“The best thing out there”: Johnny Cash’s unbridled admiration for Bob Dylan
Any artist that’s been around for a while can recognise when someone is being inauthentic. Some of the biggest names in rock and roll are based on quoting their own heart, and when there’s someone there to collect a quick paycheck, or worse, trying to exploit other artists for their own personal gain, it doesn’t take long for the titans of the genre to call them out on it. While Johnny Cash couldn’t claim to be rock and roll in every sense of the word, he knew when someone was speaking their truth a lot better than he ever could.
Even if he wasn’t purely rock and roll, Cash has been almost cultivated by the genre throughout his career. Everything that he made was as pure to country as most could get, but given how straightforward he was when speaking his mind, he may as well have been a punk before anyone knew what that genre even meant, especially when he got in trouble with drugs or got in trouble at the Grand Ole Opry for stomping out all the stage lights.
But the real appeal of Cash was never about what genre he fit into. It all came down to the songs he chose, and listening to him singing to those prisoners on albums like At Folsom Prison, you’d swear that he was talking to them like a friend before anything else, as if he knew every one of them personally and was more than happy to play the tunes that all of them had lived through.
Even when he pivoted more towards rock and roll with Rick Rubin, that ‘Man in Black’ character never changed. The idea of him playing songs like ‘Personal Jesus’ and ‘Hurt’ might have sounded strange, but now that he was at a stage of life when he focused on mortality, he was speaking directly to his higher power about the complicated feelings he had with religion and the desperate plea to repent for his sins.
If Cash was speaking about what everyday America was like during his prime, Bob Dylan was speaking for every man on the street asking questions. The US had never been perfect during the 1950s and 1960s, and while Cash might not have agreed with everything that Dylan talked about, he knew that his way with words was absolutely necessary for the country during the Vietnam era.
While Cash mistakenly thought Dylan was a country singer at the time, he couldn’t deny that he was one of the finest musical poets to ever grace the stage, saying, “I realized somebody told me who he was — and I said, this is really unbelievable that he could get airplay singing that kind of music. I just heard a fresh approach to some old themes, but really done well with an insight that had never been put on record. I just loved his work, loved him. Always have. Still do. I think he’s still the best thing out there.”
Then again, Cash and Dylan weren’t so different in the way they wrote songs or chose songs to cover. Each of them had their own rough back pages during their time in the spotlight, but hearing them sing songs like ‘Give My Love to Rose’ or ‘Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right’ showed the heart that they could have underneath it all.
And without Dylan to pave the way with songs like ‘Masters of War’ and ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, perhaps Cash wouldn’t have had the courage to write something as blunt as ‘What Is Truth’ and play it in front of Richard Nixon when he took office. Cash was undeniably proud to play country music to anyone within earshot, but sometimes it takes a Dylan figure to get every songwriter to dream bigger.
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