// A very short digest...a very quiet week. 
// Enjoy...[BP]

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Subject: Fwd: Johnny Cash story
   Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2003 21:39:40 -0700 (PDT)
   From: Reid Mitchell (reidmitchell@yahoo.com>

Nanciphiles:

I apologize if this has been posted before.  It's a moving story.

Reid Mitchell

Alone with the Man in Black

I went to do an interview with Johnny Cash - he so moved me that I gave up
my job and became a novelist

Louisa Young

The Guardian, Wednesday Sept. 17, 2003

So there I was, sitting in Johnny Cash's front room in Hendersonville,
Tennessee, about 10 or 12 years ago. He'd been with journalists most of the
day and I was the last. A couple, I knew from chatting to them, were hacks
with less than no interest in country music. I was worse - I was a fan.
He's looking a little tired, and a little fed up, in a polite way.  The room
is dim, lots of furniture, glass-fronted cabinets full of June's crystal and
cut-glass collection.

"So," I say, "Are you still the Man in Black? Can you tell me why?"

He goes into the stock answer: quoting the song lyrics, about wearing black
for the poor and the beaten down. But I know all that - I'm wondering if
that's still how he feels, 30 years later. 
"I mean, are you still doing it?" I ask. "For the same reasons?"

"Now?" he says gently. There's a wry look in his eye. "Now more than ever...
"

We get to talking about the evils of the world. I mention a song he
recorded: Here Comes That Rainbow Again, by Kris Kristofferson. It's a small
drama. A pair of Okie kids, a waitress and some truckers are in a roadside
cafe. The kids ask: how much are the candies? "How much have you got?" the
waitress replies. "We've only a penny between us". "Them's two for a penny,"
she lies.

A trucker notices. "Them candies ain't two for a penny," he says, and "So
what's it to you?' she replied. Then when the truckers leave, "She called
'Hey, you left too much money!' 'So what's it to you?' they replied."

It sounds hokey - but it's not, not the way Cash sang it, and certainly not
in its first incarnation - the song is based on an intensely touching scene
from Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

I mention this.

"You know that book?" he says, his face lighting up.

"I love that book," I say. "And you know that book!" Why am I surprised that
Johnny Cash has read Steinbeck?

"Know that book?" he says. "I was that book." He smiles at me. It's kind of
like being smiled at by Monument Valley, or the Hoover Dam.  He pronounces
it "Grapesawrath", like Rose of Sharon is pronounced Rosasharn.

"You like that song?" he says, and he pulls over his guitar.

What, really?

He tunes up. I can't quite believe my fortune here. He starts to play, and
he sings that song. In his front room. That pure, deep, thundery,
reverberating voice, just across from me on the other sofa.

"All that was part of my childhood," he says, when it's over. Then he tells
me about the flood when he was a kid, that leads to Five Feet High and
Rising. "You like that song?" Yes I do.

He sings it for me.

"What else, now," he says. "You like Man in Black, don't ya?"

Well yes, I do. And I Walk the Line, and the Tennessee Flat-top Box, and the
Long Black Veil, and Ring of Fire, and the Ballad of Ira Hayes, and John
Henry, and some I'd never heard before.

So, we were there all afternoon, in that shadowy room, and it was one of the
finest afternoons I've ever spent, and definitely the worst interview I've
ever done. We hardly talked. This is how he's choosing to communicate, I
realised. By singing. Which from a singer is not unreasonable - in fact it's
possibly more right, more true, than answering interview questions. Also - I
turned the tape recorder off. 

Why? A one-on-one personal Johnny Cash concert on the sofa and you turned
the tape off? Why? 

Answer: because I knew this was not something which could be repeated. 

Couldn't be, shouldn't be.

He did say one thing I remember: "You have to be what you are. Whatever you
are, you gotta be it."

And I came out realising that I didn't want to be a journalist any more.
Although it was journalism that had given me this extraordinary day, I
didn't want to be the person oohing and aahing on paper about Kris
Kristofferson, John Steinbeck and Johnny Cash. I wanted to be the person
writing and making the stuff that makes the other people ooh and ahh. Cash
loving Kristofferson's song; Kristofferson loving the way he sang it, both
of them loving Steinbeck's book. I wanted to be one of them. Yeah, I know.
But I might as well admit it.

Somebody took a photo with my camera of Johnny Cash and me standing grinning
outside his house, squinting against the low spring sun. He's in black, I'm
in green. He has his arm round my waist. He picked me a daffodil from his
front garden, gave me a kiss, and then I went home, to give up journalism,
bit by bit, and start trying to be what I was: someone who wanted to create.

I had the daffodil on my desk while I wrote my first book. I still have it -
a little dried-up papery ghost of a thing, reminding me that that's what
integrity means: being what you are.

-- Louisa Young's latest book is The Book of the Heart

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Subject: NN: Nanci broadcast
   From: James Troiano 
   Sent: Saturday, September 20, 2003 9:58 AM

Hi folks: 

I did enjoy Nanci's broadcast concert.  I  missed whatever went on between
Love at the Five and Dime and Goodnight New York. It seemed like a great
concert and I wish I were there. Tumble and Fall kept going through my head
and I liked the new song Love Conquers All. 

I turned the show on 8:00 pm eastern time in the hopes that it was not
really pacific time, but alas it was as listed.  I have to get up really
early so I had about three hours sleep. Nanci Caroline is the only person in
the universe who could keep me up that late. But I was rewarded with a
surprise, on the Nugget website Nanci and the Blue Mooners rehearsed about
8pm eastern time-so I heard them practicing. They seem to have a lot of fun
and her marvelous laugh is not merely an act for the audience. 

Best wishes, Jim  

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Subject: NN: Great Quotes from Cartoon Texans
   From: Catelaw@aol.com
   Sent: Saturday, September 20, 2003 6:38 PM

"If they had a sponge to clean up broken dreams, Woolworth's
would still be open." ~~ Peggy Hill, "King of the Hill"

Cate, in Atlanta

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