1969: Johnny Cash, At San Quentin
By Adia Victoria
In 2009 I was living in Atlanta when the Tallahatchie River expanded from its bed after an onslaught of unseasonal rainfall. It breached its banks, and over the course of a week had summarily swallowed whole portions of the city. The flood felt like a reckoning and a betrayal of the way Atlantans viewed this habitually docile body of water that snaked unseen through our city.
The flood occurred at a time when I had only recently begun teaching myself the blues on a borrowed Washburn. My knowledge was limited to three chords, and I used them every which way to accompany my burgeoning insights of my native South. That family of chords was all I needed to play along with a man whose music had only months earlier entered my life—Johnny Cash.
My best friend and I would ride through the neon glow of Midtown in a fog of blunt smoke with At San Quentin on repeat. For me, a Carolina girl of 22, reared and country-bred in the Upstate Piedmont, Johnny was the first Southern musician whose vision of the South as a place peopled with simple folk living complicated lives formed and informed by this most peculiar land, matched my understanding of what it meant to be Southern.
At San Quentin was brimming with the kind of folks I had bought side-of-the-highway peaches from, had sat aside them in churches with busted AC units where godly women fanned their faces in vain while awaiting a revelation in the Carolina heat. I intimately knew the kind of small-town hot shot Cash embodied in “Jackson”. I knew him because I was the same no account Southern cuss on the break from a slim pickings village, dead-set against the maw of anonymity all in a bid to make a name for myself in the city.
“Orange Blossom Special” became my anthem as I rode the Amtrak, overwhelmed with youthful avarice and arrogance, up and down the eastern seaboard from New York to New Orleans searching for some vision of a life bigger, wider, and deeper than my Bible school teacher had ever thought to offer.
I could close my eyes and see the type of thick-legged Southern woman June Carter Cash riffed on in her between-song banter. She was the woman who had let her figure go, in favor of getting just a bit too-thick on fried pie, good gravy, ham biscuits and her own sense of self-completion. She measured her down-home authenticity against Twiggy’s then-au courant underfed Mod frame. This was the white Southern woman’s mid-life wisdom, wit and autonomy she brought to the stage.
Black essayist, poet, author and Southern folklorist Margaret Walker describes folk culture as “based on mores, customs, attitudes, and actions developed over a long period of time…folk ways are inevitably tied to the natural life cycle—birth, puberty, marriage, reproduction and death. All of these folk expressions are translated in the literature as symbol, myth, and legend.” Johnny understood the iconic status that the Solid South held in the American imagination as an ancient place still entirely moored to its past. He packaged these symbols and delivered them, tongue planted firmly in cheek, to the inmates of San Quentin prison.
Johnny, a son of the South, knew very well the potency of placing himself decidedly outside the norms of conservative society. He understood that the South, with its unearned self-righteousness and compulsive coherence to the old ways, set itself up as the perfect target to be observed and lovingly taken apart. There is an almost grotesque nature to the heroes and anti-heroes in his songs—the one-piece-at-a-time car thief, the lovesick rambler combing the Mississippi, the boy named Sued hellbent on patricide—all cast against the ever-looming back drop of Jim Crow. This desire to rebel against the South is watered by the sheer nature of what it means to be Southern—the rooted contradictions, the misunderstandings, the complications, the questions, the errant self-doubt lodged deep within us.
It was this same spirit of defiance on display in the iconic image of Johnny giving a vengeful middle finger to a British cameraman who stepped in between Johnny and his audience while filming At San Quentin. This image has remained fixed in American folk culture not as an isolated moment in time, but as the everyday American’s expression of rage towards systems of bullshit daily constricting their lives.
At times Cash’s backing band seems outpaced by the man himself. “A Boy Named Sue” is performed live for the first time, spontaneously. The miracle of the song coming to cohesion around Johnny’s storytelling becomes the emblematic moment of the album. It is the embodiment of the rambling man, armed with his wit, having to wing it because he chose to jump.
The endurance of At San Quentin is testament of its unflinching humanity. As sure as the inmates of San Quentin found themselves realized in the folklore of Cash, so would a twenty-two-year old Black girl in Atlanta four decades later. The power of Cash’s art gave me the ability to witness the Tallahatchie overflowing the interstate not just as a singular natural disaster, but as entry point to dismantle and dissect the very notion of the Solid South. At San Quentin gave me a certain permission to read symbols into the South. At San Quentin gave me a certain permission to create folk expression from my own Southerness and from that big river.
Perhaps this drive to explain.
We carry with us wherever evidence of being from the South—our dress, our insolvent faith, our manner, our accent marks us as clear outsiders even in our own country. Johnny Cash was no exception to this rule. Rather than smoothing away the peculiarities his Southerness born in him, he leaned into this identity. Johnny Cash refined the art of what it meant to speak on his homeland.
Adia Victoria is a student of the blues, poet, southern folklorist and mostly minds her own business. Her latest album “Silences” was co-produced by The National’s Aaron Dessner and was released in 2019. Her mother thought it was weird. Barack Obama, however, thought it slapped.