Poet in black?

Johnny Cash is presented in this book as a celebrity literary poet, with photographs of his handwritten pages appearing as illustrations. Cash was a singer, songwriter, movie actor, and television personality who sought public acclaim through live performances and recordings. Cer­tainly he was a celebrity, one of the most popular entertainers of his generation. Whether he wanted to be known as a literary poet is a question to ponder.

If these poems do not establish Cash as a literary artist, at least they show the depth of his relationship with words. A complex and reflective man, he knew the power of crafted words in reaching an audience, the importance of words in guiding his personal beliefs and values, and the usefulness of words in shaping his legacy. His deeply resonant speaking and singing voice, so familiar and so often parodied, can almost be heard in these rough, sad, earnest, and funny lyric poems. Missing from all but a few of them is a good tune by which we might remember them. A poem titled “For­ever” from 2003, the year Cash died, ends with the lines, “the trees I planted still are young / the songs I sang will still be sung.” This book aims to place a new selection of Cash’s lyrics into circulation, that they might be read and remembered.

In the foreword, John Carter Cash writes that when his father died he left behind piles of personal papers and documents. The poems published here were chosen from hundreds discovered in those stacks. One imagines that many of them were written to be shaped into song lyrics. A love poem, “Let’s Put It to Music,” builds to the lines, “Let’s put it to music / Sing about it.” A talented and charismatic performer, Johnny Cash was first of all a singer.