VARIOUS: Look Again To The Wind: Johnny Cash’s Bitter Tears Revisited

Â
Various Artists
Look Again To The Wind
Sony Masterworks 06067
www.sonymasterworks.com
Â
Â
Â
Forthcoming film:
Weâre Still Here: Johnny Cashâs Bitter Tears Revisited directed by Antonino DâAmbrosio
Johnny Cash was âa holy terror ⌠a dark and dangerous force of nature that also stood for mercy and justice for his fellow human beings,â said Kris Kristofferson (his friend and teammate in the Highwaymen) at the Man in Blackâs funeral in 2003. As his son John Carter Cash once put it (on the DVD Johnny Cashâs America), âMy father had a way of reaching out and singing songs for everyone in need and becoming the spokesperson if need be for those who couldnât speak.â
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of his Bitter Tears , a concept album addressing centuries of wrongs done to our Native American population. Coming at the onset of national turbulence over the Civil Rights Movement and then the Vietnam war, the LP spoke for a people whose worthy issues were often overlooked amid the eraâs altruism. Native American singer and activist Bill Miller says the album âwas a phenomenal boost for my spirit. ⌠It made me feel that someone cared,â in the forthcoming film Weâre Still Here: Johnny Cashâs Bitter Tears Revisited directed by Antonino DâAmbrosio, whose thoroughly researched book A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears (Nation Books, 2009) was the inspiration for the new tribute CD Look Again to the Wind: Johnny Cashâs Bitter Tears Revisited. The arresting film is meant to be a companion to the tribute.
Cashâs original Bitter Tears (Columbia) was a concise 32-minute, eight-cut collection with five tracks penned by Peter La Farge, two by Cash himself and one by Johnny Horton. The tribute album mostly retains the originalâs song sequence but doesnât try to recapture Cashâs charisma and gravitas. How could it? Nor does ace guitar mainstay David Rawlings mimic the trademark tick-tack rhythms on Cash tracks since his early days on Sun Records.
The opener âAs Long as the Grass Shall Growâ (six minutes long in Cashâs hands) becomes a nine-minute meditation by Gillian Welch and Rawlings on the 13-cut tribute, where track 10 is a shortened revision of âAs Long,â this time including Norman and Nancy Blake â Norman being the sole survivor among performers on the â64 original. (By the way, John and June Carter Cash later revamped the ballad into a love song. Long unissued, it surfaced on his posthumous box Unearthed.) The original song has a close-to-nature chorus while the verses pointedly deal with the American government disregarding a 1794 treaty President Washington signed with the Seneca tribe in order to build the Kinzua Dam along the Allegheny River. (The Kinzua controversy also fueled Buffy Sainte-Marieâs angry âNow That the Buffaloâs Gone,â which opened her debut LP, Itâs My Way , in 1964). We see the damâs ravages to Native American land on Weâre Still Here.
Moving on, âCusterâ drolly â even mockingly â relives the legendary 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn. At one point, Cash laughed sarcastically on La Fargeâs composition. Steve Earle (whoâs been known to write fictionally of a loathed 19th century military man) treats it as a talking blues with an acoustic arrangement that would fit on his 1995 comeback CD, Train a Cominâ.
Next comes the final track of the original LPâs side 1. âThe Talking Leavesâ â now quietly narrated by Nancy Blake â speaks of Sequoia, a Seneca who was told that white peopleâs paper with dark markings conveyed meaning so, over time, he created a written alphabet for his own tribeâs tongue.
The albumâs most powerful track of all, La Fargeâs composition âThe Ballad of Ira Hayes,â dramatically began the â64 LPâs second side. (Coming midway on a single-sided CD, its impact is lessened.) Kristofferson gives it a grizzled sound. And who, some may ask, was Ira Hayes? A Pima Native American from Arizona, Ira Hamilton Hayes was among the World War II soldiers in Joe Rosenthalâs iconic 1945 photo of the American flag raising on Iwo Jima (later recreated at the Iwo Jima Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery). A war hero upon returning home, he fell victim to unemployment and drink. In 1955 at age 32, he died in a ditch from exposure and alcohol poisoning.
For truthâs sake, DâAmbrosioâs book points out that Rosenthalâs photo doesnât actually capture a moment of victory. Hayes and his mates were really just replacing a smaller flag that had already been raised there. It seems the Second Battalion commander wanted the original flag for himself. (Ever putting Bitter Tears into historical context, the book also discusses the irrigation system that for centuries had enabled Hayesâs Pima tribe to thrive agriculturally until whites redirected their water supply for their own use.)
Did self-destructive Cash identify with Hayes, no longer a hero in his final dissolute years? Weâre Still Here has a clip of him singing âIra Hayesâ on Pete Seegerâs TV show Rainbow Quest. His face is a painful mirror of substance abuseâs ravages. How did straight-arrow Pete feel about his guestâs condition?
Another La Farge composition, âWhite Girlâ (covered by the Milk Carton Kids on the tribute) tells of an interracial love that cannot be. A few years later, Janis Ian would revisit the theme on âSocietyâs Childâ as Merle Haggard would on âIrma Jackson.â
The LPâs powerful finale, âVanishing Race,â gets expanded by part-Native Rhiannon Giddens of Carolina Chocolate Drops. The original piece was penned by Cashâs angling and sĂŠance buddy Johnny Horton (âthe singing fishermanâ). After years of honky tonk discs, Horton had finally found the road to pop stardom with a series of lively American history songs geared for teenagers, starting with âBattle of New Orleansâ in 1959 and followed by âSink the Bismarkâ and âNorth to Alaska.â âVanishing Raceâ shows a socially concerned side to Horton his hits never revealed. Using his guitar to create a tomtomâs sound, he only did it as a demo tape in 1960, a few months before a drunk driver killed him en route home from a gig. All the stronger for its bare-bones backup, his demo can be heard on Youtube. Recorded before the â60sâ topical songwriting boom, it leaves us wondering how his writing would have evolved had he lived into the folk revival.
The tribute closes with a number not found on Cashâs original LP. Itâs the song that becomes the tributeâs title track. Bill Millerâs sonorous rendition of La Fargeâs âLook Again to the Windâ offers a final note of optimism in a collection filled with bitter tears.
And how was the LP received in the polarized 1960s? Weâre repeatedly told of Columbia Recordsâ negative response. One label exec told Cash he should entertain, not educate. He furiously paid for an ad in Billboard excoriating the media for, in his mind, not having the courage to get behind the album. Yet it made #2 on Billboardâ s country charts, while challenging âIra Hayesâ hit #3 as a country single, showing that it must have gotten airplay and that some country fans were far more progressive than outsiders to their culture stereotyped them. Cashâs earlier recordings on Sun enjoyed their share of trad folk, but Bitter Tears proved he belonged at Newport Folk Festival as much as on Grand Ole Opry. As an artist, the Man in Black defied pigeonholing.
So did Cash himself have Native American blood? Bitter Tearsâ notes ended with âJohnny Cash is proud of his Cherokee blood.â Then, years later, as we hear on the Johnny Cashâs America DVD, he acknowledged, âI wanted to be part Indian so bad I said I was.â
Mentally troubled Peter La Farge (1931-65) sometimes claimed to be full-blooded Native American. More often, he said his parents had blood from New Englandâs Wampanoag and Narragansett tribes. Born into wealth as Oliver Albee La Farge, he was the great grandson of John La Farge, a stained glass artist involved with the creation of New Yorkâs Cathedral of St. John the Divine. In 1930, Peterâs father Oliver La Farge (a strong advocate for indigenous peoples rights) won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel Laughing Boy, most of whose characters were Native Americans. When young Peterâs mother and step father moved the family to the Southwest, his interest in Native concerns grew. As a singer/songwriter in New Yorkâs folk community, he recorded for Columbia and Folkways and wrote for Sing Out! He also helped Seeger build his fireplace and chimney. For a photo of him, Look Againâ s booklet simply reprints a 1966 Sing Out!â s cover. (For that matter, A Heartbeat and a Guitar often cites Sing Out!) Weâre Still Here has footage of him performing. The circumstances of his death are shrouded in ambiguity.
So will the new CD and film lead audiences to go exploring backwards to Cashâs original Bitter Tears? And from there to La Fargeâs discs and to ongoing Native American issues? JR Cash would surely have hoped for the latter.
â Bruce Sylvester