“My voice doesn’t sound right with it”: The Tom Petty song that Johnny Cash turned down
It’s never easy trying to get someone to understand your song. As much as people try to get to the root of what they want to say in a few lines, there will be people who don’t see the same sentiment in the melody as they do or don’t connect with it the way they intended. Although Tom Petty usually didn’t have to worry about cutting to the chase when making his greatest tunes, country legend Johnny Cash never really understood this classic when he heard it.
Looking back on Petty’s catalogue, one can see that he was never that far away from country music. He still held onto his status as a rock and roll icon, but listening to songs like ‘Louisiana Rain’ and ‘Southern Accents’, it was clear that there was one side of himself that always leaned on those iconic tunes by Hank Williams and Merle Haggard behind the scenes.
But that was only a small helping of what Petty was used to. Outside of breaking out the acoustics and strumming away on a country song, he was also ready to delve into the world of electronic music. It didn’t always sit well with the Heartbreakers, but hearing him take chances on tunes like ‘You Got Lucky’ and ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’ was half the reason why MTV embraced him alongside the other rock veterans.
There is a moment when everything hits a wall, though, and Petty remembered Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) as the era when things started to go off the rails. The songs were still fine, but after spending years on the road with Bob Dylan, it’s hard not to look at the record as a stopgap between the band’s golden age and Petty turning towards a solo career with Jeff Lynne.
If this is what the band sounded like on autopilot, maybe they should have done it more often. A lot of the music on the record was said to be improvised, and while some of it sounds too synthesised, like ‘Runaway Trains,’ ‘A Self-Made Man’ is the kind of rootsy rock song that wouldn’t feel out of place on a later Bob Dylan record or one of Bruce Springsteen’s records.
Even though the lower register of the tune would have been perfect for Johnny Cash’s voice, Petty said that one chord kept ‘The Man in Black’ away from it, saying, “I tried to get Cash to do that one. Be he couldn’t deal with the major seventh chord. He just said, ‘I can’t sing over that. My voice doesn’t sound right with it.’ I couldn’t come up with another chord that sounded right. But I always wanted him to do it.”
It shouldn’t be that hard to work around one chord, but it’s easy to see what Cash was getting at. The major seventh chord sounds almost dreamlike compared to every chord in modern music, and for a man whose discography is known for cutting to the chase, Cash wasn’t going to spruce up his sound that much.
Then again, Cash still had tremendous respect for what Petty did, eventually covering other ballads like ‘I Won’t Back Down’ and ‘Southern Accents’. It’s not like he didn’t admire the heartland rocker, but there was some mystery hidden behind that major seventh chord that would never sit well with him.
