Album: The Johnny Cash Collection, 1988
Acquired: I picked this up in a mall in Baton Rouge during the Great State Bank Supervisors tour of 1993. My sister and I spent a lot time in the Saturn. We had to have new tunes at irregular intervals. Plus, I had to spend time and money doing something while Clair was making her business calls. I went to malls and historical sites. You'd be surprised how few of either of those there are in towns like Albany, Miss. At least Baton Rouge has a college, state capitol, malls, and levees. That was the first time I ever saw a levee, which, SPOILER ALERT, is really nothing more than a hill between a river and a ditch. It's no wonder they fail.
Best Track: "The Ways of a Woman in Love"
Lasting Memory: My most distinct memory of listening to The Johnny Cash Collection involves the very first time I played it. After leaving the mall, I slipped the tape into the car stereo and set off back to the hotel. Both the mall and the hotel were in the city of BR proper, and the LSU campus lay between my particular points A and B. My route included about two miles of semidirt road. Exactly what did Huey Long accomplish? (I mock even as I tell the truth, but I should also point out that Montgomery County, home to Virginia Tech, had hundreds of miles of dirt roads during the late '80s and early '90s while I was matriculating.)
Many of the songs featured on this apparently unlicensed Johnny Cash greatest hits compilation from Italy evoke specific memories of their own. I can certainly never hear "Ring of Fire" without flashing back to seeing once and future Social Distortion lead singer Mike Ness ripping through his cover version during a solo concert at Washington, D.C.'s 9:30 Club. "Folsom Prison Blues" is every night I ever worked or socialized at Raven Bar & Grill. (By the way, if you go to this link and see the guy who wrote about getting kicked out of the Raven three times, be 100 percent assured that the guy is an absolute ass. It is nearly impossible to get bounced from the Raven for anything other than fighting, sleeping, or puking on the bar/bartender.)
I could go through The Johnny Cash Collection song by song and anecdotalize, but that would be self-indulgent and self-aggrandizing. And who at any point has ever used the blogosphere for self-indulgence and self-aggrandizement? I certainly wouldn't want to be the first.
What I will do is note that this particular collection gives second life to Cash songs that were hits in their day but are far outside the canon. Notable among these "oh yeah, that song" inclusions are "The Wreck of the Old '97," "Ballad of a Teenage Queen," and "The Ways of a Woman in Love." The first is a story song about a train engineer who misses a curve running down a Virginia mountain between the towns of Lynchburg and Danville, blows out his airbrake, and dies with his hands still on the throttle. It's also the source of the name of the kickass alt-country band Old 97's.
"Ballad" is a bit of teenybopper fluff about a small-town girl who goes to Hollywood to become a star but returns to the middle of nowhere to marry the boy from the candy store who she never stopped loving.
"The Ways of a Woman in Love" deserves quoting.
You've cut out your dancin'
And you never see a show
Friends drop by to pick you up
And you hardly ever go
It seems your head is in the clouds above
You've got the ways of a woman in love
I walk by your house at night
In the hopes that I might see
The guy who's got you in a spin
I wish that guy was me
I don't know why it's you
I'm dreamin' of
You've got the ways of a woman in love
Many is the night I've stayed awake and cried
Now you'll never know how much you've hurt my foolish pride
I recall your kisses
The times I held you tight
Now when I come to see you
You're sittin' in the light
Missing all the things that we dreamed of
You've got the ways of a woman in love.
While this is undeniably a stalker anthem (hello, "Every Breath You Take") teetering on the edge of becoming a murder ballad (hello, "Banks of the Ohio"), "Ways" is also undeniably sweet. Listeners can't help but feel bad for the boy who is sad because his ex-girlfriend is happy. A listener also can't help but relate with one of the characters in the song. Which character that is at any given time will depend.
The value of having a song like "Ways" play alongside a better known Cash song like "Folsom Prison Blues" is that it presents fuller picture of the man's discography, which is almost unbelievably extensive and diverse. The juxtaposition also gives a sense of how Cash delved into all aspects of the human condition and, as both a songwriter and interpreter of others' works, sicceeded in illuminating how people live, love, and pray. It is telling that an excellent Cash career retrospective issued by his longtime label Columbia in 2000 was titled Love, God and Murder.
Up Next: Johnny Cash, American Recordings, 1994
No comments:
Post a Comment