Walking the Line with Johnny Cash
- Thread starter Meanderer
- Start date
was teacher aide for a special needs student (8th grade autistic). he had an assignment to do a power-point presentation on a poet/poem and was clueless where to start. so teacher gave him Shel Silverstein... pretty scary looking dude who wrote some pretty tame poems geared at kids. in our research, discovered SS wrote "a boy named sue". if course, my kid had never heard of SS nor JC!?! sad, huh? teacher was allowing video clips but he was scared to include that classic line near the end of the song!
oh, SS also wrote "the cover of the rolling stone"!
oh, SS also wrote "the cover of the rolling stone"!
Johnny & Shel
"Silverstein said the inspiration for "A Boy Named Sue" came from his friend, radio announcer and humorist Jean Shepherd, who'd been teased as a kid because of his feminine first name. "I fist-fought my way through every grade in school," Shepherd later said. "
The day Johnny Cash's voice walked in the door
“Don’t ever take voice lessons again,” the teacher told Cash. “Don’t let me or anyone change how you sing.”
"Cash built his mythic self to fit his actual voice, behaving as if it had arrived from somewhere else, as if the voice (like a flame) had traveled a great distance to get here. This was correct. As the story goes, Cash’s voice presented itself to him late in his adolescence. It just showed up one day, unannounced, there to be misunderstood and wasted, like any other blessing. His mother was a simple woman but she referred to his voice as The Gift".
"Its snarl, however full of bombast and sanctimony it might have been, also had a lazy cruelness to it, a sense of malignant power held in reserve. It was like an ink drawn from some prior place. Cash would always imply that his voice did not come from his own earthly person but from a spectral elsewhere, outside of him, coming on like the Holy Ghost, selecting him and then commencing its ravishing. There was no way he could have prepared himself for its arrival. He had been working when he received it, simply doing his chores, adding his blood and sweat to the family engine, keeping on keeping on. “When I was 17,” he wrote, “I had been cutting wood all day with my father and I came in and I was singing a gospel song, ‘Everybody’s gonna have a wonderful time up there, Glory hallelujah.’” (Continue)
“Don’t ever take voice lessons again,” the teacher told Cash. “Don’t let me or anyone change how you sing.”
"Cash built his mythic self to fit his actual voice, behaving as if it had arrived from somewhere else, as if the voice (like a flame) had traveled a great distance to get here. This was correct. As the story goes, Cash’s voice presented itself to him late in his adolescence. It just showed up one day, unannounced, there to be misunderstood and wasted, like any other blessing. His mother was a simple woman but she referred to his voice as The Gift".
"Its snarl, however full of bombast and sanctimony it might have been, also had a lazy cruelness to it, a sense of malignant power held in reserve. It was like an ink drawn from some prior place. Cash would always imply that his voice did not come from his own earthly person but from a spectral elsewhere, outside of him, coming on like the Holy Ghost, selecting him and then commencing its ravishing. There was no way he could have prepared himself for its arrival. He had been working when he received it, simply doing his chores, adding his blood and sweat to the family engine, keeping on keeping on. “When I was 17,” he wrote, “I had been cutting wood all day with my father and I came in and I was singing a gospel song, ‘Everybody’s gonna have a wonderful time up there, Glory hallelujah.’” (Continue)
Johnny Cash was the first American to hear about Stalin’s death
"The “Man in Black” was one of those people born with an unfathomable “aura of greatness.”
Every dedicated Johnny Cash fan knows the ups and downs of the iconic singer’s life: The Folsom Prison phase, the charming love story with his best friend and wife June Carter, his addiction phase".
"But it is a fact that the country singer and the cultural legend had led a turbulent life and there are still corners of his life path that are unknown to everyone". Continue
