The songwriter Bob Dylan called “high art”
There is little doubt that if you looked up in the musical almanack who is most widely considered to be the greatest songwriter of the modern age, then Bob Dylan would be the face in the image staring back at you.
Through a myriad of incredible musical moments, Dylan has secured himself that status. A life perforated by truly mesmeric songs, utterly wonderful albums and an inexcusably defiant artistic spirit, Dylan captivated the entire world with his words, even winning himself a Nobel Prize in the process.
It has meant that, over the years, whenever Dylan has taken a moment to appreciate another songwriter, the public has listened. Like Picasso pointing to his favourite painting at the gallery, the stock of said creation can instantly go up. So when Dylan singled out artists like Warren Zevon and John Prine as particularly brilliant, thousands of people flocked to their respective mediums and began listening to them.
However, for one songwriter that Dylan so dearly admired, this was completely unnecessary, for he was already an icon of the highest order.
Johnny Cash has long been regarded as perhaps the most authentic musician of his generation. A sincere country devotee, he mixed his Americana poetry with the rockabilly sounds tyhat were emerging in the 1950s to create a set of songs so deeply entrenched in his expression that they not only stood him out as different from the rolling gang of rockers, like Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, but made him a folk hero too.
Cash seemed to tread the line between multiple genres with a uniquely authentic voice. He rarely ventured into areas where he could not deliver his soulful sounds, but as he crossed genres and prison borders, he did so with a levity that is only given to the most integrous musicians. It was a quality that instantly connected with Bob Dylan, and the moment the two met, they felt like kindred spirits.
“My father told me he met Bob Dylan in a New York City hotel room in the early 1960s,” John Carter Cash told fans in 2014. “They had corresponded, writing letters back and forth. Dad said that when he met Bob, Dylan rushed into his room, jumped on the bed, and began bouncing up and down, chanting I met Johnny Cash, I met Johnny Cash.”
“They had a dear friendship,” his son added. “And although they didn’t spend a lot of time together in the last part of my dad’s life, they never ceased being friends.” It went beyond friendship, too. As neatly captured in the biopic of Cash’s life, when the country singer heard Dylan he instantly began to integrate his songwriting style into his own, they recorded together, Dylan appeared on his TV show and Cash even covered ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ with June Carter. He would later note, “I just loved his work, loved him. Always have. Still do. I think he’s still the best thing out there.”
Those feelings weren’t one-sided, either, and in discussing Cash’s song ‘Big River’ — arguably one of his most beautiful and touching efforts — Dylan noted just how elevated Cash’s work was: “There are so many ways you can go at something in a song,” he said. “One thing is to give life to inanimate objects. Johnny Cash is good at that.”
“He’s got the line that goes, ‘A freighter said, ‘She’s been here, but she’s gone, boy, she’s gone.’ That’s great,” Dylan explained. “That’s high art. If you do that once in a song, you usually turn it on its head right then and there.”
It is too easy to think of Cash as an ‘everyman’, or ‘one of the guys’ or more simply as a voice for the working man. He was, of course, all of those things. But perhaps his most outstanding quality was that he was able to authentically be all those things while still working only as a true artist could, with veracious vulnerability, expressing himself as best he could to alleviate his brain and give his audience a breath of comfort or joy. It’s exactly what makes him one of the greats and why Dylan was so completely besotted with him.
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