Cash

I enjoyed this Breakpoint article on Johnny Cash by Alex Wainer. He was many things, but he was, as an artist, honest. If you have seen the film Walk The Line you only got part of the story. Far better to read the book The Man Comes Around by Dave Urbanski. It shows not only Cash's spiritual side far more lucidly than the film, but also reveals his intelligence. The book makes the observation in passing that Cash may have had an influence, through his early TV series, on early 'Jesus Rock' musicians like Larry Norman.

Cash could sing about ordinary things, life, love, heartache, sin and depravity, and in the next breath honestly sing gospel songs of redemption. And for him it wasn't a contradiction. That turned out to be his genius. There was no artificial wall between the sacred and the secular. Says Wainer:

"Compare Cash's approach to the model of the Contemporary Christian Music industry. The standard approach has been to take various rock and pop music styles and insert Christian lyrics. This began in the 1970s as young musicians found Christ and sought to reach their friends by using the music they loved to deliver the gospel message they now believed. When Christian record companies began signing new artists, the eventual result was a marginalized category sold mostly in Christian bookstores or restricted to the 'Christian' bin in music stores thus blunting the artists' original evangelistic intent."



Years ago I spent countless, fruitless hours trying to explain to fellow Evangelicals the things that frustrated me with "contemporary Christian music". It was to no avail. C. S. Lewis had written, and I had understood as a young man, that often it is the honest Christian dentist who has more influence on ordinary folk than the professional minister. But most took the Pauline dictum to know nothing but Christ crucified in a wooden literal sense, as if the Cross were a concept removed from real sin in the real world.

Even today, what sells in the Christian "market" remains largely music about contentless emotion. There are more exceptions than there used to be. But I find I quickly flee from Christian radio when every time I turn it on I hear yet another new arrangement of yet another worship "standard" set to some more current rhythm.

Larry Norman sang about the Vietnam War, the Beatles, sex, drugs, the space program, hypocrisy, eschatology, (a la Hal Lindsay) and more. His protege Randy Stonehill wrote deeply personal lyrics about life and death, Jimmi Hendrix, sin and fallenness. Mark Heard wrote about human contradictions, the human condition. These lyrics were far, far, far more Christian than just another love song with the word "Jesus" stuck in the place of "baby". Wainer continues:

"With CCM's contractual constraints on lyrical content, artists are kept from singing about all aspects of life and must have so many mentions of Jesus per minute (known in the industry as 'JPMs') to please the label management. This self-limiting system keeps the artists singing to the choir and away from other topics that might get secular listeners' attention."

Oddly, this has changed somewhat in the seeker church era, so that the word 'Jesus' is often replaced with the pronoun "you", but the content remains primarily focused on emotions about Jesus or how Jesus makes life better - rarely about anything so negative as the fallenness of the human race and the real effects of that fallenness in the real world.

"Whereas Cash hadn't been allowed to sing songs of faith at Sun Records, CCM didn't allow its artists to sing anything but 'Jesus music.' Ever the maverick, Cash left Sun for a label that gave him that freedom. It has been tougher for young Christian musicians who started in the gospel ghetto to break into a larger, more mainstream audience and the last ten years have seen some significant success stories, such as Jars of Clay and P.O.D., and some who never started with a CCM label, such as Sufjan Stevens. Like Cash, they did it the hard way, through determination and being good enough to get people's attention."

What I always suspected has turned out to be largely true. It isn't the "gospel" in CCM or the mentions of Jesus that failed to resonate with ordinary folk and turned CCM into an in house art form. It was the disconnectedness from the ordinary things, as if spiritual people don't eat, fish, camp, get married, paint, farm, work, die, love, get angry, garden, think, vote, sin and forgive. When the gospel is wedded to real life, it resonates, and a number of Nashville songwriters have found the country genre an ideal place to tell real stories of real life.

Do yourself a favor. If you want Christian content that really integrates with real life, don't look in the CCM bins. Try Alison Krauss or Kathy Mattea. Listen to Brad Paisley or Ricky Skaggs or recent Randy Travis. It may not be your style of music, but if you are a songwriter, there is much to learn from great writers who understand that faith and life must integrate.

Cash is not popular with young people today because of his voice or his musicianship. He is popular because he was real.