Review: Johnny Cash - With His Hot And Blue Guitar! (1957)
Tracks: 1) Rock Island Line; 2) I Heard That Lonesome Whistle; 3) Country Boy; 4) If The Good Lord’s Willing; 5) Cry, Cry, Cry; 6) Remember Me; 7) So Doggone Lonesome; 8) I Was There When It Happened; 9) I Walk The Line; 10) The Wreck Of The Old 97; 11) Folsom Prison Blues; 12) Doin’ My Time; 13*) Hey, Porter; 14*) Get Rhythm.
REVIEW
I often wonder about the implications and consequences of the fact that the initial phase of the musical career of Johnny Cash, a folk-and-country man through and through, took place under the roof of Sun Records, the birthplace of the classic rockabilly sound. Contrary to what one might suspect, in fact, contrary to what one might have anticipated in 1957 just by looking at the album sleeve, Cash did not actually begin his career as a rockabilly artist — this album is not rockabilly, nor is anything else Cash recorded for Sun. In fact, he came to Sam Phillips as an aspiring gospel artist, and was politely (or, perhaps, impolitely) asked to come back with more commercial (and less boring) material. But even when he did, this material was nowhere near close to a ‘That’s Alright Mama’ or a ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On’. In seeking out a middle ground behind mature gospel and teenage rock’n’roll, Johnny settled on middle-o’-the-road country — a fairly natural choice given the country roots of Sun’s other major star, Carl Perkins. Whatever be, Johnny Cash was not going to sing for rebellious teenagers: from the very beginning, he was pining for an adult audience, albeit not a particularly sophisticated one — this music is as barebones-simple as it gets, be it country, rockabilly, or something else.
What made this early brand of Johnny Cash music suitable for Sun Records was not so much the singing and songwriting as Johnny’s main playing companion, guitarist Luther Perkins (no relation to Carl). As in many legendary cases, Luther owes his sound to an accident — a defective Fender Esquire guitar with broken volume and tone control, which he had to play while muting the bass strings. The resulting scratchy «boom-chicka-boom» sound was low, thick, and grumbly, and it made most of the songs sound like an old, overweight, but still muscular stallion running cross country — an early «punk» take on the country idiom if there ever was one. It’s a really cool, earthy, dirty, rusty lo-fi sound that has never been properly recaptured by anyone since, not even Cash himself, and, honestly, it is the main thing that I remember from the record, given how the actual songs are relatively generic and rudimentary.
‘Cry, Cry, Cry’, Johnny’s debut single for Sun, is included here, and you could easily picture it as a Hank Williams song, except Hank would certainly have a larger, more polished band, replete with steel guitars and fiddles. The Tennessee Two, however (with Marshall Grant on bass), trim the instrumentation down to the essentials of a rockabilly band, and all it takes to not make that treacherous last step is the determination to preserve some, well, let’s old-fashionably call it «dignity»: neither the guitar player nor, most importantly, the singer ever get out of line while delivering the goods. Technically, this is danceable music; in reality, you are supposed to sit back and listen to the lyrics, as Johnny essentially takes on the role of the preacher man. Elvis was inviting you to meet him and a-hurry behind the barn, because he’d heard the news there was some good rockin’ tonight; Johnny, on the other hand, is your guardian angel, warning you that "everybody knows where you go when the sun goes down" and that "soon your sugar daddies will all be gone". And given that deep, paternal bass tone in which the warning was delivered (even though he was only 23 at the time!), you might want to heed it — not to mention admire the tenacity with which this man still succeeded in putting out a streak of moralistic music on the Sun label, then-currently one of the Devil’s main tools for corrupting innocent American youth.
The second single was ‘So Doggone Lonesome’, not a particularly interesting Ernest Tubb rip-off, and its B-side was ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, a quite particularly interesting Gordon Jenkins rip-off — I mean, nobody ever kidded anybody that Johnny mostly lifted his melodies from traditional patterns or other artists, being a word man through and through, and if we have a problem with that, we might just as well pack up and leave right away. It is instructive, though, to hear Gordon Jenkins’ and Beverly Maher’s original version of ‘Crescent City Blues’ (beginning with the same "I hear the train a-comin’, it’s rollin’ ’round the bend" line), just to watch it die, I mean, just to see how Johnny transformed a smoky film-noirish blues tune into one of the most famous prison anthems ever, and it is not just the words: it is also how the boom-chicka-boom sound matches the train imagery, and it is also how each line delivered by Cash is like a straight-up gunshot, and how he delivers each punchline at the lowest range his voice can muster — symbolically denoting the protagonist’s downfall into hellflames. I mean, all the fame has understandably gone to the "I shot a man in Reno" line, but the true kick in the guts is actually delivered by "I hang my head and cry", doesn’t it?
That single went to #4 on the country charts, and it obviously paved the way for ‘I Walk The Line’, Johnny’s first #1 on the country charts and first Top 20 entry into the general charts. This was his most «experimental» number to date, due to the slightly unusual chord sequence and the constant changing of key between the verses (which explains the humming before each verse as Johnny is slowly getting in tune), but, of course, the lyrics, with their overriding theme of marital fidelity, are anything but rock’n’roll — and the way they are delivered, you get a feeling that here indeed is a man who finds it very very easy to be true. (Never mind that he would be sued for divorce by his wife a decade later on the grounds of adultery — it’s the original feeling that counts, right? right? okay then). I am still a bit confused as to the huge popularity of the song, though, since it does not particularly stand out from the general quality of Johnny’s Sun-era material — maybe there is something magical about that humming that does not work on everybody’s brains. I personally prefer the B-side, ‘Get Rhythm’ (not present on the original LP, but included as a bonus on subsequent re-releases) — it is the closest Cash got to proper rock’n’roll back in the day, since the song’s melody essentially rips off Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybellene’: BUT it (a) is a ‘Maybellene’ delivered in classic Tennessee Three-style and (b) even here, Johnny manages to be smart and sly and come up with lyrics that turn a former teenage car-lovin’ anthem into an indirect condemnation of racism and exploitation (very indirect, but very damning when you poke it with a magnifying glass).
Finally, coming to the album itself and the songs specifically recorded for it (or, at least, not found on contemporary singles), we should notice that most of them are covers — emphasizing Johnny’s infatuation with his folk, country, and gospel roots. The selection is modestly diverse, as we get some Leadbelly (‘Rock Island Line’), some Hank Williams (‘I Heard That Lonesome Whistle’), and a batch of lesser country idols (Stuart Hamblen, Jimmie Davis, etc.), all of them put through the chicka-boom treadmill, though none of these songs truly slay the way ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ does. Honestly, both then and later Johnny Cash was never a great interpreter of other people’s material, as much as he loved to interpret other people’s material — his primary strength is the combination of his deep voice with his own words. But if you really, really love this kind of sound, you will probably enjoy each single song, because, well, they sort of all sound the same, don’t they? Sometimes a little slower, sometimes a little faster, but that’s about it.
The strangest thing about the album, actually, is its title: Johnny CashWith His Hot And Blue Guitar! (do not forget the exclamation mark!) seems like a title more fit for somebody like, say, Gene Vincent — there is nothing particularly blue or particularly hot about Johnny’s guitar, and even if it is actually Luther’s guitar we are talking about, well, I’d rather call it a black than a blue type of sound, if you get my meaning. Apparently, Sam Phillips still wanted to market Cash as one of his rockabilly artists — to which he was somewhat entitled, given how this is all country music played from a rockabilly-ish perspective. Fortunately, this slightly misguided move did not spoil the artist’s commercial recognition — which would have been easy if he had found himself ignored by the country market and booed by the genuine rockabilly fans. Yet in the end, Cash won both of them over with his deep charisma, becoming the single most famous and accepted link between the country music scene and the rock music scene (or, at least, the roots-rock music scene) — and there is no better way to understand why that was than to digest these early Sun recordings. They might not be all that great, per se, but in 1955-57, there was nothing else around that sounded quite like that, and this is quite a compliment for a guy who never thought of himself as any sort of «innovator» in the first place.
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