In 1969 Johnny Cash jumped on the T.V. show bandwagon. It seems like everyone had one at the time – Doris Day, Sonny & Cher, etc. but leave it to the Man in Black to put them all to shame. By the time he ventured into the censorship-infested waters of network television, Cash had already beaten a handful of addictions and had a few more left to go but nonetheless, he was already a living legend and he wasn’t shy about using that power to voice his opinion about anything that crossed his mind. Over the course of 58 episodes, the country icon gushed about a trip to Israel to visit the River Jordan and admitted to a group of college students that he had “courted death” during the drug-fuelled early days of his career.
But besides keeping the censors sweating, Johnny Cash also used his rank and status to book the best and brightest of any and every music genre to come on to his show and sing a few tunes. There were plenty of established performers like George Jones (in a powder blue suit) and Loretta Lynn but he also played host to some of the new talent of the day – young upstarts like Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Creedence Clearwater Revival and an act from London called Derek and the Dominos.
As a performer himself, Cash was always amazingly magnetic and those qualities transferred over to his duties as a host as well. Whether it was chatting up a wan Joni Mitchell before dueting on “The Long Black Veil” or sitting at the piano with Ray Charles as the R&Ber played his smokey cover of “Ring of Fire”, Johnny Cash always seemed equally interested in and attuned to the styles of all of varied his guests. Like any seasoned performer though, Cash knew who everyone was really tuning in to see and offered up great performances of his own classics like “A Boy Named Sue” and “Jackson” with wife June Carter.
An introduction to the show puts the contradictory 1969-1971 time span of the show in good context – from Woodstock to Altamont, from the end of Vietnam to the beginning of Sesame Street but, the occasional talking head clips by Cash’s son John Carter and Kris Kristofferson extolling the virtues of the show get in the way. Don’t interrupt a great show to tell us it’s great! |