While many of his train songs have overlapping characteristics within those four categories, there is usually a singular standout quality that helps identify which category a song fits into most fully.Ĭash’s first experience with a train song coincided almost immediately with his first notable experience in the music business. In analyzing the breadth of Cash’s deft, multipurpose usage of train songs, it seems that almost all of his rail-themed pieces (with a few exceptions) find him assuming the role of one of these four categories - storyteller, historian, sentimentalist, or existentialist. It’s this weird magic trick that we all try to do, and Johnny Cash was one of the best to ever do it.” They’ve got all the violence of the fight and all the forward motion of the flight, and the songwriter is trying to turn that into something that equates to freedom. “In a lot of ways, train songs are the ultimate distillation of the fight-or-flight response. For the last 25 years, Miller has fronted the pioneering alt-country band Old 97s, whose name was derived from “The Wreck of the Old 97” (one of the many bygone train ballads Cash popularized throughout his career). “Johnny Cash owns the train song genre,” Rhett Miller emphatically states. The idea of trains being used for migration in all its forms - geographically moving from here to there, historically moving from past to present, philosophically moving from one concept to the next, emotionally moving from one state of being to another, and metaphysically moving from life to death - was a densely-layered perception that Cash understood and synthesized into his songs in a way that contributes greatly to his overall creative legacy. The secret to Cash’s multifaceted approach to train songs was not to rely solely on their literal characteristics and usages (though he masterfully did that in ways few others could), but also to mine them for their metaphorical, spiritual, and existential value. Writing about Cash’s connection to train songs for a Vanity Fair profile of his American V: A Hundred Highways album, writer David Kamp said: “Trains were in Cash’s veins, insinuating their boom-chicka-boom rhythms into his early records … and serving him lyrically as metaphors for adventure, progress, danger, strength, lust, and American Manifest Destiny.” Whether it was a passing reference in a single lyric, the lead character of an entire song, the central thread of a concept album, or the overarching theme of a multi-disc box set, Cash called on trains in a myriad of ways to serve a wide variety of storytelling purposes. His ingenious ability to draw a new bucket from the same well is evident in his numerous concept albums ( Bitter Tears, Sings the Ballads of the True West, America, The Rambler), his thematically linked compilation sets ( Love, God, Murder and the later released Life), and his litany of gospel and Christmas records.īut of all the oft-visited material in Cash’s expansive musical inventory, there’s one topic with which he seems to have logged the most sonic mileage: trains.įrom his very first recording with the Tennessee Two (the 1955 single “Hey, Porter”) to the very last song he ever wrote (“Like the 309,” posthumously released on American V: A Hundred Highways in 2006), trains were a constant presence in Cash’s career. From his earliest recordings for Sun Records in the mid-1950s all the way up to his final recording session just a few weeks before his death in 2003, Cash’s impressive catalog includes the release of over 150 singles and close to 100 full-length albums. While it seems like there was no subject deemed off limits for The Man in Black, he did seem to return to a few favorite motifs again and again. And please consider supporting No Depression with a subscription for more roots music journalism, in print and online, all year long.Īs one of the most prolific entertainers of the modern era, Johnny Cash sang about a vast array of topics throughout his legendary half-century career. EDITOR’S NOTE: Below is an excerpt from a story in our Summer 2018 print issue “(im)migration” You can read the whole story - and much more - in that issue, here.
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