The artist Bob Dylan called “the living ultimate end” of country
The sun beat down on Newport Folk Festival like god’s own spotlight. Something auspicious was set to take place that day, but it wouldn’t happen on stage. No, that would be next year. This time out, it was 1964, and a shadier ceremony doused in hush would unfurl behind the curtain, heralding the electric fuzz and steadfast attitude to come from Bob Dylan—the original vagabond was meeting his hero.
But he didn’t just shake hands with the stately Johnny Cash, so the story goes, a grander greeting was taking place—Cash was handing over his guitar to Dylan, a country tradition, a passing of the torch. They’d met a few times before and Cash thought Dylan was “way ahead, out of sight”. But other than respect, what was it that was being exchanged?
Well, that much would become clear in the year that intervened. The next time Dylan stepped out onto the Newport Folk Festival stage, he would be booed and heckled for the simple act of going electric and playing a few frenzied masterpieces.
Cash had somewhat prognosticated this fate. In the March 1964 edition of Broadside, the country hero had penned a small poem eluciating Dylan’s luminary ways, which concluded, “Shut Up! …And let him sing”. That line didn’t just forecast the rigmarole that the freewheeling Dylan would soon be embroiled in but also fortified the folk star to, in essence, not give a damn. There were few stars who gave less of a one than Cash. The Man in Black even dared to play an electric guitar at Newport before Dylan did.
Beyond the music, it seems that this punk-like attitude of righteous lawlessness inspired Dylan. He saw Cash as representing a new form of music in totality, and he endeavoured to walk the same line whether his audience liked it or not. As he said years later, reflecting on the impact of his late friend, “Johnny Cash was at that time – if not now – he was the epitome of country music, the living ultimate end. I loved all of his gospel songs, too. And meeting him at that point was the high thrill of a lifetime.”
Lines like “I shot a man in Reno” practically stung the ears of Dyan as he listened on, awed. You can see the searing influence of Cash on his songwriting when you take note of the lines he picks out as pearlers himself. “His songs meant a lot to me,” Dylan continues in a documentary. “Even that line, ‘I met her accidentally in St Paul, Minnesota’. I mean that would just give me the chills every time I heard that.”
The lyric from the 1958 track ‘Big River’ is of an ilk echoed throughout Dylan’s more romantic songs like the one he and Cash would later sing together, ‘Girl from the North Country’. In fact, singing together would be a firm part of the friendship. “We’d see each other from time to time here and there,” Dylan concluded, “And get together and pound songs out. A lot of it just went by in a blur”. But in that blur, two fellows who marched to their own beat were most certainly rubbing off on each other. One emboldening the other to change the world in the high and hazy process.
That sense that Cash was a fateful musical guide would ring out in Dylan’s final tribute to the country star upon his death in 2003. He wrote: “I was asked to give a statement on Johnny’s passing and thought about writing a piece instead called ‘Cash Is King’ because that is the way I really feel. In plain terms, Johnny was and is the North Star; you could guide your ship by him — the greatest of the greats then and now.”
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