‘People would like to see me lay back now and rest and grive and lie on my laurels,, but I’m not going to lay back and relax. Cash’s wife of 38 years died in a Nashville hospital in May 2003 from compilcations following heart surgery. Six weeks prior to this interview, something did happen to June Carter. June told me once, ‘If something happens to me, you keep working’. I read out a couple of titles – First Corinthians 5.55 Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down. “I don’t see so good”, he says, peering at it through foggy eyes and handing it to me. “Where’s my list? I believe in lists.” Johnny Cash rummages through a pile of papers on his desk and extricates a sheet which he holds up to the light. Looking at this list, there’s the uncanny sense of Johnny Cash closing the circle and singing himself back to the beginning. When country music turned its back on him, another visionary producer and record label owner, Rick Rubin, persuaded him to make a stripped-down Americana album, which led to Cash becoming a rock ‘n’ roll icon, who ended his life and his career as he began them both,singing gospel songs. The visionary producer and record label owner persuaded him to play stripped-down rock ‘n’ roll, but the way he played it made Cash a country icon. Cash, raised on religious songs, had offered Phillips his services as a gospel singer. Balshazar, a self-penned spiritual, was one of the first songs he sang when he auditioned for Sam Phillips at Sun’s Memphis studio in 1955. Some – Flesh And Blood, Balshazar – are songs Cash has sung in the past. Many of the songs on the inventory have a religious bent – Family Bible, I Am A Pilgrim, First Corinthians 5.55. This, not the “empire of dirt” he swept aside in Hurt, is the piece of Johnny Cash that matters. Cash was adding songs to that list and recording them in his home studio right up until the day he died. It is the list Cash made of the songs he was recording for American V, the next – now last – installment of his collaboration with Rick Rubin. Lot 768 (out of 769) is, simply, two sheets of plain paper written on in a failing, spidery hand. As you leaf through the auction catalogue, there’s something hollow and meaningless about this hoard of fripperies. You imagine it to carry more weight – certanly a life as weighty as Johnny Cash’s. Going under the hammer, along with guitars and gold records, was all kinds of Nashvegas clutter: a mawkish Norman Rockwell collotype of the young Abe Lincoln bronze statuettes of Elvis and John Wayne a pair of Nudie pants (black, of course) a ‘faux leopard’ car coat ornate rifles a ‘Renaissance Revival’ mailbox Louis XIV-style ‘fauteuils’ an extravagant Waterford crystal cowboy boot engraved with Johnny’s name.Ĭoming face to face with the debris of a life is rarely a heartening experience. Last month, between the 14th and 16th of September, you could walk into Sotheby’s New York building at York Avenue and 72nd Street, and buy yourself a piece of Johnny Cash.
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