“Don’t let me or anyone change how you sing.” “Don’t ever take voice lessons again,” the teacher told Cash. Not only was it bigger than he was, it seemed as if his voice had its own ideas about itself, distinct from professional norms. He went to a local singing teacher, hoping to refine The Gift, but after the first lesson his teacher told him that his voice should not be polished or tamed. This was the felt strength of The Gift, its vortex and promise, as well as its threat: the possibility that Cash could birth a second self through it, to not just be JR, wayward son of country trash, but to eventually become Johnny Cash, musician and artist, historical and spiritual vessel, consummate American.Ĭash decided that he should learn to master this new voice. He had to have been a stranger to himself in that moment as well, an unfamiliar (this is among the addictions of art). “I was singing as I walked in the back door,” Cash later wrote, “and she wheeled around from the stove in shock and said, ‘Who was that?’” It seems she thought the sound might be her own father, returned from the beyond.įor Cash, it was an intoxication, a first hint at the life to come: for him to perceive his mother perceiving him and growing confounded in doing so was to realize that he had become, if just for an instant, something unanticipated and strange. Scratching the lower registers of his new voice, enjoying its strange thick texture, he became for a moment unrecognizable to those who thought they knew and loved him, including his adoring mother Carrie. His voice broke into something new, or, to take his own perspective, a different voice broke into him. When he opened his mouth this time, however, a deep, otherworldly sound burst through. This was what life was like for Cash, work and song entwined, just the toilsome rituals of another day. “When I was 17,” he wrote, “I had been cutting wood all day with my father and I came in and I was singing a gospel song, ‘Everybody’s gonna have a wonderful time up there, Glory hallelujah.’” He had been working when he received it, simply doing his chores, adding his blood and sweat to the family engine, keeping on keeping on. There was no way he could have prepared himself for its arrival. Cash would always imply that his voice did not come from his own earthly person but from a spectral elsewhere, outside of him, coming on like the Holy Ghost, selecting him and then commencing its ravishing. It was like an ink drawn from some prior place. ![]() Its snarl, however full of bombast and sanctimony it might have been, also had a lazy cruelness to it, a sense of malignant power held in reserve. His mother was a simple woman but she referred to his voice as The Gift. It just showed up one day, unannounced, there to be misunderstood and wasted, like any other blessing. As the story goes, Cash’s voice presented itself to him late in his adolescence. ![]() Cash built his mythic self to fit his actual voice, behaving as if it had arrived from somewhere else, as if the voice (like a flame) had traveled a great distance to get here.
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