Classic Cash: Bitter Tears

This is another excerpt from a thread about Johnny Cash I posted on a messageboard about three years ago.



June 1964. On the 9th, Dylan records Another Side of Bob Dylan in a single, all-night session fuelled by two bottles of Beaujolais. While on the 30th June and 1st July, Cash records the eight songs that make up Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian.

It is an ironic twist of fate that in the same month that Dylan bade farewell to "protest songs" forever in songs like "My Back Pages" ("I was so much older then/I'm younger than that now), Cash should record his first protest album: although as we have seen, sympathy for the downtrodden and exploited and even the criminal was a characteristic of his songs from the start.

As we have seen in our survey of Ride This Train and Blood, Sweat, and Tears, Cash's musical interests lay far beyond the confines of Nashville, and he was basically working in the same field as the hipster folkie crowd in Greenwich Village, New York, with the exception that he had sung traditional songs in the cotton fields rather than learning them from records. Cash is the bridge between country and folk. He was never as conservative as many of the Nashville crowd, and when he first heard Dylan's Freewheelin' , he recognized someone with the same sympathy for the underdog that characterized his own best work. He would play the record before and after his shows and eventually wrote to Dylan expressing his admiration. It was no surprise that in his reply Dylan stated that he had followed Cash's career since first hearing 'I Walk The Line'. In fact, Dylan can be heard talking about Johnny Cash (albeit none too complimentarily) in the very first circulating recording we have of Dylan (when he was just an 18-year-old Minnesota kid called Robert Zimmerman). Despite enjoying a huge pop hit with "Ring of Fire" in 1963, Cash was determined to make his own folk-protest album.

A few weeks after making that album, Cash and Dylan finally met (July 1964) . "When Bob Dylan first met Johnny Cash, at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964," Kris Kristofferson said in Madison Square Garden in 1992, "they say that Dylan just looked up at him, like a big tree, and walked all the way around him and said, YEAH!" This would be the beginning of a friendship that would culminate in their recording together in Nashville in 1969. In the meantime, when the furore over Dylan's going electric erupted in 1965, Cash wrote a letter to Billboard Magazine, ending with the words: "Shut up and let him sing!"

Back to Bitter Tears. This is a very impressive album: a fine selection of songs brilliantly arranged and performed. Five of the eight songs were written by the American Indian folk singer Peter LaFarge.

Peter LaFarge, adopted son of Oliver LaFarge, first winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature–the book was "Laughing Boy," a sympathetic treatment of the Navajo Indians. The F.B.I. took an interest in Peter and began hounding him when he organized FAIR (Federation for American Indian Rights). Several months before he died, the F.B.I. raided his New York apartment at midnight. They scattered and tore up his papers; they put handcuffs on him and dragged him to Bellevue in his pajamas [sic]. They put pressure on Bellevue to declare him insane, but Bellevue could find nothing wrong and turned him loose.

LaFarge died of a stroke just a few months after Cash's recording of Bitter Tears, although rumours persist that he committed suicide. His own recordings of his songs are still available on Folkways and Broadside recordings, but his name remains known largely through Johnny Cash, and Bitter Tears stands as an unintended tribute (the liner notes still talk about him in the present tense, so it is to be hoped that he lived long enough to hear the album).

It cannot be stressed too much that Cash was taking a big risk in releasing Bitter Tears. He needed commercial hits like "Ring of Fire" to enable him to persuade Columbia to allow him to continue producing his American musical histories such as the albums I have been focusing on (from Ride This Train onwards). But this political album risked alienating his core, basically conservative, country music audience. Cash actually took out full page ads in the music press, daring radio programmers to play "The Ballad of Ira Hayes", the single off the album, but to no avail. Although the single was a hit, radio stations refused to play it.

Dylan's song "With God on Our Side" is basically about the way history is taught in American schools. "Oh, my name it means nothing/My age it means less/The country I come from/Is called the Mid-West/I's taught and brought up there/The laws to abide/And that the land that I live in/Has God on its side." The rest of the song is a recital of the history lessons learned in school. (It owes a debt to Pete Seeger's "What did you learn in school today?") One of the verses is: "Oh, the history books tell it/They tell it so well/The cavalry's charged/The Indians fell/The cavalry's charged/The Indians died/For the country was young then/With God on its side."

But a new generation was beginning to question these history lessons. They were to find that Johnny Cash had already been there. The basically patriotic Ride This Train already pays tribute to the Indian contribution to American history and mourns the fate of the native Americans (as they were not then called!) evicted from their homes and slaughtered in great numbers as the white man moved westward, ever westward...

A tall, brooding man, Cash could pass for a native American himself; in fact, he did claim at this time to be a quarter Cherokee, although he later admitted this was untrue. A self-mythologising story, perhaps, but it does show the extent of his sympathy with his subject. And he took the songs back to the people who inspired them: there is remarkable footage in the BBC documentary "The Last American Hero" shown over Christmas that shows Johnny performing "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" to a native American tribe.

So here is a rundown of all the tracks on Bitter Tears n its entirety. It's still in print, but has not yet been remastered.

As Long As the Grass Shall Grow (Peter LaFarge)

A brilliant performance by Johnny. Note especially the effectiveness of the spoken interjections at the end: "Are are you thirsty?... My brother, are you warm?" These never fail to bring a tear to my eyes. The lyrics tell the story of how the Seneca Indians were cheated of their land despite a treaty signed by Washington himself. After the American Revolution, the United States found itself very weak. To placate the American Indians (many of whom fought on the side of the British), the US government offered numerous peace treaties promising land "as long as the grass shall grow and the waters flow". US Courts later interpreted such phrases as pure metaphor, and denied claims to land that the treaties promised. LaFarge uses the example of the damming of Allegheny River, and the consequent dislocation of many Native Americans, near Pittsburgh as proof of these broken treaties. The damming of the river flooded the land of the Seneca Indians (of the Iroqois tribe):

The Iroquois Indians used to rule from Canada way south
But no one fears the Indians now and smiles the liar's mouth
The Senecas hired an expert to figure another site
But the great good army engineers said that he had no right
Although he showed them another plan and showed them another way
They laughed in his face and said no deal Kinuza dam is here to stay
Congress turned the Indians down brushed off the Indians plea
So the Senecas have renamed the dam: they call it "Lake Perfidy".

Apache Tears

One of only two self-penned songs on the record, a simple and effective ballad mourning the tragic fate of the Apache tribe. A couple of explanations: the lyrics mention "Mescalero death moans" - Mescalero is one of the divisions of the Apache.

Dead grass dry roots hunger crying in the night
Ghost of broken hearts and laws are here
And who saw the young squaw they judged by their whiskey law
Tortured till she died of pain and fear

In July 1832, Congress passed a law that totally banned alcohol in the Indian country.

Custer (Peter LaFarge)

A truly remarkable performance as Cash gets right into the persona of an Indian positively exulting in the death of General Custer. This must have been startling in 1964 and later to any white American who had learned only traditional American history: here that history is gleefully turned on its head or presented sarcastically.

Now I will tell you, buster, that I ain't a fan of Custer
And the General, he don't ride well any more!
To some he was a hero, but to me his score was zero
And the General, he don't ride well any more.
Now Custer done his fightin' without too much excitin'
And the General, he don't ride well any more
General Custer come in pumpin' when the men were out a huntin'
But the General he don't ride well any more
With victories he was swimmin', he killed children dogs and women
But the General he don't ride well any more
Crazy Horse sent out the call to Sitting Bull and Gall
And the General he don't ride well any more
Now Custer split his men - well he won't do that again!
'Cause the General, he don't ride well any more!
Twelve thousand warriors waited, they were unanticipated
And the General he don't ride well any more
It's not called an Indian victory, but a bloody massacre
And the General, he don't ride well any more
There might have been more enthusin', if us Indians had been losin'
But the General he don't ride well any more
General George A.Custer, oh, his yellow hair had lustre
But the General, he don't ride well any more!
For now the General's silent, he got barbered violent
And the General, he don't ride well any more
Oh, the General he don't ride well any more!

The Talking Leaves

The other self-penned song on the album, which tells its own story.

The Ballad of Ira Hayes (Peter LaFarge)

The single from the album, see above. Dylan later recorded this for his "New Morning" album, though it was eventually omitted, only to be released on Columbia's revenge album when Dylan left the label in 1973. The album was simply entitled Dylan and consists entirely of songs released against his wishes. It is no longer available in the U.S.A., although it was released in the nineties on CD in the United Kingdom under the title A Fool Such As I.

The song tells the story of a "simple Pima Indian", who, although he had fought for the United States in World War II and even taken part in the famous hoisting of the Stars and Stripes over Iwo Jima, was not given a decent pension and returned home to a life of poverty and alcoholism.

Drums (Peter LaFarge)

Another song about education - this one the attempted forcible assimilation of the remaining Indians, partly by teaching them history from the white man's point of view, even giving them "white" names. The chorus warns that Indian culture will not go away.

Well you may teach me this land's hist'ry but we taught it to you first
We broke your hearts and bent your journeys broken treaties left us cursed
Even now you have to cheat us even though you think us tame
In our losing we found proudness in your winning you found shame

And there are drums beyond the mountain Indian drums that you can't hear
There are drums beyond the mountain and they're getting mighty near....

White Girl

A song about the difficulties of interracial marriage, a very hot topic in America at the time.

The Vanishing Race

The final song was written by J. Horton, and is impossibly melancholy, as the singer mourns the death of his people.

And he gazed below with a heart of woe where the prairie schooners sail
A vision formed like a mortal storm in the dust of the wagon train
A vanishing race appeared in space and he sang his sad refrain
Ii Ii ou Ii Ii Ii ou Ii Ii ou....

Three years after I wrote the above piece, Cash's classic protest album has still not been remastered.

Classic Cash: Blood, Sweat, & Tears

This is an excerpt from a thread about Johnny Cash I made on a messageboard three years ago.








Blood, Sweat and Tears celebrates the American working man - black and white, free, convict, and slave, all those who earn their crust or are forced to labour in the sweat of their brow. The album starts with the grunting of a man sweating in hard physical labour and the sound of an axe swinging against cold steel. This is the prelude to the story of John Henry, a semi-mythical African-American folk hero. To quote Wikipedia:

Like other "Big Men" (Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, Iron John), John Henry served as a mythical representation of a particular group within the melting pot of the 19th-century working class. In the most popular story of his life, Henry is born into the world big and strong. He grows to be one of the greatest "steel-drivers" in the mid-century push to extend the railroads across the mountains to the West. The complication of the story is that, as machine power continued to supplant brute muscle power (both animal and human), the owner of the railroad buys a steam-powered hammer to do the work of his mostly black driving crew. In a bid to save his job and the jobs of his men, John Henry challenges the inventor to a contest: John Henry versus the steam hammer. In the process, he suffers a heart attack and dies. In modern depictions John Henry is usually portrayed as hammering down rail spikes, but older songs instead refer to him driving blasting holes into rock, part of the process of excavating railroad tunnels and cuttings.

Johnny's version is suitably epic in conception, clocking in at over eight minutes. There is a lot happening in this song - I seem to hear something new every time I play it. The changes of tempo, the vivid narration and characterization of the various protagonists make the song dramatic and moving (particularly in John Henry's death-bed speech to his wife) at the same time. John Henry is taunted:

But the bad boys came up laughin' at John Henry They said," You're full of vinegar now but you bout' through! We gonna get a steamdrill to do your share of drivin' Then what's all them muscles gonna do? Huh? John Henry? Gonna take a little bit of vinegar out of you."

Hiding in a coal mine during his lunch break, he hears the pit foreman shouting:

Get up whoever you are and get a pickax Mine me enough to start another hell and keep it burnin' Mine me enough to start another hell.

Whether slaving down the mine or driving steel (hammering stakes into the ground in order to extend the railroad), the working man's lot is a hard one in this era of American history. But his labour supports his wife and children, whose livelihood is threatened when the boss tries to replace man-muscle with machine power. John Henry takes his stand against the machine in the name of the working man. In the dramatic climax of the song, the Carter Family shout "Go, John Henry!", and the hero responds with real spit-in-your-eye defiance: "I'll die with my hammer in my hand..but I'll be LAUGHIN'!" In the following remarkable sequence, Cash imitates the machine letting off steam in competition with the swing of John Henry's axe. John Henry is victorious, but it costs him his life.

The next song, "Tell Him I'm Gone", is a real blues song of a type not often sung by Cash. It starts with the same pick-hammer sound as heard in John Henry's Hammer. It tells the story of an escapee from a chain gang who sends a message of defiance to the "captain".

Blood Sweat and Tears is the first Cash albumn to feature The Carter Family, the first family of country-folk music. They are Mother Maybelle Carter (on autoharp) and her daughters Anita, Helen, and of course, Johnny's future second wife June. Anita's voice is an important contribution to "Another Man's Done Gone."

This is a work song collected by those important collectors of American folk songs Alan and John Lomax. It concerns the grim fate of an escaped convict, no doubt a worker in one of the chain gangs of the American South (he could be the escapee we heard in "Tell Him I'm Gone"). Although the song is spare of words, the song does tell us that he was captured and hanged before witnesses, including his own children. The acapella performance by Johnny and Anita is unforgettable. (This is not the song of the same title written by Woody Guthrie and performed by Wilco & Billy Bragg.)

The next song is "Busted," written by Harland Howard. It deals with another aspect of the working man's life in the Depression years (and today!): crippling debt. However, the song is anything but gloomy; as the liner notes suggest, it is almost "philosophically cheerful." Ray Charles had a big hit with this song later.

Light relief is provided by the next song, the story of the famous Irish-American engineer Casey Jones, a real life character, although his story has been embellished in legend. To quote the album liner notes:

In the early morning hours of April 30, 1906, about ten miles north of Canton [Mississippi], Casey and his fireman Sim Webb roared around an S-curve right into the rear of another train. Viewed simply as a chronicle of events, "Casey Jones" is one of the world's most exciting ballads. But it is at the same time a compelling argument for the inevitability of fate. From the very beginning of Johnny Cash's version with its eerie, whippoorwill-like train whistle, we know that Casey is doomed. As Johnny points out, his orders that morning said, in effect, that Casey was "taking a trip to the promised land."

This is followed by "Nine Pound Hammer", a song written by the great Merle Travis, author of several superb songs that sound timeless and traditional to this day. Cash covered his "Loading Coal" (Travis came from a Kentucky mining family) on Ride This Train and would later cover "Dark As A Dungeon" and "Sixteen Guns." "Nine Pound Hammer" is a variant on "hammer" work songs ("Tell Him I'm Gone" shares some of its themes). See this link for an interesting note.

The next song is "Chain Gang"; this time, rather than an escapee, we hear about a prisoner - a "carefree lad that loved to roam", but who was imprisoned on the chain gang for the crime of wandering about with no money in his pocket.

"Waitin' for A Train" is the story of another vagrant - one who travels the country by riding the rails. The price of being free from labour is poverty and homelessness. There is something really lovely and pure in the plaintive way Johnny sings "I haven't got a nickel". Cash re-recorded this one towards the end of his life (it's on the Unearthed boxed set of American Recordings outtakes).

The final song takes us back to the chain gang - "Roughneck" concludes the album on a lighter note. Sheb Wooley's song is about a brawny character who brags "By the time I was five there was no kid alive who could get the best of me"; but now "layin' pipe is ha-a-ard labour." He was "born to be a roughneck." Like "Busted" it takes a semi-humorous, philosophical look at a bleak issue.

Amazingly, this masterpiece (along with the equally excellent "Bitter Tears") has yet to be remastered. Apparently, Johnny Cash's Children's Album was a bigger priority.