No doubt it is a sign of encroaching fuddyduddyism, but I regret that the way people get their music nowadays is putting cultural artifacts like album covers and liner notes in a category with phone booths and white Democrats from Dixie. Who would want to be without the liner notes to Johnny Cash's 1996 album "Unchained," in which he wrote:
I love songs about horses, railroads, land, Judgment Day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak, and love. And Mother. And God.
I confess I know this not because I own "Unchained." Last night, I saw a woman, Casey Cep, interviewed on TV about the post office, because it was Mother's Day and she'd written an article about her mom, a mail carrier, that was published in The New Yorker, where Cep is a reporter. I was so favorably impressed by her in the interview that I found the article online, read it—it's great—and then surfed around finding other stuff she's written, including a review of a book about Johnny Cash wherein she quotes the above extract from the liner notes to "Unchained." In the same review she relates the following detail from Cash's life:
Here and elsewhere, Beck [the author of the book under review, Richard Beck's Trains, Jesus, and Murder: The Gospel According to Johnny Cash] wrestles with questions about solidarity and patriotism, and with the complexities of Cash's simultaneously conservative and countercultural appeal. That's a familiar bind for country-music artists, as the recent Taylor Swift documentary "Miss Americana," the career of the Dixie Chicks, and a long litany of actions and notable inactions before them testify. In Cash's case, it came to a head when he was invited to perform for President Richard Nixon at the White House, in 1970. The Administration announced that Cash would perform "Okie from Muskogee," the famous anti-antiwar anthem by Merle Haggard, and "Welfare Cadillac," a racist dog whistle by Guy Drake—but he refused and instead performed his prison set, including "What Is Truth," a protest song of sorts that he likened to Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'."
I'd heard of this kerfuffle before, which leads me to believe Ken Burns covered it in his film on country music? I was 11 when Cash played for Nixon so don't think I remember about it from contemporary accounts! Though Cep doesn't explicitly mention it, the craziest aspect of the whole thing must be that Nixon specifically requested Cash to play two songs that were not Johnny Cash songs. He probably didn't even know.
Casey Cep, on the other hand: doesn't seem to be much she doesn't know about. The daughter of the mail carrier went to Harvard and then, on a Rhodes Scholarship, to Oxford, where she studied theology. The New Yorker sent her to Alabama to report on Harper Lee, and the upshot was Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, which made all the lists of best books of 2019. She is the same-sex spouse of another New Yorker writer, Kathryn Schulz. Cep's abiding interest in religion must be upsetting to votaries of stereotypes relating to Ivy League lesbians. An interview she did in connection with the publication of Furious Hours concluded:
Q: In addition to your English degree from Harvard, you have a master of philosophy in theology from Oxford. Issues of religion and religious leadership come up in this book. I wonder if you think of theological concerns as central to your overall project.
A: Thank you for noticing this. I grew up in the Lutheran Church, and I often say that Sunday services were my first book club, because week after week very thoughtful, very loving people gathered around the same book and tried to figure out what it meant. I was steeped in scripture as a kid, and I've devoted quite a lot of my adult life to studying religion and theology, so I find that it is one of the great themes that interests me—not only as a writer, but as a person in the world, trying to figure out how to be a good partner and community member and citizen of the cosmos. I end up writing about it so much because I think about it so much.
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