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September 19, 2003A Ring of FireLove Is A Burning Thing The Taste Of Love Is Sweet
Johnny Cash has passed on to that great Ring of Fire in the sky. My daddy brought me up listening to the Man in Black, Hank Williams, Sr., and a host of other country singers; both contemporary and the legends. I've always loved Cash's music, even before he came back into vogue after signing with Rick Rubin of Def Jam fame. I will grant that Rubin's decision to give Cash as much creative license and returning to his acoustical roots resulted in some of the best Johnny Cash songs ever. Can anyone listen and even more watch his video of "Hurt" the Nine Inch Nails song he covered and not be haunted? I watched it once and got up and went to the store and bought it. Immediately. As in when the song was over. While I could write about his music all night, it is not his music that sparked this post. My blog's theme is about dating, the South, dating in the rural South, and occasional commentary on the passing scene. True to that theme, the passage that struck me the most deeply in Time's cover story about Cash's passing was about his relationship with his late wife, June Carter Cash, and how he mourned her. When she died earlier this year, I told a friend that that Johnny Cash would not live another year since June had passed. Sadly, I was correct. I carry a sense of geographic kinship with Johnny Cash. The little town I often write about is only 30 or so miles away from Cash's childhood home of Kingsland. Kingsland is less than ten miles from Fordyce, the home of Bear Bryant. My daddy was brought up doing much of the same laborious cotton sharecropping as Johnny Cash. There is something in the dirt and the air and the water that I know links me to him. Many times I have been asked what I am looking for in a woman. My answer is that it is not nearly so dependent on her singular attributes--those can be trivial items like the color of hair, eyes, style of dress, etc. In the epic quest to find "The One," it is as much about the end as it is the means. The love Johnny and June Cash had for one another is a perfect example of the end I seek. The following passage brought me to the brink of a tear. "June Carter Cash made that trip first, on May 15 of this year, after complications from heart surgery. Cash was devastated. He knew that if he was to survive June's death, it would be through the thing he knew best: work. "About three days after June passed away," says country music star Marty Stuart, who toured with Cash for 24 years and was for a time married to Johnny's daughter Cindy, "John's son John Carter called me and said, 'Daddy wants to record.' It was the best news I heard in a long time. We all gathered around him and made close to 50 songs." The microphone seemed to be a source of healing and comfort. Can a wound like the death of the love of one's life ever heal? Not easily; maybe not ever. "He tried to contain himself," Reverend Wilson says, "but her passing took his last spark, the last bit of his heart." Cash admitted as much. "I don't know hardly what to say tonight about being up here without her," he said at his first public appearance after her death, at the Carter Family Fold country music festival in Hiltons, Va. "The pain is so severe there is no way of describing it." The pain could be described not in words but in sobs. "One day there was just the two of us sitting there," Stuart recalls, "and he broke down and started crying and said, 'Man, I miss her so bad.' I didn't know what to say, so I held his hand. He loved my wife Connie, who's been a friend to that family for a long time. He grabbed my hand and said, 'Son, cling to her; cling to her; cling to her.' What I saw at that moment is that he would have traded every bit of fame, fortune—everything that Johnny Cash meant to the world—for five minutes with June." When I have had the better part of a lifetime of love in a union like theirs, when my broken heart is my ultimate end, then all that care to know will know exactly what I am looking for in "The One."
suburban blight linked with The Cul-de-Sac for Monday, September 22 suburban blight linked with The Cul-de-Sac for Monday, September 22 Comments
AWESOME post again.... i need to get some new adjectives to use....' Anyways - that's would be how I would want to go too. Posted by: Ho at September 21, 2003 08:00 AMI frankly didn't think too much of his cover of Hurt, when I had only heard the song. To me, it was just "old man singing contemporary song - creepy but not profound". I watched the video, though, and THAT was something. Posted by: Ryan Waddell at September 22, 2003 10:20 AMPost a comment
 
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