The Man in Black is gone.
I clicked back on my homepage, and what do I see but another noteworthy death! I'm scared to go back there! Anyway, the great Johnny Cash has indeed died this morning. I've recounted the story before, but I've got to relate it again: chances are I wouldn't be the music fan I am today if not for Cash's "Ring of Fire", one of the first records I ever owned. My Dad was a league bowler, you see, when I was 4 or 5 and he would take me along sometimes. I would always wander over to the bowling alley jukebox and ask him to play songs for me, and I asked him to play "Ring" so much that I guess he figured he'd save money if he bought me the 45. Of course, over the years I kinda lost interest in Cash...his TV show was pretty cool, but wasn't on all that long, and as a teen and young man I just wasn't all that much of a country music fan. And let's face it, by the end of the 70s he was perceived as being irrelevant and a relic of bygone days, which made his Rick Rubin-enabled comeback albums all that much sweeter. I picked up his Essential Johnny Cash a few months ago, and have listened to it a lot lately. It's going in the CD player right now, as a matter of fact.
Anyway, he's reunited with wife June now, let's hope, and his legend will grow. Hopefully, there's a big jam session going on right now with Elvis, Carl Perkins, Sam Phillips, and John. And I hope this is it for noteworthy deaths for a while.
Extra: The Louisville Courier-Journal's Jeffrey Lee Puckett weighs in on Cash and his life.
