‘The Chicken In Black’: The song Johnny Cash used to “dismantle his own legacy”
The outlaw persona adopted by Johnny Cash during the early part of his career is often accused of being little more than a phoney marketing stunt. After all, the songwriter had never served hard time other than a few days in local jails, usually for drug-related incidents. However, nobody can deny the fact that Cash was a rebel in his own way, always operating by his own desires and refusing to conform to anybody else’s ideas of what he should be.
If you look back at the life and discography of the Man in Black, it reads like a story of constant conflict between the songwriter and his record label. Virtually every decision that made Cash the iconic figure he is today, the singer had to fight tooth and nail for permission to make. Take the legendary Johnny Cash At San Quentin live album, an indisputable highlight within Cash’s career, but a record that his label – Columbia – was incredibly apprehensive about recording or releasing.
Cash released the vast majority of his most notable material through Columbia Records, having signed a lucrative deal with the label in 1958 following his departure from Phillips. However, as the songwriter’s career progressed and interest in country music waned from the music-buying public, Cash found himself not adequately supported by his label. Reportedly, the songwriter felt as if his material was not being properly promoted by Columbia, and that was the reason for his drop in commercial success.
In reality, Cash’s drop in commercial or mainstream success was likely just a reflection of a changing musical landscape. The youth of the 1980s were not nearly as interested in outlaw country music as people had been 20 or 30 years prior. Nevertheless, Cash placed the blame on Columbia and quickly set about cutting short his contract with the record label. To do so, he penned a particularly strange song, ‘The Chicken In Black’, released by Columbia in 1984.
Telling the story of a chicken whose brain is replaced with Cash’s, while the singer has his brain replaced by a bank robber’s, the song was later described by the songwriter as “intentionally atrocious”. Whether the track was a comment on the commodification of Cash’s musical material or simply a cringeworthy comedy song is endlessly debated. In poking fun at his ‘Man in Black’ persona, though, he was directly attacking Columbia Records and how they had come to handle his music.
His daughter, Rosanne Cash, later wrote that in recording ‘The Chicken In Black’, her father was “kind of mocking and dismantling his own legacy.” While there may be some truth to that statement, the song did at least achieve Cash’s aims of severing contact with Columbia Records, who dropped the songwriter from his contract only one year following the release of the bizarre comedy song.
Despite leaving Columbia, Cash’s music career did not witness the sharp uptake in interest that he had anticipated. The following decade saw the songwriter experience unsuccessful stints at various record labels, Mercury being the most notable example. It was only when he was offered a deal at a much smaller, independent label, Rick Rubin’s American Recordings, that Cash’s music found a renewed level of success.
Rubin produced albums like Unchained, The Man Comes Around, and Solitary Man, which helped to cement Cash’s legacy as one of America’s all-time greatest songwriters and performers prior to his death in 2003. Still, the brilliance of those later Johnny Cash albums might have never happened had it not been for a strange comedy song about a chicken, complete with an uncharacteristically colourful music video.
