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“A trick of the brain…”

“I Hung My Head” seems to me to translate well beyond guns, touching on that universal sense of deep guilt when one does great harm by accident.  This, no doubt, helps explain some of the song’s appeal.  Most of us have never pulled the trigger on a person, but we’ve all screwed up and hurt someone badly, physically or otherwise, without meaning to do so.  If Sting hoped the song would be more than simply “about a gun”, then he hit the jackpot with his refined imagery and storytelling.

But if knowing he wrote it makes you reject the story when Sting sings it, then let me ask you my earlier question in a different way.  Don’t you believe it all, every word, when Cash delivers the lines?

Why did Johnny Cash want to record this song on what he likely could guess was one of the last albums he would release in this life?  I don’t know the answer, though I think this interview (uncited at this source, but seemingly authentic) concerning his 2000 triple box set Love, God, Murder, is most helpful.  This passage isn’t about “I Hung My Head” per se, but it gives us some insight into Cash’s ability to be authentic when singing about guns and murder.

Cash didn’t ask… Bono to write [liner notes] for God…. [but] he’s especially taken with Bono’s line “Johnny Cash doesn’t sing to the damned, he sings with the damned.”

So how come Cash sings so convincingly about murder? He did once have quite a reputation with guns…

“I started off as an antique gun collector, and then I got into shooting–just target practice. I never carried guns. Well,” Cash chuckles, “I guess I did carry a gun, but I never intended to use it. Talking to people in prison over the years who have committed murder, I understand what it’s like, but I don’t really know because I haven’t experienced that. I don’t understand taking another human being’s life; that’s got to be the ultimate sin. But–back to what Bono said, I think he may be right–I watch some of these television preachers and I think, ‘If he’s going to heaven, I don’t want to be with him!’ I’d rather walk among with the damned: If you’ve got a light to shine, why not shine it in the darkest valleys, where people really need it?”

Johnny Cash – Ride This Train, album cover, 1960

Look at the picture at the top of this post, read the caption, and then ask yourself again about whether or not you believe this song when Johnny sings it.  I imagine most of you do.  If so, is it just because you can easily picture Cash with a gun, and that you can imagine him making a bad mistake with one?  Only partly, I’d wager.

Don’t you believe the song more because you just trust Cash when he ‘sings with the damned’, and that’s exactly what he’s doing here?  You’ll have to answer that for yourself too, of course – but for me, and Bono I suppose, the answer is yes.  (Oh, and it might be ‘yes’ for our murder ballad blogger Shaleane, too, though I won’t presume to speak for her – still, check out her first post from last year’s series about Cash and Nick Cave.)

Cash anchors his performance in the character’s horror and self-loathing, and so invokes Sting’s original ‘interesting moral argument’ – “Does this man deserve to die when it was an accident?”  Everything about the way we see Johnny Cash, coupled with the simple, mournful way he delivers these lines, forces us in to a crisis.  The brilliance is that, after listening to Johnny sing it, we fall on one side of the question while the main character falls on the other!  He can’t live with what he’s done and he willingly walks to the gallows but, because of hearing Johnny sing his story, we don’t want him to die.

The disconnect leads us to that place, both terrifying and liberating, where the lone rider comes to fetch us and we “ride together ’til Kingdom come.”

What do I mean?  In the end, the answer to Sting’s question doesn’t matter.  That is to say, in the cold words of Eastwood’s character William Munny as he prepares to kill Little Bill in Unforgiven, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”

Indeed, Johnny “sings with the damned.”  In fact, whenever you hear him you know – he sings with us all.

Artist unverified – presumably waiton at DeviantArt – from this page

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