Who did Kris Kristofferson call the godfather of American music?
The art of any great singer-songwriter is getting someone to relate to the characters before the person with the guitar in their hand. It’s easy for any singer to play to the audience’s emotions and make the kind of song that makes them look like a brokenhearted fool, but there’s a certain magic that comes with writing fictional stories and making someone relate to a song the same way they do when watching a feature film. Kris Kristofferson always grew up in the same era that birthed other legends like James Taylor and Carole King, but he knew some artists were simply too big for words.
Then again, most people would put Kristofferson in that kind of company. He was never the kind of person to mince words whenever he wrote his songs, and even when he gave some of them away to people like Janis Joplin, hearing songs like ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ was like witnessing someone telling their life story over a couple of minutes, knowing that they threw out one of the greatest loves of their life.
But Kristofferson was much more than a rock and roll figure. He was interested in music that spoke to people more naturally, and outside of rock and roll, country music was the one place any seasoned songwriter went to. Despite the greatest names in rock, the best songwriters often came from Nashville, and whether it was Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, or more recent legends like Steve Earle, everyone knew that Music Row was the one place to roadtest material.
If Nelson had been a musical prophet from that time, Johnny Cash would have been the reigning god of the scene. He never claimed to be one of the greatest artists to walk the Earth by any stretch, but the deep growl in his voice and the sympathetic tales he sang were the tunes most people would dream of writing. Cash may not have done as much hard time as most people thought, but when he talked about shooting a man in Reno, there wasn’t a soul in the crowd who didn’t believe that.
And given the vast amount of classics under his belt, Kristofferson felt that Cash was bigger than any other artist could hope to be, saying, “Johnny Cash was a biblical character. He was like some old preacher, one of those dangerous old wild ones. He was like a hero you’d see in a Western. He was a giant. He went from being this guy who was as wild as Hank Williams to being almost as respected as one of the fathers of our country. He was friends with presidents and with Billy Graham. You felt like he should’ve had his face on Mount Rushmore.”
But the reason why Kristofferson spoke so reverently is because he knew what Cash was like firsthand. Although The Highwaymen weren’t nearly the same kind of blockbuster supergroup that the Traveling Wilburys were, Kristofferson served as the resident Tom Petty of the group, looking at people like Waylon Jennings and Cash as mentors for how he could structure some of his greatest tunes.
Cash already had enough under his belt to be one of the godfathers of American music, but the true mark of his greatness was in the final days of his career. He could have spent his time living a quiet life at home, but by working with Rick Rubin, he reminded everyone of the legend that he still was all the way up until his final days when he was working on songs like ‘Hurt’ by Nine Inch Nails or his version of Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’.
Then again, Cash’s strength was simply about being the father figure to legions of songwriters that came after him. It was about his reputation as a friend of underdogs everywhere, and while it’s easy to root for the biggest names in music, Cash knew never to count anyone out even when they were at their lowest.
