In 2003, when Cash died, that sort of Christianity and patriotism seemed far out of step with the dominant sensibilities in the nation — and perhaps especially in Cash’s native South. In the 2004 election, “evangelical voters” were, in the dominant analysis, the decisive factor in Republican victories. A popular meme depicted a red-state “Jesusland” stretching westward from the South — a solid bloc fervently committed to triumphal evangelical conservatism.
Today, 15 years after Cash’s death, one regularly hears “white evangelicals” are the single most loyal group of Trump supporters. A recent Washington Post article seeks to take the pulse of the pro-Trump “Bible Belt,” and finds it in the First Baptist Church of Luverne, Alabama. There, congregants say Hillary Clinton is “of Satan,” that the Obama presidency “woke a sleeping nation” into seeing its impending peril, and that the Trump presidency involves nothing less than “the survival of the Christian nation.”
The religious politics of these churchgoers are a real part of the South. But they are only a part. In his classic 1953 essay “The Irony of Southern History,” C. Vann Woodward argued that a candid history of the South presented a counterpoint to the “American legend of success and victory.” From a different angle, Flannery O’Connor theorized in a 1962 lecture that Southern history, anchored in the dark blot of the Civil War, was imbued with deeper meaning by the region’s powerful Christianity: Southerners palpably felt their “Fall” and approached modernity with “an inburnt knowledge of human limitations.”
As a child of the impoverished rural South, Cash knew the truths Woodward and O’Connor were articulating, and he sang them into popular culture. The tragic, doleful sensibility through which he sang of Christianity and the national story had — and still has — resonance. It was a sensibility generated out of a genuinely Southern experience and a striking alternative to sweeping assertions about the religious politics of the white South.
It was there in his youth, in songs he composed and sang with a gravitas that seemed beyond his years. On his 1957 hit “Give My Love to Rose” he told of an ex-prisoner who is hoboing trains in a fervent attempt to “see my Rose, and get to know my son,” yet who dies in the railroad yards whispering a plaintive benediction. His 1958 hit “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town” depicted a young cowboy who rejects his mother’s warning, only to have it come back as a haunting epitaph when he is mortally wounded in a gunfight. The steady rise of floodwaters is ominously narrated in his 1959 hit “Five Feet High and Rising,” where a farm family watches helplessly as much of their livelihood is destroyed.
In the 1960s, the story-songs led to a series of concept albums that presented a panoramic vision of the American past. On Ride This Train (1960), Blood, Sweat and Tears (1963), Bitter Tears (1964), Orange Blossom Special (1965), Ballads of the True West (1965), and From Sea to Shining Sea (1968), Cash took the listener on journeys to obscure places with forgotten people. On Ride This Train and Ballads of the True West, the travel frame was overt: Cash’s spoken-word narration between songs wove them together into circuitous tours with Cash as the trusted guide. The packaging of the albums accentuated the journey-into-the-past motif. Cash appeared on the covers dressed as one of the types he was singing about: a gunslinging outlaw, a miner with pick and lantern, a somber Indian, a hobo riding the rails, a hardened cowboy. And his voice, deepened since his early days at Sun Records in the mid-’50s, imbued the stories he sang with a stark, unsentimental seriousness.
