What’s most interesting about American V are the last two songs Cash wrote. “Like the 309” is a chipper-paced death ballad in which Cash plays a failing man contemplating his last railroad trip — in a pine box in a baggage car. Hormel’s slide guitar gives the tune a righteous blues feel. “Like the 309” would sound right at home on Personal File, its feistiness attesting to the strong American heart Cash came to embody through song.
That strength, and his dedicated exploration of the human spirit, drives all 25 tunes on the first disc of Personal File — the collection of songs he really wanted people to hear, or at least to preserve for posterity. There’s a tale about a railroad engineer who’s at the throttle though he’s fraught with worry about his infant’s possible health; another about a man whose mother dies and whose father pleads for reconciliation and reunion. There are also old chestnuts from the Anglo folk tradition like “Galway Bay” and “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,” and a version of the first song Cash ever performed in public at a talent show in Dyess, Arkansas, “Far Away Places.” Some of these songs, like the tribute to his dear aunt “Vergie” and the songwriter’s ode “A Fast Song,” Cash wrote himself but never recorded for formal studio release. Others were pulled from the catalogues of his friends, like Johnny Horton’s “When It’s Springtime in Alaska (It’s Forty Below)” and Lefty Frizzell’s “Saginaw Michigan.”
HARD TO BE GOOD: Cash’s spiritual struggles were real. |
The second CD in the box is truly personal. It’s a gospel set, and Cash’s relationship with God was complex. He wrote many of these tunes about his own experiences in seeking to live what he perceived as the Christian life, so they’re full of references to backsliding and judgment. Some are based on his extensive studies of the Bible, which he read, re-read, contemplated, and debated throughout his life. There are gospel relics that he learned as a youth and from country-music inspirations like his mother-in-law, Maybelle Carter. This material isn’t as compelling as the stories that he spins on disc one — at least not for those who’ve been born only once. But it’s fascinating to hear how deeply he internalized and even fantasized on things he read in the Bible. “If Jesus Ever Loved a Woman” is his contemplation of Mary Magdalene; “One of These Days I’m Gonna Sit Down and Talk to Paul” is his vision of the best discussion with Paul that he could wish for.Given this passion for the spiritual, it’s no wonder that the other final song that American V offers is a number about his personal struggle for salvation. At that, he was always a realist. “I Came To Believe” attests not only to the faith he discovered but to how hard it was to win and to keep. “Nothing worked out when I handled it all on my own,” he sings. “And each time I failed it made me feel twice as alone/Then I cried, ‘Lord there must be a sure and easier way/For it just can not be that a man should lose hope every day.’ ” Then he sings of giving himself to a higher power and the relief that came with such devotion.
Cash probably saw the human spirit as a corporal manifestation of that higher power — of the strength, dignity, and willingness to persevere embodied in the Holy Spirit. That would explain his attraction to the notion of “getting into the human spirit.” What he probably never understood is how distinctly he, through his music, came to embody those admirable qualities for so many of us.
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