The country anthem Bob Dylan called “the most mysterious and revolutionary of all time”
In 1956, the platitudes of popular music had not yet become platitudes. There were still plenty of legs in holding hands, first dances, and thinking about your sweetheart under an improbably large moon. So, you can imagine how revolutionary it was when Johnny Cash took the simple tenets of country music songwriting at its most basic and somehow imbued a few easy notes and five measly verses with the same closing line and created a classic that you could drop an anvil into and never hear it hit the bottom.
‘I Walk the Line’ arrived ahead of its time and changed everything that followed. As Bob Dylan would later write in his memoir, “I‘d always considered [‘I Walk the Line’] to be up there at the top, one of the most mysterious and revolutionary of all time, a song that makes an attack on your most vulnerable spots, sharp words from a master.” Perhaps the most pertinent part of the mastery is that it is barely detectable what the mystery even is. Or the revolution, for that matter.
Study the lyrics, and you’ll find a simple love song. As Cash put it himself, all he was saying was, “I’m going to be true to those who believe in me”. It’s a message so straightforward that the lyrics came to him “as fast as [he] could write”, and within “50 minutes”, the whole song was complete. That unrefined exuberance was even novel and practically proto-punk in the days of polished Tin Pan Alley tracks.
That’s also the beauty of it: in an unfiltered and unconscious manner, Cash wrote what was on his mind. That explains why it’s a love song that doesn’t sound like a love song at all. It’s distant and plodding. The great declaration of fidelity has no bows or ribbons. He doesn’t once mention hand holding, kissing or ever consider any grand instrumentation. That imbues it with more truth and reality than any other love song of the time—the earnest act of day-to-day respect goes a lot further in a true relationship than a grand poem under a weeping willow.
So, perhaps that no-thrills realism explains why the song not only was revolutionary, but also felt that way, too. However, it doesn’t go the whole way to explain why it feels so mysterious. But maybe Dylan’s own ‘Man in the Long Black Coat’ can help shine a light into that darkness. “In some kind of weird way, I thought of it as my ‘I Walk the Line’,” Dylan said of his own Oh Mercy anthem.
The song, as producer Daniel Lanois explained it, is about running away with the circus. “The character in the song,” Lanois told Songfacts, “Is looking for reinvention and some way of going someplace else and running away from convention, and she decides to do it with a man in a long black coat. I think it’s not specifically about the man in the long black coat, but it’s about that inclination that we have to find something new.”
It’s the direct inverse of ‘I Walk the Line’. In Cash’s song, a new life has already presented itself, and he is trying to cling to the old. That’s why it’s an attack on our “most vulnerable spots.” It shows the fragility of love, family, and a settled existence. That’s why Cash’s song doesn’t sound like a love song: it isn’t one. It’s a song about life. It’s a song about how difficult it is just to walk in a straight line in every sense—the whole undercurrent of waving away affairs has largely been overplayed when the point seems much more general than that.
Cash might have been writing with his lover in mind, but he was two years into his marriage, 24 years old, and on the cusp of a new life on the road as a touring musician. That created uncertainty. Uncertainty is not the most romantic word in the world, but it underpins a lot of our lives. Whether it’s running off with the circus or, even more trivially, watching TV and wondering whether you should actually be running off your lunch, our lives are besieged by unceasing questions about what we should be doing with the unending potentialities placed before us.
In five elementary verses, Cash’s epic track ponders life’s unfurling presentiments while he steadfastly tries to march to the beat of an answer he once found to life’s persistent line of questioning. So, maybe that’s why this rudimentary track somehow feels so damn heavy—at least that’s what Dylan seemed to think.
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