Johnny Money, so the usual line goes, was a person of many elements. “There was nobody single Money,” the scholar Leigh H. Edwards has argued. “He was all the time a number of, altering, inconsistent.” He was each “Saturday night time and Sunday morning” is how the rock journalist Anthony DeCurtis put it; he was a “walkin’ contradiction,” Kris Kristofferson, Money’s someday collaborator and operating buddy, sang in a tune.
To work my well beyond the cliché and bear in mind what a high-wire act his as soon as was, I just lately rewatched footage of Money on the Newport Folks Pageant. It’s 1964, and he seems nearly like Montgomery Clift, a stupendous and half-broken man. He’s so lean and angular from abusing amphetamines, he not fills out his signature black swimsuit; his eyes are set alarmingly deep. However the unbroken half? It’s downright magnificent, how he chews his gum and carelessly performs his guitar, dead-strumming it prefer it’s a washboard.
He’d been scheduled to look Friday night time with Joan Baez and Phil Ochs, however missed his flight—a nasty omen, contemplating the form he was in. His movie profession was a joke, his marriage in shambles. Some nights he’d “drive recklessly for hours,” he later wrote, “till I both wrecked the automobile or lastly stopped from exhaustion.” And medicines had been now overruling his thoughts. He’d began with a number of “slimming capsules” to pep himself up, however they’d turned him on “like electrical energy flowing right into a lightbulb,” Money admitted. By the early ’60s, he was in such sorry form that he as soon as mumbled and paced, zombielike, across the govt suites of Columbia Data.
The executives had seen sufficient and threatened to drop him. Worse than the embarrassing conduct—banging on doorways in the course of the night time, smashing chandeliers—he was not promoting. The primary of his so-called idea albums hadn’t damaged out commercially and had gone all however unnoticed by the music press. And so Money had come to Newport to win over a brand new, and doubtlessly profitable, viewers—the children now flocking to Bob Dylan.
The medicine, nevertheless, had been drying out his vocal cords. These days, when Johnny Money opened his mouth to sing, nobody was positive what would come out, least of all Johnny Money. At Carnegie Corridor—a earlier proving-ground gig—he may solely muster a desiccated whisper. When Money lastly appeared, everybody at Newport gathered to see him. Would he elevate them up as one? Or would they should catch him when he collapsed?
After which, out got here the voice—that voice, the outdated umami and gravel, with all its fragile grandeur intact. Was he good that night time? No, however this was Johnny fucking Money, product of Solar Data, the place the proper was the enemy of the elegant. He performed “I Stroll the Line” and a canopy of Dylan’s “Don’t Assume Twice, It’s All Proper” after which “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” from his forthcoming album, Bitter Tears. After the present, he and a giddy Dylan traded songs and a guitar. Everybody—the school children, The New York Instances—agreed: He’d blown all of them away.
The paradox had lived to see one other day.
In a sense, the paradox lives to see one more day in Citizen Money: The Political Life and Instances of Johnny Money, which units Money’s contrariness in a brand new mild. Money, the cultural historian Michael Stewart Foley argues, was not only a country-music icon, however a uncommon sort of political determine. He was seldom a partisan in any conventional sense, and in contrast to Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, he not often aligned his music with a progressive agenda. Nonetheless, “Money, with out actually intending it, original a brand new mannequin of public citizenship, primarily based on a politics of empathy.”
[From the March 2004 issue: Johnny Cash, God’s lonely man]
For Foley, Money’s standing as an artist whose music deeply engaged in any other case incompatible audiences offers him a particular relevance to us now. He’s a radically unsorted man chatting with our radically sorted instances. Simply as there are two Americas, there are two Johnny Cashes. One is probably going higher remembered by older followers in purple states because the nation artist who aligned himself with Richard Nixon and Billy Graham, who sneered on the “hippahs” and wrote the traces “I do prefer to brag, ’trigger I’m mighty pleased with that ragged outdated flag.” The opposite is the acceptably blue-state Money, the antiestablishment insurgent flipping the chook at a digicam in San Quentin; the Money of Native American rights.
Foley’s technique is to remind every set of followers of the opposite Money, the Money they’ve conveniently forgotten, after which present how he made up a single human being, one who did his personal justice to the advanced job of being an American. The argument has a sure wishfulness to it. To start with, there’s the religion Foley locations in “empathy,” or Money’s tendency to be “guided by his personal emotional and visceral responses to the problems.” What considering particular person in 2022—amid the outrage and umbrage Olympics that’s American life—nonetheless desires an emotional response? We choose, I believe, respect, well being care, and a dwelling wage. The case made by Money is much less on behalf of “empathy” than of a world through which partisan affiliation isn’t a depressingly sturdy predictor of—properly, all the pieces else, together with musical style.
In its collection of company, Money’s TV present (on the air from June 1969 via March 1971) willfully combined Neil Younger, nonetheless giving off the hippie aroma, with such Grand Ole Opry standbys as Tammy Wynette. However how properly does such a pleasant miscellany translate into an on a regular basis politics? Foley doesn’t say, although he has a maddening tendency to construe essentially the most modest gesture of allyship as a profile in braveness. When Odetta, the people singer and civil-rights activist, appeared on the present, Money sang a duet along with her. A stunning second, sure, and never with out its significance. Foley’s studying? “By telling the world he had been shopping for her information for years, he mentioned, in impact, that he had been on the aspect of Black lives from the beginning.”
Some readers could stroll away satisfied that Money was a Whitmanesque big, containing multitudes. I usually discovered myself questioning if he wasn’t a two-faced equivocator. The e-book is a welcome corrective to the tendency to deal with the person as so internally opposite as to be an entire enigma. However the price of rescuing Money from the metaphysical fog has been to show him right into a plaster saint. Neither does justice to the precise extent of his weirdness.
Johnny Money grew up in Dyess, Arkansas, in any other case generally known as “Colonization Undertaking No. 1,” a New Deal growth constructed nearly in a single day in 1934. The Money home was No. 266, on Street 3—5 rooms, no electrical energy, no operating water—and it had been plunked down on dangerous land, all thicket on the floor, waterlogged muck beneath.
Money lived the Outdated South archetype of working exhausting and near the soil, beneath circumstances of endemic rural poverty, mixed with one other, fairly completely different archetype of the New Deal as private savior. The Dyess venture had its personal full-time house economist to assist with canning, stitching, and quilting, because the biographer Robert Hilburn writes in Johnny Money: The Life ; a farm supervisor permitted the selection of seeds. The radio that first introduced Johnny Money the sounds of nation music was bought with Federal Emergency Reduction Administration mortgage cash. Even because the South started urbanizing and suburbanizing, the Money household remained dwelling anachronisms, smallholders whose pluck went hand in hand with a deep-seated dependence. By the point he graduated highschool in 1950, Money was determined to depart.
His childhood was Little Home on the Prairie crossed with Levittown. (There have been 500 government-fabricated homes within the Dyess venture.) This may increasingly assist clarify a peculiar high quality of Money’s, of being, as Kristofferson put it, “partly reality and partly fiction”; of seeming firmly anchored in himself, and completely at sea. At a loss for what to do after stints working in a car-parts manufacturing facility in Pontiac, Michigan, and cleansing vats in an oleomargarine plant near Dyess, he joined the Air Power. Capable of hear refined variations in sounds, he was skilled as a radio intercept operator; and for 3 years, no less than eight hours a day, he sat in a room outdoors Munich, listening to Soviet transmissions, distinguishing sign from noise.
His base was in the identical city the place Hitler had written Mein Kampf. It lay lower than 100 miles from the Russians, who may overrun it at will. Surrounded by rural magnificence and numerous dangerous juju, Money took up the guitar, taking part in with barracks buddies and placing his emotions of exile and confinement into his first makes an attempt at songwriting. He had a fast and stiletto wit, a complete thoughts. This “was no hillbilly stereotype,” Hilburn quotes a fellow airman saying.
And but. On a few events, Money bought drunk and harangued a Black man. “Honey,” he wrote to his future spouse Vivian, “some N— bought good and I requested him to go outdoors and he was too yellow.” The letter is sickening, and having learn it, some folks will understandably by no means get well a style for Money’s music. I did, although, and what follows could assist clarify why.
From the start, rock and roll was notable for the sheer number of abilities and kinds it may embody. If Elvis Presley was the lovable dodo, Roy Orbison was a nightingale; if Jerry Lee Lewis was the virtuoso magpie, Johnny Money was—properly, a sort of crow, a spectral oddity with doubtful pipes.
He had the rockabilly look (quiffed-up hair, black duds) and carried himself with a few of the insolence and swagger of Elvis whereas holding a watchful reserve. After leaving the Air Power, he headed to Memphis, the place he hoped to interrupt into radio. However the cosmos had different concepts. The day after he stepped off the airplane, in July 1954, Sam Phillips recorded Elvis Presley’s first single, “That’s All Proper.” Elvis was a type of astonishing younger males who’s bare even when he’s clothed. Seeing him carry out on the flatbed of a truck—the sexual charisma, the utter lack of guile—persuaded Money to method Phillips, the founding father of Solar Data, and beg him for an audition.
Money had, at greatest, rudimentary musical expertise, however he had beautiful style. He gravitated to Memphis’s Beale Avenue, to a retailer referred to as the Residence of the Blues, the place he purchased his first document by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and the place he mentioned he found the blues and people recordings made by the folklorist Alan Lomax within the South. Lomax’s astonishing Blues within the Mississippi Evening, an album of “Genuine Subject Recordings of Negro Folks Music,” grew to become a serious affect on Money’s songwriting. The revelation for Money, Foley suggests, was how uniquely brutal the expertise of Black artists had been, particularly these dwelling on jail farms and in levee camps, and likewise how shut it was to that of sharecropping whites. Having labored, exhausting and by hand, a land they didn’t personal, each shared a eager sense of our nation’s skill to interrupt a promise.
Money’s profession was a variation on the grasp rock-and-roll narrative, of white musicians plagiarizing from Black musicians: He envied however, by and huge, he didn’t steal. He needed to make gospel information, however Phillips mentioned no. He pressured Money to hurry up “I Stroll the Line” and “Folsom Jail Blues,” turning him right into a (form of) rock and curler; he turned him right into a (form of) teen idol by altering his identify from John to Johnny. By the summer time of 1958, Money had offered greater than 6 million information. As was true for Elvis, it was inevitable that he’d graduate from the upstart Solar Data to a serious label, and for Money, that meant recentering his profession in Nashville.
Johnny Money and booming Nashville had been a horrible match, and never solely as a result of seasoned engineers and easygoing sidemen started to chop, polish, and brighten what was, in its essence, a tough, darkish factor. By the late ’50s, Memphis and Nashville had been, as music capitals, antitheses. Memphis was the blues, Solar Data, Elvis; Nashville was nation music, metal guitars, choral “ooh”s and “aah”s. You see the place that is going. As Memphis took so-called hillbilly and race music, and mixed them into rock and roll, nation music grew to become extra self-consciously white. Sam Phillips mentioned as a lot; Nashville mentioned as a lot.
No person interesting to the rock-and-roll viewers was extra nation than Money, and no person making nation music was extra rock and roll. This made his business prospects huge, and his musical id fragile. Right here was a person who’d stayed a homesteader whereas the nation suburbanized, who may play the blues with out thieving type or angle from Black artists, who all the time sounded nation however by no means defensively white. In Nashville, the equilibria bought misplaced. The president of Columbia Data considered Money as a people singer and, eyeing the success of Burl Ives and Harry Belafonte, Money’s supervisor agreed. Money launched into a sequence of Americana “idea” albums, on which he too usually seemed like a museum tour information. They flatlined commercially. It was on this interval that Money’s drug use amped up.
Even a zogged-out Johnny Money may nonetheless generate a single pretty much as good as “Ring of Hearth.” However the reality is, Money’s greatest work—the Solar sides, his flip at Newport—all concerned some sort of courtship of the rock viewers. After which there’s At Folsom Jail, from 1968. In contrast to some other, the album introduced collectively the spirit of nation music with all of the eros and paranoia of the ’60s. Folsom and its equally exceptional sequel, At San Quentin, are of a bit with Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers and the Louvin Brothers, but in addition Beggars Banquet and Haight-Ashbury and My Lai. Music after tune, you hear the gyres widening.
[Read: Johnny Cash’s biggest hit song was about falling in love with Johnny Cash]
A wildness flows from Money to the inmates and again once more, till, on the latter document, the place verges on a riot—one which, the producer Bob Johnston believed, would have left Money useless. The prisoners didn’t riot and Johnny Money lived. Folsom was reckoned a masterpiece by everybody from the underground press to Cosmopolitan journal. The wager made at Newport had paid off handsomely, and Rolling Stone’s co-founder Jann Wenner laid the jackpot on the desk: “Money, greater than some other modern [country] performer, is significant in a rock and roll context.” He declared him the creative peer of Dylan.
Money and Phillips—piety of their hearts, greenback indicators of their eyes—as soon as talked about making music whose enchantment was “common.” Money had completed it: He’d united the rock, pop, people, and nation audiences. In 1969, he outstripped the Beatles, promoting 6.5 million information worldwide. However simply as he took possession of the mainstream, the mainstream started falling aside. In 1968, Richard Nixon received the presidency, eking out a plurality within the South, because of his cautious courtship of white voters resentful of civil rights. And, flattering the white southerner not solely as essentially the most reliably conservative voter however as essentially the most “genuine” American, Nixon went on to embrace nation music.
This was Money’s core viewers, the nation viewers, made up largely of white southerners. Their devotion to Money allowed him to hit the nation charts, even when he put out his laziest, most mediocre work. However everybody else helped him outsell the Beatles. Right here he confronted one more dilemma, as painful as pitting Memphis towards Nashville. As one of many greatest nation superstars of the Nixon period, he might need addressed the silent majority and mentioned one thing vital, one thing concrete and true to his personal expertise as a white southerner. He may have mentioned: “My bootstraps? They had been government-issue. And what? Yours had been too.”
I do know; straightforward for me to say. However political braveness doesn’t start with introducing a Tammy Wynette fan to Neil Younger’s “The Needle and the Harm Accomplished.” It begins with your individual ox getting gored. And as distinctive because it was—drawing a dwelling from the gumbo soil—Money’s childhood was additionally typical; together with the Cashes, the postwar South bought pulled out of poverty by the federal authorities. Starting with the New Sellers, who’d labeled the poorer elements of the area “a belt of illness, distress, and pointless demise,” via to Pearl Harbor and the Chilly Warfare, the federal authorities poured cash into the South, making advantages obtainable—as with Colonization Undertaking No. 1—nearly solely to white folks.
Drawing on his personal expertise, Money might need damaged up the central falsity of the archipelago of glass and metal generally known as the New South: its equation of whiteness with self-sufficiency and Blackness with dependency. What did he do as a substitute? He smiled grimly and talked out of either side of his mouth. When Nixon requested Money to play the White Home, he accepted the invite, however politely refused the White Home’s request to cowl “Welfare Cadillac,” a racist novelty tune.
He endured in attempting to be all issues to all folks, till, a dwelling effigy in black frock coat and jabot, he rivaled Elvis for dropping any proof of his youthful self. In 1976, he served as grand marshal of the bicentennial parade within the nation’s capital, the proper consultant for a rustic nearing absolutely the nadir of its self-respect.
“The individuals are his viewers,” a Billboard editor wrote. However “the folks” had been at each other’s throats. Throughout a dwell present in 1990, trying surprisingly like Nixon—jowly, surreptitious, basically sad—he launched his tune “Ragged Outdated Flag.” “I thank God for all of the freedoms we’ve bought on this nation,” he mentioned, as the world went quiet. “Even the rights to burn the flag.” Immediately, the group turned on him, booing loudly. He silenced them with a single “Shhh,” including: “We’ve additionally bought a proper to bear arms, and if you happen to burn my flag, I’ll shoot you.” And the group set free a bloodlust roar.
When Rick Rubin, the hip-hop and metallic impresario, started reviving Money’s profession in 1993, the nation legend was languishing on the scrap heap of showbiz. His upcoming gig was a residency on the Wayne Newton Theater (capability 3,000) in Branson, Missouri. He couldn’t even fill that. Right here was a person whose personal legend was ready for him to die. However Rubin understood two issues: that Johnny Money was a dwelling encyclopedia of American tune, not a museum piece; and that his voice deserved to be introduced unadorned.
Their ensuing album, American Recordings, options Money alone, accompanied by simply his acoustic guitar. The simplicity labored—artistically, but in addition in rinsing Money clear of Nashville, Nixon, and Billy Graham. Rubin had taken him away from the NASCAR dads and handed him over to followers of MTV Unplugged. He re-sorted him.
[Read: Country music’s adventurous streak]
Thanks in no small half to Rubin, Money has been a blue-state hero ever since. Citizen Money pulls, in a salutary manner, a reverse Rubin and reminds us that the hipster-acceptable Money, who hung with Bono and premiered his American Recordings songs on the Viper Room on the Sundown Strip, represents lower than half the person. However Foley amasses precisely the suitable details, solely to attract precisely the fallacious conclusion.
Money wasn’t any sort of a politician. He was an American artist of the very first magnitude. Listening to him, unrelentingly, for months now, I believe he did have one thing to inform us. It might be idiosyncratic, however here’s what I heard: Satirically, for a rustic constructed on the promise of proudly owning your individual land, among the many truest People are those that labored the earth with out proudly owning a single crumb of it. Dispossessed, they had been pressured to take possession of themselves one other manner: They sang. Denied, substantively, the suitable to happiness, they declared as a substitute an absolute proper to character. This was most true of Black folks, but it surely may be true of poor white folks. Nonetheless you apportion credit score, collectively they created a standard inheritance all of us dwell off to this present day. Upon that commonality, Money appeared to imagine, we’d kind a much less grossly imperfect union. The hope may be very stunning, and I believe, in its manner, true. However it isn’t sufficient.
This text seems within the January/February 2022 print version with the headline “He Walked the Line.”
