A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears (Nation Press) by Antonino D'Ambrosio is a very passionately conceived and written book. That album (as I must have mentioned a score of times on this blog) is one of my favourites and definitely worthy of full-length treatment, but overall I felt unsatisfied by the book.
"The making of" in the title is in the broadest sense, painting the entire social changes of the early 60s as its backdrop. Of course as an early 60s "protest album" (Cash's own description of the record) that context is not irrelevant, but I think the book fails to really distinguish between the topics with a primary relationship to the album, and those that reside in the outer circles of background. It's A Rough Guide to the Greenwich Folk Boom, the Civil Rights Movement, Music in the Civil Rights Movement and Johnny Cash and Peter La Farge and Some Other Stuff from the Last 50 years in American Popular Culture, which is ... well, OK in theory and would have been better received by me if basic facts of the album itself did not remain cloudy. Also, it's a short book and each of those topics is Big, you know? It's a lot for 230 pages.
Some of the songs of the album (the official album, let alone the outtakes etc) actually go unmentioned through the whole book, and from reading it you wouldn't know, say, who played drums on it. Perhaps I have been trained by Dylanology to expect too much; books about his albums include details of every running sheet, every session, every player, every outtake and alternative version. I'm open to the idea my expectations are skewiff, but even trying to step back from that, there were rather more questions than answers.
The Johnny-Cash-on-the-studio part of the making of Bitter Tears sometimes left me confused. For instance, in the space of a page or so we have conflicting information about Cash's contract at Columbia. On page 64, "[L]earning from his tenure at Sun, Cash made sure the freedom to explore and record different kinds of sounds ... was included in his new deal at Columbia." This is interesting; of course Sam Phillips' aversion to letting his hit machines branch out is well known. (He wouldn't even let Cash record a gospel album, which you would think not terribly controversial in the mid-century mid-South.) But I'm very interested to know of the actual terms in his Columbia contract which guaranteed more artistic freedom. Sadly The Smoking Gun doesn't have a copy of the contract. A couple of pages later, the book quotes producer Bob Johnston (of "Is it rolling, Bob?" Highway 61 Revisited fame) saying Cash was "encountering the same king of stuff [creatively] at Columbia [as he had at Sun."] It leaves me wondering, if "the freedom to explore" was really included explicitly in Cash's contract a) in what terms and b) how could he encounter obstacles to something to which he was contractually entitled? How did that all actually work? Alas, the book does not tell me.
At this point in the story is the recording of The Lure of the Grand Canyon, a project I was not familiar with and still has not been released on CD. Released in 1961, it consists of six tracks, the first five of which are classical pieces and the last Cash's spoken word; you can hear the Cash track here (complete with singing mules!), at the wonderful WFMU Beware of the Blog. Please do so. Composer Ferde Grofé and conductor Andre Kostelanetz have other albums on Columbia going back to the 50s and before, and rather than a mavericky tangent powered by the singular artistic vision of J.R Cash, doesn't it make sense to see the Lure of the Grand Canyon as a project Columbia would have done anyway, and used Cash's mainstream star value to lift up its profile? D'Amrosio says Cash "brought in" conductor Kostelanetz, implying our hero was the creative force. Perhaps true, and I'd love it to be, but I dunno, I'd like to hear more about it to accept that story. This is what I mean that the book raises more questions than it answers.
In Stephen Miller's Johnny Cash: The Life of an American Icon it states it 'was an employee at Columbia Records, Gene Ferguson, who had first alerted Johnny to "The Ballad of Ira Hayes." A Heartbeat and a Guitar doesn't mention Ferguson and gives the impressed the Bitter Tears album sprang solely from Cash palling around Greenwich Village with La Farge and others. No doubt Columbia preferred Cash the hitmaker to Cash the artistic maverick with mavericky ideas about, say, doing a live album from a prison but I find myself wondering exactly what the internal involvement was with the genesis of the record. I would like to have known more of the actual mechanics of how the record comes to pass. It does not diminish the importance of Johnny Cash as a popular artist who pushed and exceeded the boundaries of his genre and time to know that, like all of us, he was pushing and being pushed amid many forces, administrative and bureaucratic as much as any else. I would never begrudge a retelling of the Birmingham bus boycott story but the book is more interested in those wider social events as animating forces than the mundane facts of life, even creative life, that actually produced this record.
I do know a fair bit about the Greenwich folk boom and the Civil Rights movement of this period so I admit that might lie behind some of my frustration. The Native American politics of that period (or any period really) are far less familiar and you may call me hypocritical for accusing the author of the opposite on this score: I would like to have heard more about it. Peter La Farge was not "an Indian", but like Cash adopted that as a persona which makes for a fascinating parallel between the two which I was hoping to see teased out more. I recall as a child people telling me, while contemplating Cash LP covers, "you can see the Indian in his face as he gets older" and it seemed reasonable to me. But of course you couldn't. Cash had no Native ancestry, and he sheepishly retracted the claim after he got sober in the 60s ("the higher I got, the more Indian I got.")
Cash gravitated towards the persona of the outsider in his public life, and this sort of fantasising is part of the addiction, in a way. It's not politically unproblematic of course but at least he disavowed it when his mind cleared of barbiturates. The magical thinking of La Farge, who died in 1965 and sadly never made it to the "survivor" phase of his addictions, is a more interesting case. His father was a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist who was very active in "Indian" rights advocacy, leading one of its major organisations. The books sort of suggests he "let people believe" he was Native. Perhaps initially, but once he made a clean break of his Colorado upbringing and landed in Greenwich Village did people "just believe" or did he given them a nudge along? The liner notes of the Bear Family release of La Farge's As Long as The Grass Shall Grow and On the Warpath, written in 1990, state flatly he was "a full-blooded Nargaset Indian" which is simply not the case. He had no Native American ancestry. I don't enquire into this to judge him or wag a finger (the Native American activists quoted in the book don't seem to reflect on it) however failing to deal with it left a gap in the treatment of La Farge in the book. It doesn't take an enthusiastic armchair psychologiser to see some low hanging fruit here. Here's kid who grows up in the shadow, and eventually becomes estranged from, his Pulitzer Prize winning father, who also happens to devote most of his time not to his kids but to public advocacy for Native American rights and the misfit son adopts a "more Indian than thou" public persona. Daddy issues, much? I don't mean to be flippant (well perhaps I do) but D'Ambrosio is not averse to some critical theory or reaching into the minds of his "characters" and yet on this interesting issue of cultural appropriation - which goes to the heart of his project, yes? -- he lets it slide by without a mention. If you're going to devote two whole pages (in a 200 page book) to the history of Carnegie Hall, as the book does, but not give a paragraph in passing on this stuff, I'm sort of afraid you have lost me.
I was moved to read about how "As Long as the Grass Shall Grow" is still regularly spun on radio stations serving upstate New York around "Lake Perfidy" and the extensive bibliography has given me a lot of things to follow up for which I am grateful. If you were the kind of person who wanted to read a whole book about one album, you should probably still get this one but I think the topic is very far from being fully explored in print.
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