The song Johnny Cash played every night in the 1960s: “It always gave me inspiration”
When an artist is devoted to their religion, themes of their faith tend to creep up in their work as a regular occurrence, and in the case of Johnny Cash, he couldn’t have been more explicit in his beliefs throughout his career.
Displaying an affinity for gospel music and songs of prayer, Cash released his first collection of hymns in 1959 on his third album, Hymns by Johnny Cash, and went on to release several more records of a spiritual nature in subsequent decades. While other albums of his don’t touch on this aspect of Cash’s life, there’s always been this lingering desire to return to gospel and devotional song, and by the turn of the millennium, he’d released enough music of this nature to put together a ‘best-of’ album that only drew from his catalogue of songs of a religious nature.
Love, God, Murder was a three-album box set that Cash released in 2000, the middle album of which compiled some of Cash’s finest recordings that deal with religion. Not all of it was original material, as he sang some arrangements that had originally been written by Kris Kristofferson and members of The Carter Family, and also delved into several traditional songs, including ‘Great Speckled Bird’, and ‘Oh Come, Angel Band’.
While Love and Murder touched on two of the other most prevalent themes in Cash’s music, it was God that featured some of his most significant recordings, and ones that he held dear due to his beliefs. It’s easy to forget that Cash had this side to his artistry, especially due to how frequently he delved into darker ballads that told the stories of reprehensible characters who were beyond reform, but every time gospel came up in Cash’s work, he always delivered it with as much passion and verve as he would the rest of his material.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, he explained how some of the songs present on the release are there to encourage him and others who may be feeling lost in their faith. “One I wrote called ‘What on Earth Will You Do (For Heaven’s Sake)’ is kind of a challenge to my fellow Christians and to myself as well to walk the walk instead of talking the talk,” he claimed. However, there was one song on the album that he felt was even more significant to him, and that had been a part of his life since the earliest years of his career.
“The other one on there is ‘Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord),’ a spiritual that features the Carter Family,” Cash said. “That may be my favourite. It’s the one that I sang in every concert through the ‘60s, and it always gave me inspiration.”
As a traditional African-American spiritual song that deals with the themes of Jesus’ persecution, crucifixion and eventual resurrection, with a repeated line of “sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble,” in each verse, it’s a song that was written to remind Christ’s followers of the reasons he died, and how powerful it can be to have belief in his story.
For Cash to have sung it every night would have been a reminder to him just how powerful his beliefs were, and even though there were times when his life may have been testing him, having this devotion was what kept him focused.
