Consider the moment — a famous one, and one that’s both exhilarating and chilling, whether you’ve heard it once or 100 times — when Cash sings, in “Folsom Prison Blues,” “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.”
A great wave of cheering rolls forth from the audience, all of them convicted criminals. And although we can’t know for sure exactly why they cheer — and each of them may be cheering for a different reason — we can make a few pretty good guesses: First of all, the line is grimly funny. Second, some of them may have actually done the same thing themselves, for approximately the same reason — not a pretty truth, but there it is.
But I wonder if some of them didn’t cheer for this reason: Here was a man who freely stood before them, singing in the voice of a character who had committed a crime that was probably colder, and worse, than any of the things they themselves had done. Cash’s message wasn’t “I’m better than you are.” It was “I’m lowlier than you are” — and with this, he handed them back some of their dignity. Cash sang in defense of the poor, the downtrodden, the unjustly punished. But he also sang in defense of the humanity of murderers. For that fact alone, I hope that the God Johnny Cash so believed in is right there to greet him. If anyone deserves to find peace in the valley, he does.
[Salon]