The First British Lutheran Blog Ever

so I missed the opportunity to post the link to the unusually accurate and honest NY Times article on the late Johnny Cash. That article is now in the evil evil pay-for-access "archives" of their website. But here's an except which Bunnie Diehl originally excerpted on her blog:

Yet there is a power and honesty to his music that few recording artists can match. In his most affecting songs, the gravelly, toxic rumble you hear is Johnny Cash locking horns with his dark side. It's one man's fight for his own soul, a timeless struggle to a rockabilly beat.

If all Johnny Cash brought to the stage were his demons, we wouldn't need to remember him... It is the angel on Johnny Cash's other shoulder that gives his music its depth and profundity. That same murderer in "Folsom Prison Blues" is penitent, singing: "Well, I know I had it coming. I know I can't be free." Cash himself summed it up that he was "trying, despite my many faults and my continuing attraction to all seven deadly sins, to treat my fellow man as Christ would." Johnny Cash merges our seemingly contradictory American traditions of outlaws prone to wild gunplay and pious Christians singing hymns, without stopping to explain how you can be both at once.

He left the fold at Sun Records because the impresario Sam Phillips wouldn't let him record gospel music. He went a big step further than that, eventually recording an audio version of the New Testament. This was a man who could comfortably recall playing host to the Rev. Billy Graham and killing a crocodile named One Eyed Jack on the same page of his autobiography.

As the crocodile's name suggests, Cash brought real humor to his stage show, something the movie touches on but can't sustain in the classic trajectory of a drug-addiction tale.

What the movie does capture well - especially through the powerful performance of its star, Joaquin Phoenix - is how Cash's empathy for those prisoners grew from his own deep wells of guilt... Johnny Cash was a deeply flawed Christian man who could look at criminals and see a part of himself in them.

In a world increasingly reduced to good and evil, to us versus them, Johnny Cash was a man unafraid to admit that he was both. We've somehow lost sight of the truth that there can be no redemption without sin. It's this kind of reductive thinking that makes it easy to reduce swaths of the country to color codes and political parties; to lock millions away in jails and prisons, then toss the keys without guilt.

Anyways, even though he was hugely famous and the best-selling performing artist living until his death in 2003, I only really paid much attention to his music after he died. Here's another great article -one freely available online- about the life and work of the "Man in Black".