny Cash in toto rather than just catch the frenetic vibe of his launching ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ into a crowd of freedom-hungry inmates. But it is highly likely that in order to catch this vibe from the 26-year old prophet of peaceful family life, you yourself should be at least around 40, with a long story of career fuck-ups and failed relationships behind your back. Also, you must not prepare yourself for any subtly hidden layers of artistic or philosophical complexity, because there are none: Johnny Cash does know that life is not just black and white, yet he is never going to burden you with way too complicated answers. Let others entangle you in their intricately woven nets of conundrums and paradoxes; you know there will come a time when all you want is for somebody to give it to you straight, and that’s precisely when you might be ready to accept Mr. Cash as the ‘Shepherd Of Your Heart’.

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