‘Sam Hall’: Johnny Cash’s most entertaining character study
The mid-1960s don’t tend to get a lot of analysis or celebration in the timeline of the Johnny Cash story. In that 2005 Joaquin Phoenix film (James Mangold’s Walk the Line), this period between the release of 1963’s ‘Ring of Fire’ and the famous At Folsom Prison live album five years later is mainly presented as a blur of pill popping, jail time, and bad decisions (see also: the depiction of a bumbling, stumbling Cash in Mangold’s more recent A Complete Unknown).
While it’s true that Cash was on a commercial downswing for a few years, however, he was still recording a lot of new material between 1964 and 1966, and much of it—while a few miles off the beaten path of the country music hit parade—was inspired, daring, and among the most interesting work of his career.
1965’s two-disc concept album Johnny Cash Sings the Ballads of the True West is maybe the most out-there of all these overlooked gems. It didn’t make a dent in the country charts, let alone the pop charts, and there are certainly moments where Cash’s well-documented personal struggles seep into the vibes of the recordings.
But if you enter its world for an hour, True West is also one of the more ambitious and rewarding big swings you’ll ever see from a superstar performer fully disinterested in resting on his laurels. Along with tackling a few old traditional songs of the American West (‘I Ride an Old Paint’, ‘Streets of Laredo’, ‘Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie’), there are fun interpretations of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s ‘Mr Garfield’, Carl Perkins’ ‘The Ballad of Boot Hill’, and a Shel Silverstein lyric about a man headed for the gallows, ‘25 Minutes to Go’.
Cash pens a few originals in the same spirit, including ‘The Road to Kaintuck’, co-written with June Carter, which sounds like a believable firsthand telling of frontier life during the French and Indian War. This record is wild, I’m telling you!
And then there’s ‘Sam Hall’, another gallows song with a far more sinister and remorseless speaker than ‘25 Minutes to Go’. A 1930s Tex Ritter cowboy tune with English folk roots, this rendition is the best one ever recorded and may very well be the most entertaining character study in Cash’s entire catalogue—thanks in no small part to his unusual approach to performing it: half as singer, half as actor, all menace.
The origins of the song and character of “Sam Hall” go all the way back to early 19th-century British music hall performers, who sang about “Jack Hall” before gradually changing the name to Sam. Every version was told through the voice of a condemned thief, marching to the gallows with bile in his heart and a chip on his shoulder. When the song migrated across the Atlantic, its new cowboy balladeer incarnation remained just as bitter. Sam Hall was no sorrowful outlaw—he was a swaggering, foul-mouthed antihero who blamed everyone but himself for his impending doom.
This made him, of course, the perfect subject for a Johnny Cash outlaw tune. Tex Ritter had played the part with some pep, and even the famed poet Carl Sandburg recorded a version with some expected gravitas, but Cash’s ‘Sam Hall’ goes way beyond an “interpretation.” It’s a man embodying another, with Cash relying more on a skillset from his budding film acting career than anything he learned from the Carter family.
As Hall, Cash growls his last rites with the manic glee of someone who knows the only power he has left is in the venom he can spit at his executioners. “Oh damn your eyes!” he sneers after listing the people in the crowd. He sings it over and over again, cackling mid-verse, unhinged and giddy and terrifying.
The musical arrangement is spare, even clunky by modern standards, but that subtracts nothing. There’s a punk-like rawness to the whole thing: a jagged little acoustic shuffle, some sloppily thumping drums, and Cash pacing it all like a man swinging from one emotional outburst to the next. It’s thrilling because it’s so remarkably loose that it seems like Cash himself might be unhinged in the studio. And indeed, perhaps he was.
The difference is all too clear when you listen to a much older Cash revisit ‘Sam Hall’ on the Rick Rubin-produced American IV: The Man Comes Around (2002). Here, the wear and gravity in Johnny’s voice, which worked so effectively on his covers of ‘Hurt’ or ‘Give My Love to Rose’, lack the maniacal spirit and permanent youthful fearlessness that brought the Sam Hall character to life, and death, back in ’65.
