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That--and his determination to transcend or ignore musical genres--made Cash's death last week, at 71, an event that provoked a serious sense of loss among people of all ages. Children of the '50s remember the startle of his first eminence: the one Southern star who was not a rebellious kid but a grownup with cavernous eyes and a voice to match. Kids of the '60s recall his pop hits, the TV show he was host of for two years and the easy alliances he formed with musicians beyond country's borders. The X and next generations know his old songs as if they were standards, and his boldly simple later work--especially Hurt, which was nominated for six MTV awards--as emblems of moral and musical purity, an antidote to the glitz and aggression of teen icons. Cash made patriarchal integrity cool.
He carried that integrity around the world. "He's loved in countries that don't even like Americans," says singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson, who was a janitor at a Nashville recording studio in 1965 when he first met Cash. "I've seen that firsthand in the places we've played. People love him because of everything he represents: freedom, justice for his fellow man. He is unlike any other artist I've ever known. He's as comfortable with the poor and prisoners as he is with Presidents. He's crossed over all age boundaries, all political boundaries. I like to think of him as Abraham Lincoln with a wild side."
The stature Cash embodies is not so much out of fashion as above it. His CDs are found in the country section of the music store, but he doesn't quite fit there. He came up with rockabilly phenoms like Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, but few of his songs were hard-driving rave-ups. I Walk the Line, Ring of Fire, Folsom Prison Blues--these are, if anything, contemporary folk songs. Cash sang of specific injustices and eternal truths; he was the deadpan poet of cotton fields, truck stops and prisons. He was a balladeer, really, a spellbinding storyteller--a witness, in the Christian sense of the word. Here was a man who knew the Commandments because he had broken so many of them.
As the decades wore on, and Cash notched his annual eight months on the road, experience and excess left their marks on his face, like a hammer pounding tin. He had the battered charisma of an action-movie star who did his own fights. Here was a man who had earned his craggy good looks, his Old Testament God voice, his unique hold on the pop-cultural imagination. Here, three generations of music lovers agreed, was a man--in all his imperfections and grandeur.
If a fighter is sucker punched by fate, as the characters in many Cash songs are, then the heroic thing is to punch back. Cash, as a man and an artist, had the strength to see that bad times may be not a curse but a challenge. His biggest pop hit, the Shel Silverstein song A Boy Named Sue, might be considered comic frivolity for a man whose voice and choice of material more typically dealt in darkness. But the story of a man searching out the father who gave him a girl's name has its own Cashian moral. At the end of a brutal brawl, the father mutters, "You oughta thank me before I die/For the gravel in your guts and the spit in your eye/ 'Cause I'm the son of a bitch that named you Sue." Adversity made Cash a man, mature and honorable.