By Steve Gillespie / managing editor
The live album by Johnny Cash, “At Folsom Prison,” was released in 1968. That’s where the blockbuster movie “Walk The Line” ends and it’s about where my knowledge of Johnny Cash begins.
I remember my dad bringing home the album Johnny Cash “At San Quentin” in 1969 and we listened to it over and over on our record player. I kept playing it long after he was tired of it.
At 6 years old “A Boy Named Sue” was probably the first song I ever knew all the words to from beginning to end and I’d sing it on demand for grown ups who thought it was charming for such a little fellow to be singing about cutting off a piece of another person’s ear in a bar fight and wallowing in the “mud and the blood and the beer.”
Yeah, 1969 was the year of Johnny Cash. His television variety show started that year. “A Boy Named Sue,” written by Shel Silverstein, and “Wanted Man” written by Bob Dylan, both charted No. 1 on the Country and Western charts from the San Quentin album. He received Album of the Year honors from the Country Music Association and Cash was named CMA Entertainer of the Year. “A Boy Named Sue” was chosen CMA’s Single of the Year as well.
Cash wouldn’t have another No. 1 album on the Billboard charts until after his death in September 2003, with “American V: A Hundred Highways,” released last year.
Johnny Cash grew up in Dyess, Ark., a farm community established in the 1930s as a product of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program. Dyess is just a few miles south of my hometown in Mississippi County Arkansas.
The fascination with him at such an early age didn’t have anything to do with that. I didn’t know he was from down the road when I first heard “At San Quentin.” What I was, and would continue to be fascinated with as years went by, was the sound and subject of those songs. No one else had songs that rolled with the rhythm of trains. No one else yelled “Suey!” in the middle of their performance. No one else told stories about being in trouble like he did. And, no one else treated people in prison like people — at least, not in such a public way.
It also was the San Quentin album that introduced the song “Starkville City Jail,” in which Johnny told the story of how he was arrested for breaking curfew in Starkville, Miss., during the wee hours of the morning after a show. When the police asked him what he was doing he said he was just “picking flowers.” He spent the night in Starkville’s drunk tank. The incident happened in May of 1965. He told the prisoners in San Quentin he wrote the song for anyone they might want to get back at — in his case it was the guy in Starkville that still had his $36.
During the first weekend of next month, Nov. 2-4, the Johnny Cash Flower Pickin’ Festival will be held in Starkville. It was organized by Robbie Ward from here in Meridian and it will include lectures, entertainment from Marty Stuart and many other artists, worship services, an auction and a posthumous pardon for Johnny’s indiscretion.
More details on the festival can be found on the Web site pardonjohnnycash.com. Also, you can read an exclusive interview with Robbie Ward and get more details about the festival in this week’s edition of Meridian 360º in Thursday’s Meridian Star.
The festival is not a celebration of Johnny Cash being in jail, just as his songs about people being in trouble never glorified their bad situations. The songs focused on the despair of it all — the regret, the need for help, truth, and forgiveness.
When Johnny returned to Starkville to play a concert in 1970 he had front row tickets waiting for the law enforcement officers who had anything to do with busting him on his little misdemeanor five years earlier.
Sometimes we hurt ourselves and others. Sometimes we’re treated unfairly. Life is messy and we all need redemption from time-to-time. That’s what the festival is about. That’s what Johnny Cash’s music was about. That’s what life is about.
Steve Gillespie is managing editor of The Meridian Star. E-mail him at sgillespie@themeridianstar.com.
