Issue date: 9/19/03 Section: Opinion

nfortunately, almost everything that can be said about Johnny Cash has already been said.

Even still, I asked an on-again-off-again punk rocker what the deal was with punks and Johnny Cash, because it seemed to me that the Man in Black would be anathema to a community for whom song craft takes a noticeable back seat. Was it the working class thing? "Yeah it's the working class thing; but man, it's more the authenticity."

By 1968, Johnny Cash had a major label contract and a television show, sacrificing, the way I see it, some of his "working class" credibility. But throughout the stardom, Cash never abandoned his working class roots-his authenticity. In that way, he stands as a role model to many of us.

Very few people I know on campus are more than 2nd generation college students. Most people I know come from the same sort of background I come from. My paternal grandparents survived the Depression and established a farm which sank in the 1980s courtesy of everyone's favorite president, Ronald Reagan; and my maternal grandparents were working class high school dropouts who were saved by the jobs created by World War II and by the GI Bill after the war. My parents were the first in their respective families to go to college and proceeded to make a comfortable middle class living.

The values they now hold and raised me according to come from a middle class adulthood steeped in a working class childhood. That's why they like Johnny Cash; he's one of them. He's proof that they can send their kids to private colleges without selling out. They can maintain their authenticity while enjoying some upward class mobility.

My parents relate to Johnny Cash and his class fluidity. I like Johnny Cash, however, for the same reason Steve Earle does: "He was a BADASS. He wore lots of black and he sang about murder and dope and adultery and ghosts." Even if he never committed murder or saw ghosts, one must only listen to the recording made at Folsom Prison or at San Quentin to know that he wasn't just blowing smoke.

He didn't put on airs at those prison shows or play rock star, country star or any other kind of star. I can hear in the way he sneers at prison guards in "San Quentin", or the way he delivers "The Long Black Veil" in a heartbreaking monotone, that Cash understood the human experience is a cycle of sin and redemption, of heartache and intimacy. And that this cycle defines life for us all, regardless of class, age or race.

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