Short Talks: Breaking Down the Man in Black

Matt McGowan: Welcome to Short Talks from the Hill, a research and economic development podcast of the University of Arkansas. My name is Matt McGowan. In 2019, Arkansas lawmakers decided to replace the two statues representing the state at the U.S. Capitol. Rather than obscure figures from more than 100 years ago, legislators chose two people who symbolize a very different Arkansas, one that is more contemporary and diverse. Civil rights advocate Daisy Bates’ statue was unveiled in May and this month, the statue of country music legend Johnny Cash will be installed and available for viewing. In honor of this event, Short Talks from the Hill will feature two researchers discussing Bates and Cash. This month, English professor Bob Cochran will discuss the life and career of Johnny Cash. Next month, history professor Mike Pierce will tell us about Daisy Bates. Bob Cochran is a professor of English and director of the Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies at the University of Arkansas. Refusing to specialize in any single area of scholarship, Cochran has written books on topics as disparate as Irish playwright Samuel Beckett and Arkansas music and movies. He has written biographies of Vance Randolph, the Arkansas folklorist, and Louise Pound, a scholar, athlete, and feminist pioneer. Two books, Our Own Sweet Sounds and Singing in Zion, focus on Arkansas music. And two others deal with visual arts. More recently, Cochran co-authored, Lights, Camera, Arkansas, from Broncho Billy to Billy Bob Thornton, a history of cinema in Arkansas. And he published Haunted Man’s Report, a study of the work of Arkansas writer Charles Portis. Welcome Bob, thanks for being here.

Bob Cochran: Glad to be here.

MM: We’re going to talk about Johnny Cash, one of Arkansas’s favorite sons, and that’s going to be a lot of fun. Most people in the state, nationwide, across the world, know who Johnny Cash is. He seems to be as popular posthumously as he was when he was alive. Can you tell us who Johnny Cash was and why is he still so popular?

BC: Well, I think one of the reasons that he has a durable popularity is that he was a durable worker. He worked very hard at it, and he seemed to realize from the earliest exposure when he was doing things for Sam Phillips at the Sun Record Company, he seemed to realize that this was the opportunity, that the door had opened, and he should devote himself energetically to capitalizing on that. And so he did. And so he died in 2003. And there have been some posthumous collections released. But the fact of the matter is, he was recording stuff. In a review I wrote, I said he had one boot in the grave. He was making records with Rick Rubin, and so he did it steadily from the 1950s to 2002. He’s working and he’s working hard the whole time.

MM: The Man in Black, is there something about his image that contributes to his popularity?

BC: Yeah, I think so. And The Man in Black and I would tie that to his prison concerts, which he released as records that he had perceived. And he worked hard to cultivate this…perceived reputation as a friend of the poor, as somebody who was on the side of people that didn’t have a whole lot of people on their side. So the Native American things like that, prisoners, he became a wealthy man, but he projected an image and successfully projected an image as someone with roots in poverty.

MM: Well, you alluded to his work ethic and I think it’s probably fair to say that he picked that up as a child growing up in Arkansas. Let’s talk a little bit about his background. He was born in Kingsland, south of Little Rock, but raised in Dyess, farther to the east, pretty close to Memphis. Can you talk about the role of that area, the role of Arkansas, and maybe the Dyess Colony itself, maybe talk about what Dyess was and tell us about the role of Arkansas in the Dyess Colony and his personal and artistic development.

BC: Well, his personal development is easy, and this would be true of almost anybody on the planet. He moved to Dyess at the age of three. So you don’t remember a lot of your first couple of years, and he stays there till 1950. That’s a long time. 1935 to 1950. He spends 15 years there. Dyess was a New Deal program. It was one of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs to help people survive the depression. And you had to apply to get in. You know, his dad and mom applied. That’s why they moved from Kingsland. You know, moved north. They went to Rison, stood in line and filled out an application form and were selected. It was the biggest of these things. The 16,000 acres. Dyess Colony. And it was sunup to sundown work. But and here’s the flip side of it. And all sorts of Cash descendants, Cash’s kids and Cash himself. So in fact, Cash made a wise comment. He said I was raised under socialism and he said that was some pride. It was for the people who were lucky and they had to be white to be lucky. He recognized that as an opportunity and they saw themselves differently ever after. When they arrived in Dyess, the house hadn’t even been painted. They were in the process of painting it. And the backyard was underwater, but they still walked in and said, this is the nicest place we’ve ever lived in. So it was opportunity with a capital O for people like the Cash’s.

MM: Tell me a little bit more about his life after he left Dyess Colony. He graduated from high school there. Did he go into the military right away or did he go off to Memphis? He was playing music with his family. Tell us about what his life was like after he graduated from high school.

BC: Well, the biggest thing, I think is, because this is a big step away…I mean, if Dyess Colony was a big step upward from the life that they looked like they were slotted for in Kingsland. He joined the Air Force. And he spends a good bit of time, three years, I think, at least in Germany, working for the Air Force. And there, this is the one thing I think that, I mean, he’s not under treated in biographies. There have been a lot of biographies written of him, and I’ve reviewed several of them. But one of the things I think really needs to be emphasized, maybe more than any of them do, is the examinations that he took when he enlisted in the Air Force, singled him out. He did very well on them and was offered and accepted, training programs for pretty high class stuff to do. He wasn’t just going to be peeling potatoes. He worked generally in intelligence. And so that was another big step. And also it took him to Europe. I mean, three years in Europe. So I would say the big thing he did then was enlist in the Air Force. You’re right that he was working for Sun. And we’ve talked about that already.

MM: So how did he get to Sun? I mean, I know that he grew up around music. His mother was a piano player and musician, and he learned music from her and then continued to play music. And I know he played some in the Air Force or in the military. What happened when he came back, when he got out of the military, came back and he headed off to Memphis, right. How did the connection to Sam Phillips and Sun Records come about?

BC: He worked very hard to get it. But he started low. He came to Memphis, strictly speaking, and got a job selling vacuum cleaners. He wasn’t very good at it, but he managed to persuade his employer to help sponsor a show on a local radio station. He’d also embarked on his family life at that time. He married and had the first of his four daughters during those years. And so that’s the Air Force. And then Memphis. And then Sun. But he worked in Memphis, Tennessee, too. You know, they were Memphis musicians. So he got into the Memphis music scene, and then the rest is history.

MM: We know about his rise, the early songs, Folsom Prison Blues, Walk the Line and many others. And then a pretty consistent, steady career trajectory there. A little bit of a dip. But then he ends up in California in the late 60s and records an incredibly famous live album there at Folsom Prison and also San Quentin, I think. Did he ever do anything like that at Cummins Prison or any prisons in Arkansas?

BC: Yes, he did, and you’ve caught me not knowing what you’re going to ask me, but I think he did a concert at Cummins Prison in 1965. That relates to something I was very interested in at one point in my own work, in a song called the Rock Island Line, and the earliest recording of the Rock Island Line was from prisoners at Cummins Prison, and Cash recorded the song and played it. He brought the song back where the earliest recordings were made. I don’t know how much he knew about their prison recordings, but that’s an Arkansas song, and he did sing it at Cummins Prison. Don’t take this to the bank and put money on it. But I think 1965.

MM: Was that something maybe Alan Lomax discovered? It was actually recorded by prisoners?

BC: It was recorded by prisoners, and Lomax recorded it.

MM: That’s fascinating. I didn’t know that. Recently, when I was reading up about the statues of Johnny Cash and Daisy Bates that will be on display at the US Capitol in Washington, D.C., I was reading a little bit about the process of the choosing of these two historical characters, and I really liked what a state senator said about the choice of Johnny Cash and Daisy Bates. He said, “we wanted to do the common person, and I think with Daisy Bates and Johnny Cash, we covered the spectrum in Arkansas. They represent the common folks of Arkansas.” Do you think this is true of Johnny Cash or Daisy Bates, for that matter? And in your mind, this is really the important thing I want to get at. What does the selection of Johnny Cash as a statue representing this state at the U.S. Capitol say about Arkansans?

BC: It’s interesting that he’s paired with Daisy Bates. And just personally, I think that’s a perfect pairing because of course, neither one of them is common. They’re both really outstanding and unique people, and one of the things they share is just a willingness to just keep working at it. They were working at very different things, but they overcame obstacles. Let’s put it like that. Neither one of them was born with a silver spoon, born on third base, and thought he hit a homer. That does not describe either one of those two. And I think that in that sense at least, they’re perfectly matched. And that’s where the state senator, or whoever the politician is, that’s where the politician’s statement rings really and deeply true, that it’d be very hard to find more representative Arkansans. I mean, everybody knows that people in this state, you know, work against obstacles. We’re a relatively poor state. We’re a relatively rural state, and these people overcame that, and they helped other people do the same thing in very, very different ways. I mean, one of them was male and one was female. One was white and one was black, but they have that in common. They came up an uphill trail, and I think that makes it a really appropriate choice.

MM: I won’t get into the historical characters who were the first two statues, but I want to ask you, how you feel about a cultural figure such as…Here we have kind of more of a civil rights leader and a political person as one of the two sort of new symbols of Arkansas in Daisy Bates. The other person is not really political. I mean, he’s more of a cultural figure. And that’s a lot of, most of your scholarship, your writing and research has been music, folklore, movies, that kind of thing. So cultural, more of a cultural, U.S. history kind of thing. So how important is it that Johnny Cash, a cultural historical figure, is, someone who’s chosen as a representative of the state?

BC: I like that, actually, that he’s a culture figure. He’s an art figure, but he’s not a high art figure. He’s a popular art figure. And one thing we haven’t mentioned at all, but your question reminds me of it. A really important strand in Cash’s recorded repertoire, which is huge. You know, his discography is huge. And this brings us to…this is actually stressed in the most recent biography. The most recent biography stresses, as no other one had before, gospel music. If we’re going to talk about Johnny Cash, the music he grew up with, I mean, his mother bought a radio. I mean, they didn’t spend their money freely. So early on in his life, she bought a piano, too, and she could afford a little more. So she really stressed the music and the music was gospel music, along with country music and this latest biography better than the other biographies…there’s some good things about all the biographies, including, by the way, the very first one, Christopher Rentz, Winners Got Scars Too. That’s a great title for a Johnny Cash bio. That came out in 1971, and the most recent biography here in 2022, Colin Woodward’s, Country Boy. So that’s a long period of biographies, but, it’s good to get gospel music in there, too. And short, just to go back. I think if you’re going to pick a cultural figure, you want to pick someone who is popular, who appeals to a broad spectrum of listeners. And he did that in a repertoire that covered a whole lot of ground.

MM: Bob, thanks a lot for coming in today.

BC: My pleasure.

MM: Short Talks from the Hill is now available wherever you get your podcasts. For more information and additional podcasts, visit ArkansasResearch.uark.edu, the home of research and economic development news at the University of Arkansas. Images of Johnny Cash’s statue were provided by the sculptor, Little Rock artist Kevin Kresse. Music for Short Talks from the Hill was written and performed by local musician, Ben Harris.

This story also appeared in the University of Arkansas News publication.