JOHNNY CASH'S JOURNEY THROUGH THE OTHER SIDE OF VIRTUE

Johnny Cash wasn't nearly as handsome as Elvis. His singing voice,
while deep and rich, had a tendency to wander off-key. He was the
first to admit that he knew very few guitar chords. If performers
could be weighed and measured like prizefighters, Cash might have left
the oddsmakers in stitches.

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.

Just over two years after Cash's death at age 71, the American music
legend has returned for an encore in "Walk the Line," a film named for
one of his signature songs. While the movie revolves mainly around his
tangled, forbidden courtship with his eventual second wife, June
Carter, it opens at Folsom Prison in California. Inside the
penitentiary's walls in 1968 Johnny Cash recorded the live album that
for many fans defines the macabre Man in Black, his band's railroad
rhythm churning behind him as he sings, "I shot a man in Reno just to
watch him die."

High on amphetamines, this self-proclaimed pioneer of hotel vandalism
once took an ax and chopped a brand-new door through the wall of his
room. In another drug-induced fit he smashed all the footlights at a
Grand Ole Opry show at Ryman Auditorium with his microphone stand. In
the second of his two autobiographies, "Cash," he wrote that he dwelt
on "the literal meaning of 'hell-bent. ' "

If all Johnny Cash brought to the stage were his demons, we wouldn't
need to remember him. Marilyn Manson, the shock rocker, proved far
more grotesque than a man in a black suit singing a few country murder
ballads. Cash's drug addiction and light brushes with the law pale
beside the rapper 50 Cent's drug deals and bullet scars.

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.

Cash had a huge hit with the Shel Silverstein-penned "Boy Named Sue,"
about the roughest, toughest brawler ever to have a woman's name. The
movie shows him singing "Cocaine Blues" to the rowdy crowd of inmates
at Folsom, but not the jocular "Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog" or "Flushed
From the Bathroom of Your Heart," which were part of the original concert.

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. His concert at
Folsom was no simple publicity stunt. Cash and his band had been
playing shows at prisons for more than a decade before they recorded
the hit album at Folsom and followed it up with one from San Quentin
Prison. 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.

Johnny Cash sang that he wore black "for the poor and beaten down,
livin' on the hopeless, hungry side of town." With hundreds of
thousands displaced by Hurricane Katrina, layoff announcements
dangling over the heads of 98,000 American auto workers, and 2.1
million men and women in prisons and jails across the country, we
still need him.

Cash's life was an American story that can never be repeated, one that
began in the Depression-era cotton fields of Arkansas and continued
through an auto assembly line in Michigan to occupied Germany with the
United States Air Force. He then joined legends of rock 'n' roll like
Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis at Sun and on the road. He stayed
with us until the end, touring as long as he could and recording
almost until his death. "The way we did it was honest," he wrote. "We
played it and sang it the way we felt it, and there's a whole lot to
be said for that."