The Johnny Cash Blues For Breakfast
Johnny Cash was singing this morning of the time he woke up one sunday morning with his head bent completely out of shape and Johnny sings, "The beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad, so I had one more for dessert." This song, "Sunday Morning Coming Down" contains the essence of the John Cash modus operandi. Music rules. The words come & go, the images flicker in and out of the big picture. But what remains at the very center of operations is the great Johnny Cash sensibility. He does not sing these songs so much as exude them. They drip from his very marrow & joints, his bones & his liver & intestines, his sweat his blood his sperm and his brain heart and that wounded thing---his memory & conscience, the sensitivity buds that drive the music. Johnny Cash is singing about how waking up on sunday morning he is suddenly beat into the ground by the melancholia & loneliness of sundays. Sundays won't let him have any pleasure. This is a southern redneck culture song of the sermons & soda water and chicken for dinner at noon and that's all she wrote so you better get used to it. Johnny Cash is not going to go back to college and review the history of the church or religion or southern attitudes toward having fun on The Lord's Day. O no. He is going to give it to you straight from the blood.
And what is this "it" that comes out of his unfiltered unconscious? It is life in the impoverished small-town South without the mighty sophistications of a university education and an upscale family income and educational program. And this life is distinguished by its pain & its unrelieved suffering. No money, few things. Here we have the story of busted marriages and failed love affairs. These people struggle to get their feet on terra firma. But they have no property. They have scrawny possessions. They have a bare iota of dignity. And they have no future. This is all in the throat of Johnny Cash. It is in the inner linings of his song. Poor redneck housewives who don't have the money to put one solid meal a day on the table for their husbands who are squeaking by on moon-light jobs that will take them nowhere or they're sitting around the house smoking & drinking & thinking about the next song or the woman they encountered last night in the honky tonk. These husbands & wives smoke a lot of cigarettes & they drink whatever they can get their hands on---booze coffee or soda pop. The ladies do the wash every Monday morning & hang it on the line with wooden clothes pins. Only there isn't much to hang. Mainly worn-out white underwear with holes in it for the kids. Not one new stylish dress in the house for the mistress of the empty kitchen. Do you know what a brand new set of underwear feels like? A brand new pair of sparkling shoes? The appliances all gone to seed. And 2 or 3 kids drenched in poverty. Well, they just come with the territory. And they keep coming. Like the rent. And they are miserable most of the time. Husband & wife & mistress & children. They are poor. And they are ill educated and can not afford to go to the dentist. Thus their teeth are gray or missing in action.
John Cash is grieving but he'll never admit it to you. He must sing to get this damned ache out of his nuts out of his brain out of his eyeballs that he woke up itching this a.m. John is singing of Death in America that feeds its citizens bullets & coffee & all the cigarettes you can eat. Just so you never squawk about the conditions. There won't be any changes in the weather. The kids will be playing on gray grass under bone trees with no green leaves on them. And the cancer rates are going up by the dozen every month because radiation is in the air spewed by American bombs & machines that spew poison all over the world including right here in the Bible-spewing South. These marriages are mainly shot in the ass. They have no hope. There is no money here that can buy these people a decent set of clothes a new car & a good decent house and schools for the children. Guess what? These poor folks think of education last. First come the cigarettes & booze. Then food. Then a table to put it on. And then maybe a car and a job & a family. Right now most people are going to church. It's sunday morning. And Johnny Cash wakes up sicker than a dog from too much booze last night and too much reality this morning. He says this is the loneliest day of all days. Sunday. The Christian Sabbath. The Bible. Preachers. Sermons & threats. And the litany of promises. To be fulfilled when you're safely dead & buried. He feels lonelier than the damned of hell. Listen. You will hear it. You will smell it. You will taste something you thought you could not taste: the hunger of an empty belly & a starved mind & a hopeless heart. Try that one for size as I did this a.m. in my bathtub. This is not music to get drunk by.
John Cash is not going to go to college to cure himself of the pain & the suffering & the afflictions. He is going to sing the raw songs of the unrehabilitated heart. He is not going to invent some sophisticated college crap that sublimates the original raw experience. No, he is not going to enter the University of Utopia and give you the story of how I made it big in the land of Academia & Sublimation. He will not go that route. You are going to learn of southern redneck divorcees & kids so poor they'll break your heart in pieces. You are going to go to the school of poverty & failure of the American Dream and the big lies of the USA that promise you you are Special & will be treated so as honored citizens of a vastly rich country of privileged billionaires & millionaires who mainly came by the money by hook & by crook. This is all inside the throat of John Cash it quavers in the music. These little poor uneducated & sickly people who so often live in shacks or dingy apartments where nothing ever quite works who are addicted to cigarettes and booze and coffee & maybe a hamburger & fries on a good day. They will never put three solid meals on the kitchen table. And certainly never lay that table with a dinner featuring three solid vegetables & a balanced meal.
You feel it grab at your throat. Johnny Cash gets to you with his literal insides. He penetrates your guts. You can smell & taste his history in the very fiber of his music in the tremor of John's ever vigilant voice. He is reporting from hell, the world of the damned. Make no mistake. You are not to be free of its history. The history of John Cash's voice. JC carries his history in his very pleading bleeding heart-breaking melody. He does not spell it out for you. He does not preach. He gives you a sketch, an outline. He names a back yard with a fence & some cigarette smoke and his own beer for breakfast that tasted so good he has a second for dessert. You won't be taken in by the comedy. You won't miss the tragedy going on under your nose. Your own major tragedy that J.C. is singing to you in C Major. O, no. John's vocal cords soaked in the suffering of the damned will make sure of that.
Elvis Presley the minute he rang the cash bell with his songs gave up overalls and the clothing of the poor & the underclasses. Elvis refused to allow any girl friend to wear blue jeans or tennis shoes. He saw these items as symbols of poverty defeat & death & as the stigma of the lowest classes. And he could not stand to be clothed in symbols that called him back to his impoverished Tupelo, Mississippi roots. John Cash on the other hand waded up to his neck in the experiences of the oppressed and the impoverished & the semi literate & the sick of body & of mind & of heart. And John gave us back our hells & our deaths redeemed in the voice The One & Only Voice of John R. Cash, singer, born in Arkansas, USA. John also wrote almost all his own songs. So this would be the telling point here. John's songs are his very soul. Elvis sang and transformed & elevated the songs composed by others. I do not write these words to denigrate Elvis Presly a singer of extraordinary & absolutely unique & unequivocal power. I merely point up the differences in origin. A singer who has etched every word he sings owns it in a different way. The singer & his song are biologically inseparable.
RLG copyright 2006
And what is this "it" that comes out of his unfiltered unconscious? It is life in the impoverished small-town South without the mighty sophistications of a university education and an upscale family income and educational program. And this life is distinguished by its pain & its unrelieved suffering. No money, few things. Here we have the story of busted marriages and failed love affairs. These people struggle to get their feet on terra firma. But they have no property. They have scrawny possessions. They have a bare iota of dignity. And they have no future. This is all in the throat of Johnny Cash. It is in the inner linings of his song. Poor redneck housewives who don't have the money to put one solid meal a day on the table for their husbands who are squeaking by on moon-light jobs that will take them nowhere or they're sitting around the house smoking & drinking & thinking about the next song or the woman they encountered last night in the honky tonk. These husbands & wives smoke a lot of cigarettes & they drink whatever they can get their hands on---booze coffee or soda pop. The ladies do the wash every Monday morning & hang it on the line with wooden clothes pins. Only there isn't much to hang. Mainly worn-out white underwear with holes in it for the kids. Not one new stylish dress in the house for the mistress of the empty kitchen. Do you know what a brand new set of underwear feels like? A brand new pair of sparkling shoes? The appliances all gone to seed. And 2 or 3 kids drenched in poverty. Well, they just come with the territory. And they keep coming. Like the rent. And they are miserable most of the time. Husband & wife & mistress & children. They are poor. And they are ill educated and can not afford to go to the dentist. Thus their teeth are gray or missing in action.
John Cash is grieving but he'll never admit it to you. He must sing to get this damned ache out of his nuts out of his brain out of his eyeballs that he woke up itching this a.m. John is singing of Death in America that feeds its citizens bullets & coffee & all the cigarettes you can eat. Just so you never squawk about the conditions. There won't be any changes in the weather. The kids will be playing on gray grass under bone trees with no green leaves on them. And the cancer rates are going up by the dozen every month because radiation is in the air spewed by American bombs & machines that spew poison all over the world including right here in the Bible-spewing South. These marriages are mainly shot in the ass. They have no hope. There is no money here that can buy these people a decent set of clothes a new car & a good decent house and schools for the children. Guess what? These poor folks think of education last. First come the cigarettes & booze. Then food. Then a table to put it on. And then maybe a car and a job & a family. Right now most people are going to church. It's sunday morning. And Johnny Cash wakes up sicker than a dog from too much booze last night and too much reality this morning. He says this is the loneliest day of all days. Sunday. The Christian Sabbath. The Bible. Preachers. Sermons & threats. And the litany of promises. To be fulfilled when you're safely dead & buried. He feels lonelier than the damned of hell. Listen. You will hear it. You will smell it. You will taste something you thought you could not taste: the hunger of an empty belly & a starved mind & a hopeless heart. Try that one for size as I did this a.m. in my bathtub. This is not music to get drunk by.
John Cash is not going to go to college to cure himself of the pain & the suffering & the afflictions. He is going to sing the raw songs of the unrehabilitated heart. He is not going to invent some sophisticated college crap that sublimates the original raw experience. No, he is not going to enter the University of Utopia and give you the story of how I made it big in the land of Academia & Sublimation. He will not go that route. You are going to learn of southern redneck divorcees & kids so poor they'll break your heart in pieces. You are going to go to the school of poverty & failure of the American Dream and the big lies of the USA that promise you you are Special & will be treated so as honored citizens of a vastly rich country of privileged billionaires & millionaires who mainly came by the money by hook & by crook. This is all inside the throat of John Cash it quavers in the music. These little poor uneducated & sickly people who so often live in shacks or dingy apartments where nothing ever quite works who are addicted to cigarettes and booze and coffee & maybe a hamburger & fries on a good day. They will never put three solid meals on the kitchen table. And certainly never lay that table with a dinner featuring three solid vegetables & a balanced meal.
You feel it grab at your throat. Johnny Cash gets to you with his literal insides. He penetrates your guts. You can smell & taste his history in the very fiber of his music in the tremor of John's ever vigilant voice. He is reporting from hell, the world of the damned. Make no mistake. You are not to be free of its history. The history of John Cash's voice. JC carries his history in his very pleading bleeding heart-breaking melody. He does not spell it out for you. He does not preach. He gives you a sketch, an outline. He names a back yard with a fence & some cigarette smoke and his own beer for breakfast that tasted so good he has a second for dessert. You won't be taken in by the comedy. You won't miss the tragedy going on under your nose. Your own major tragedy that J.C. is singing to you in C Major. O, no. John's vocal cords soaked in the suffering of the damned will make sure of that.
Elvis Presley the minute he rang the cash bell with his songs gave up overalls and the clothing of the poor & the underclasses. Elvis refused to allow any girl friend to wear blue jeans or tennis shoes. He saw these items as symbols of poverty defeat & death & as the stigma of the lowest classes. And he could not stand to be clothed in symbols that called him back to his impoverished Tupelo, Mississippi roots. John Cash on the other hand waded up to his neck in the experiences of the oppressed and the impoverished & the semi literate & the sick of body & of mind & of heart. And John gave us back our hells & our deaths redeemed in the voice The One & Only Voice of John R. Cash, singer, born in Arkansas, USA. John also wrote almost all his own songs. So this would be the telling point here. John's songs are his very soul. Elvis sang and transformed & elevated the songs composed by others. I do not write these words to denigrate Elvis Presly a singer of extraordinary & absolutely unique & unequivocal power. I merely point up the differences in origin. A singer who has etched every word he sings owns it in a different way. The singer & his song are biologically inseparable.
RLG copyright 2006
posted by rlg at 5:01 PM
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