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M. Hinds and J. Silverman, "Johnny Cash International: How and Why Fans Love the Man in Black" (U Iowa Press, 2020)
01:10:27
Michael Hinds and Jonathan Silverman examine transnational and translocal fandoms and the legacy of Johnny Cash beyond the United States...
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- [00:00]
Podcast Host
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Michael Hines
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Michael Hines
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Podcast Host
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:24]
Rebecca Buchanan
Hi, this is Rebecca Buchanan, host of New Books Network, New Books and Popular Culture and Today I'm here with Michael Hines and Jonathan Silverman, the authors of Johnny Cash International how and why Fans Love the Man in Black. Michael and Jonathan, thanks for being here.
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Michael Hines
Hi, how are you doing?
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Jonathan Silverman
Thanks for having us.
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Rebecca Buchanan
Great. So I'm wondering if you can both start by sharing a bit about how this book came about. How you started to not only look at sort of Johnny Cash and Johnny Cash fandom, but sort of the international Johnny Cash fandom. So I don't know which one of you wants to start?
- [03:02]
Jonathan Silverman
I guess I met Michael through a query on his. On the website of the American Studies association of Ireland, or what is it? The Irish American.
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Michael Hines
That's close enough. I would say. Irish association for American Studies.
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Jonathan Silverman
Yeah, right. And I was coming over for a conference and wanted to give an additional talk. And I just emailed him and said, is there anywhere I can talk? And he said, yeah, you could talk at my school. Do you have a particular text that you're interested in? It's a poetry seminar. Do you have a particular text you're interested in? And I said, well, I could give a talk about a Boy Named Sue. And he said, oh, that sounds great. So I gave the talk and then Michael and I became friends and we worked together for a study abroad.
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Michael Hines
I should add to this that whenever he communicated that to me, like a Boy Named Sue. I don't think I've ever said this to Jonathan, but in that moment I went, oh, fantastic. You know, like, this would probably be the best turnout for one of these seminars we'll have had in, you know, three years. Because I understood almost immediately, or just I know how much Irish people like Johnny Cash or love Johnny Cash are interested in Johnny Cash. So it was interesting from that point of view just to. Just to hear that, you know, and at the same time, I knew from things I'd done myself, a couple of papers I'd given Exploring Cash as an academic Subject, that there wasn't much work done on them over here in that regard. So it was a really gratifying thing to hear that Jonathan already was committed to that kind of work. But also I knew that people here were so ready to hear it.
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Jonathan Silverman
And then we end up just. Thanks for saying that, Michael. I did not know that story.
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Michael Hines
That.
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Jonathan Silverman
Might have been good to put in the book. But, you know, how do you know?
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Michael Hines
I just didn't make it up.
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Jonathan Silverman
Yeah. So we became friends and we worked together. I hosted a study abroad for my university and Michael served as a co teacher. So we became friends and colleagues that way and then I was approached by University of Iowa to see if I wanted to write a book about Johnny Cash. And Michael and I talked and we thought about first doing a collection and then we said, oh, we should just do this ourselves. And I was going to write about Norway and my experience as a roving scholar, which I. Which Rebecca and I. You should talk. We should talk about sometime. And Michael with his experience with his.
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Michael Hines
Irish shopkeeper, because that actually had happened completely independently. Like I think I met Charlie Taggart and just had talked to him, but hadn't thought the first time I talked to him anything about that being a subject for a book or anything like that. But I think I mentioned it to you that I'd met this guy and then you talking to the woman, Catherine from Iowa. The idea about fandom and international fandom I think was formulated by you, but it was just one of these peculiar. We've all these heuristics attached to this project that I just happened to have had this conversation with this guy and hadn't thought much about it, but all of a sudden it became something that grew and grew.
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Jonathan Silverman
Right, right. And he. And just the details that he played Johnny Cash all day, every day in his. In his shop in Omah. Right, yeah. Where he grew up.
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Michael Hines
Yeah.
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Jonathan Silverman
And it began, I think really academically. We were, we did a survey and we were combing through the Internet looking for international fandom. And then we decided we should interview the person who ran the Johnny Cash Info center, who was in Gronigan, the Netherlands. And then an Irish singer translated, I think a Facebook message from Dutch and just invited himself over to the Netherlands to come be interviewed. That was Barry Winters. And then those guys led us to lots of other places. I think the real key moment in our, in our book was getting in touch with Elvira in. Who's Elvira? And Polgeast, who's the. Is the founder of the Johnny Cash Info center, which is a. An amazing Johnny Cash website.
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Michael Hines
Because one of the interesting things with the contrast between her, say, and Charlie, the shopkeeper in Oma in Northern Ireland, is that Charlie was a very sort of self contained individual, very happy in his fandom, surprised to be spoken to about it, you know, surprised that anybody would actually want to. Quite pleased, but at the same time surprised that anybody would want to actually, you know, inquire into this phenomenon with regard to him. Whereas with Elvira, you know, she was somebody who was very consciously making fandom and Johnny Cash fandom, you know, a kind of her business and her pleasure committed Entirely to doing it internationally. And then in the middle of this, we also have, you know, Barry, a thorough performer, but also somebody incredibly good at promoting himself and projecting himself and that he, you know, in the best possible way, we're delighted he did it. He really put himself in the way of our project, you know, not in.
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Jonathan Silverman
The way of our project. Like, the way that's. That's an Irish expression, not an American expression would mean like he was keeping our project from. In the way was is a good thing. Just like.
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Michael Hines
It's like he made sure. He made sure that the truck stopped so he could get on it.
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Jonathan Silverman
That's right.
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Michael Hines
That's the way I would put it. Whether you want to imagine it as him lying down in the middle of the road or just waving his hands agitatedly.
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Jonathan Silverman
That's the.
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Rebecca Buchanan
He made sure he was part of it. And you got the authentic experience.
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Michael Hines
Absolutely. And it transformed everything, just as Jonathan said. Because one of the frustrations of the project, say, when we were only looking at survey responses, was, of course, you're limited by your questions. People don't necessarily write you 3,000 words and answer to every single question on a survey. You get a lot of yes, no stuff. Some very funny, laconic material. My favorite one was a Norwegian guy who was asked. We asked in the survey, one of the questions was, do you ever sing or perform Johnny Cash? And he just wrote, better not. But meeting people meant that we could inquire further. And it was so gratifying to converse in depth with both Barry and Elvira. That, of course, then that created an appetite for doing the same with other people as well. So their experiences became very core to the project. But it also meant that we could, to a certain extent, deviate as well and go out and find other people and use them as controls and comparators for. For what we were seeing in the lives of. Of Rebecca and. Oh, sorry, not Rebecca, sorry. Elvira and Barry.
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Jonathan Silverman
Yeah. And then. So that led to more travel. Both Elvira and Barry traveled to the US with other people and did two different types of Cash tours. Elvira is more just exposing her Dutch friends to a lot of different types of American culture, including Johnny Cash culture. And Barry did the same thing, but also managed to talk himself on the stage in two different places. One with Johnny Cash's brother, Tommy Cash, and his nephew, Mark Allen Cash, to recreate a sequence of songs on Johnny Cash at Madison Square Garden that I didn't even know about because it had been a while. One thing that sort of happens with these Johnny Cash fans, Vira and Barry is. They, they had read my book. So actually they knew more about Johnny Cash than I did because I put everything I knew into the book. And they had read that and then continued to accumulate knowledge and experience. And so he, and then he, he, I, I watched him talk himself onto the stage at the Carter family compound, and he played the last song that Johnny Cash ever played publicly on that stage and made the host, one of the Carter cousins, cry in front of the crowd. It was, it was just remarkable.
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Rebecca Buchanan
Like, what is it? I mean, this is part of the book, but what is it? Did you feel. You sort of talk at the beginning sort of about what it is about, John? Like, what is it about Johnny Cash that has this sort of international appeal to. And you talk about that appeal to a wide audience. So it's not just conservatives or liberals or progressives, but what is it? Did you start to see or what feeling did you get around that?
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Michael Hines
Well, it's complicated and it's, it's, it's complicated because it's one thing when we're talking about, say, engaging with fans like Barry and Delvara and indeed Charlie Taggart, the shopkeeper in Omaha, because for them it was a long narrative in many ways, a kind born out of. Again, going back to this idea of the heuristic. You know, Charlie Taggart, the shopkeeper, his story about engaging with Cash, it just, it happened one day that he happened to be outside and the radio happened to be playing a song, a radio station that he didn't usually listen to, but the song was if the Good Lord's Willing and the Sun Don't Shine. And that was the hook. But for those long term Cash fans, they tended to have long term stories that were based on living with them, growing with them, and in many ways celebrating the complexity of Kash's career and the various turns he took. And that's in particular what they valued. You know, in many ways, it almost was the kind of longevity and complexity of the life text and everything that went with it. But on the other hand, we encountered huge numbers of people one way or another who had got into Cash at different moments in their lives, but also at different moments in Cash's that Cash himself seems to establish a remarkable kind of chain of events that people can connect to. You know, the number of people that became Johnny Cash fans because they saw Mark Roman X video for Hurt or heard a song from American Recordings. I mean, this. We found out a lot of stuff in terms of that. You know, it's not Just that Johnny Cash fans don't all come from the 1950s and the 1960s. Young people really like Johnny Cash. It was fascinating to see that whenever I went to Portugal to just to sort of explore this university town in Portugal, give a talk on our project, and more or less try and meet as many people as I could who were interested in Johnny Cash. And I was kind of overwhelmed by the experience, you know, and the way in which Cash was this signifier of something. I'm not sure people can always put their finger on what exactly it is that's significant about him, but the feeling that he is significant and the feeling that he represents something very real and pivotal. Me and Jonathan have an unwritten rule where we never mention the word authentic because we don't trust it. But at the same time, it's not to say that Kash necessarily represents authenticity, but he generates a feeling of authenticity for people that seems to be different to the kind of feeling of authentic authenticity that's generated by an awful lot of other artists that people feel safe with Cash, even as they also respond to what's dangerous about him, you know, in terms of some of the material that he sings about and some of the kind of traumatic experience he represents. But the phenomenal trust that he inspires in people, I think, is. Is something almost beyond our estimation. You know, it still surprises me, but you.
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Jonathan Silverman
And then the other half of it is compared to someone like Elvis, and this is a point that Elvira made, is that he had a very long career. He worked in multiple genres. He had five, like, hall of Fame record producers. He had children who married into musical families. He toured forever. And he toured around the world, where someone like Elvis, whose appeal was undoubtedly much broader than Johnny Cash's for most of their parallel careers, did not tour very much after the 50s, I think, almost never went abroad.
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Michael Hines
Yeah.
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Jonathan Silverman
Except through movies and things like that. And his. His estate still register. I mean, still gets a lot of Johnny Cash's music into movies and television shows. And so you'll go onto YouTube and there'll be a recording of Hurt, or. I can't remember the other one, but someone from. Who has just watched Logan. The. What is what. What kind of movies?
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Rebecca Buchanan
Logan Marvel, The X Men. Marvel's X Men?
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Jonathan Silverman
Yeah, yeah, the X Men movie. And it's in the X Men movie. And you'll see a bunch of posts from X Men listeners, watchers that just say, I came here because of Logan. Yep. And so you have one hand. You have Barry Winters, who talks about writing an essay to win a Johnny Cash 45 in the early 1970s. And then you have someone in 2019 watching Logan and becoming a fan that way. I just don't know of many other artists that have that. That sort of long term generative appeal that keeps renewing for every generation, but in a slightly different way.
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Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah, it was. Go ahead.
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Michael Hines
I think the thing that we came up against is that you have this interesting combination with KA of the canny and the uncanny. That on the one hand, what's canny about Cash is that just his sheer appetite for work, his ability to put himself on the road, whether or not his star was sort of high or low and internationally, that was hugely significant. He kept coming back to places like Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, you know, it was, it was part of the rhythm of his life, you know. You know, maybe that's partially because he was frightened to run out of money at some. At some level or something. But at the same time it was something very hard grained in him and that built very, very substantial relationships. And it brings me back to a word I used earlier, which is trust, you know. But the uncanny part of it is how Cash still does all of this work. He's still a hard working artist years after his death because as Jonathan says, it's just amazing to see how those songs, and I think it's probably true to say, particularly now it seems those songs that he recorded with Rick Rubin, things like God's going to cut you down and Hurt, those songs seem hugely vocal in our culture. They seem to speak to people in all sorts of surprising ways and in abiding ways. And to be honest with that, I think when I say it's uncanny, it's because I'm still slightly in awe of that. It's still a source of surprise to me to see how Kash resonates not in terms of perpetuating the same work, but in terms of generating new resonances for new groups of people in new places continuously.
- [20:05]
Rebecca Buchanan
Well, it was interesting because, Jonathan, I think you were a roving scholar about a decade before I was. And I didn't do a workshop on Johnny Cash, but on American history, sort of American music. And by far he was one of the artists that students, students knew they could recall, they could talk about his songs, right. And there was an appreciation for him, right, besides some of the contemporary artists that they know from the us but he was one that they all were like Johnny Cash, Johnny Cash, Johnny Cash. Especially in sort of rural Norway. So I thought that was interesting too, that connection that still Continues with young people even 10 years later. Right?
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Jonathan Silverman
Yeah. I mean, it was, I think I, I think we write in the book that it was not surprising that Norwegians were Johnny Cash fans because, you know, I don't think there's any for, even for me in 2007 and eight when I was there, I was never surprised that there was a Johnny Cash fan, but I was surprised by how many people requested that particular workshop, which was the second most popular after the American presidential election, which is almost was required for schools to listen to. So, yeah, I was. And that was because of the movie. That was only three years after the movie came out. So I think that itself generated a lot of interest in Johnny Cash. And so there was probably some of the, some idea that I would help either verify or expand on some of the lessons that the movie sort of put out in the world.
- [21:49]
Michael Hines
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- [21:55]
Jonathan Silverman
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- [21:58]
Michael Hines
Not amusing.
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- [22:21]
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- [22:49]
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- [23:19]
Rebecca Buchanan
So in your book, right, you sort of set up the Johnny Cash and sort of talking about this context of this fandom. And then you sort of go into this sort of year in the life and you've mentioned some of these people, people that you talked about or looked at. But another thing that you talk about in the context but also in this is The Internet and you look at sort of YouTube and also the comments on videos, but also that Ring of Fire and how there is that sort of performance piece. So could you talk a little bit about what you think the Internet's role is in Johnny Cash fandom in particular, what you saw in those YouTube comments and that performance piece of Ring of Fire?
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Jonathan Silverman
Well, Michael and I are both have a lot to say about this, but I.
- [24:11]
Rebecca Buchanan
Awesome.
- [24:12]
Jonathan Silverman
No, it's good.
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Michael Hines
But just don't make us relive the experience of sitting at a table for what felt like 10 weeks.
- [24:23]
Jonathan Silverman
Watching YouTube videos.
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Rebecca Buchanan
It's Mike Mildred's dream, right?
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Michael Hines
Hey, have you seen this one? Hey, have you seen this one?
- [24:29]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah.
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Jonathan Silverman
Well, I think the question that we really came up, I mean, the. What the Internet taught us. There's two things. One are the YouTube videos, which sort of tell us about how almost iffy the definition of what a fan is. Because it's so. It's just so. Like, is the person posting a song, like posting under a video from Logan a fan? Are all commenters fans? Are people who are posting videos of themselves playing Ring of Fire. Are they fans? You know, like, it's almost the same with authenticity. You know, Michael and I do not, you know, we're not the international court of fandom and we don't pass judgments on who's a fan, who isn't. But it does seem interesting to compare that participation to the way that someone like Barry participates. And then, of course, you have the Internet as the facilitator of fandom, that, you know, Elvira can. Elvira. Elvira and Barry can arrange their trips all the way from Ireland and the Netherlands, all through, you know, travel websites and email and sending videos and things like that in a way that fans from a different era would never even think of.
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Michael Hines
And it's also like the young singer, the Dutch guy who sang with the band the Black Suspenders, Ilvara's band, he had come to Cash through watching the Hurt video. And we were kind of startled when we talked to him on the day they were doing their concert in Cork that, you know, he'd listened to that something like four years previously. And here he was standing in front of us wearing, you know, a full, full kind of cowboy regalia. You know, he owned nothing but cowboy boots. But the idea that in four years he'd gone from watching a YouTube video of hurt to full blown transformation, and that seemed very interesting to me. And we did have a big argument at one point, I remember, about.
- [26:47]
Jonathan Silverman
The.
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Michael Hines
Whole question of speed and Fandom that the Internet brings up, that it goes one way and then there are two aspects to a hard bitten fan. Somebody like say, Charlie Taggart or like Barry, they earned their cash fandom the hard way. You know, they were patiently waiting for releases to come out. Every year they followed him through, you know, 78, you know, 45s, 33s, eight track cassettes, all this kind of stuff. But it was a kind of patient accretion. And on the other hand, Thurnas could acquire all of that almost instantaneously in terms of the listening, in terms of, you know, and of course you have to fight against the algorithms to organize your listening, to get through stuff in sequence, the same way somebody who'd be building up their knowledge gradually would. But I suppose again, Jonathan said we weren't judges of fandom. It came back to the same thing. It's not that it's necessarily. There's nothing wrong with getting your fan knowledge fast. I suppose it's just a fundamentally different experience. And it's what 21st century fandom, I think is like. And you could argue that looking at those fan comments, it didn't seem relevant really for us to look at the comments on the YouTube page and really decide whether or not this is fandom or that isn't or whatever. But to see or to think or conceive of the ways in which what was being expressed could be seen as expressions of fandom and perhaps expressions of a new kind of fandom. Internet fandom mightn't encourage the same very intense, I love this figure kind of fandom that a lot of us grew up with. Maybe necessarily it's a more skittish phenomenon, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's less real, but just fundamentally different.
- [28:48]
Rebecca Buchanan
So you talk a bit too about these ways that fans cover and post Ring of Fire for that year. What is it June 2017 to June 2018. Can you talk a little bit about the different ways in which you saw this sort of participation in the fandom with this particular song and how people sort of posted and participated?
- [29:18]
Michael Hines
The first thing we have to remark is that some of those videos probably had 20 views and some had 20 million. That's something that you have to really take into account what I find so startling about it. And again, I think it's problematic perhaps to think about it necessarily as expressions of fandom in a conventional sense. The stuff that struck me the most were these weirdly intimate scenes where you were practically taken into somebody's family life. I was particularly intrigued by what appeared to be a Dutch family who'd relocated to Malta. Again, I'm building a narrative here. I'm not absolutely sure that that's what was happening, but their family had, I think, three separate postings of performances of Ring of Fire, one in an incredibly kind of subdued domestic party setting. There was a kind of bottle of whiskey on the table and snacks laid on the table, and a young couple sang it in acoustic very, very quietly. But then I noticed there was a comment underneath the video, and the woman had left the comment. I did a search for her, and she appeared with the father of the family on stage singing Ring of Fire in a Maltese burlesque club. And she apparently is Malta's leading burlesque singer, and she's just a family friend. And then there was another video of the family, the patriarch of the family, singing Ring of Fire in a restaurant. So from that, you're going, okay, is this fandom? Quite clearly, somebody in that family group really loves Ring of Fire, and they really presume maybe they're a fan of the song more than they are a fan of Johnny Cash. But what's so interesting is that it also seems to be the case that there's a series, this is a family group that are choosing to put their love of Ring of Fire on online and either inviting themselves or a few other people to look at it. I mean, we stumbled across it entirely by accident. But that struck me as just a kind of remarkable kind of coming together of a kind of desire to perform with a genuine interest in the song. But clearly also this idea of the song taking hold of a network beyond whoever the person is who's the original person with the fondness for it. But on the other hand, then there are people making, you know, getting into auteurism and making really fancy videos based on Cash songs. On the other hand, half the time, Ring of Fire, we're also aware, is just a song people cover and like to cover. So it was impossible for us to tell. And that's just because it's a song that's easy to cover. But on the other hand, they do that because they know that people will like it. It's not sometimes the performance in itself that we're listening for as much as the. What the crowd say, you know, the kind of.
- [32:21]
Jonathan Silverman
Whoa.
- [32:22]
Michael Hines
What do you think, Jonathan?
- [32:24]
Jonathan Silverman
Well, I. I mean, and I would add. I mean, I agree with all that. And I would just add that sometimes it's one of the few places where it feels like Johnny Cash fandom could be a type of currency that people are spending. So. So there's something about the way people cover songs and that's supposed to reflect things back to you. Right. In a way that, like, I have taste, I know I'm cool. I'm going to cover this legendary singer song to show how much I'm committed to this idea of Johnny Cash and the associated values with him. Yeah. And so I think there's a little bit of that, too. And then there's people who just sort of take it. I keep thinking of that. The one. The two covers that I love the most are the one from the Hungarian band with the female singer and violin player. Is that right?
- [33:27]
Michael Hines
I think, yeah, that's it.
- [33:30]
Jonathan Silverman
And they're clearly, like, straddling both those things at the same time. Right. They're. They're sort of expressing their idea that. That. Oh, I. You know, we. We know who Johnny Cash is, and we like Johnny Cash, but we have our own kind of way of making that. And then the German. That German band, the Hermes house band, which has invented a dance associated with Ring of Fire. And the different versions almost exactly Mirror, by the way, the first cover of it comes from June Carter's sister Anita, and it sounds like. Almost like a dirge. And then Johnny Cash turns it into something very lively and whose meaning is sort of undercut by how spirited it is and happy, it seems. So you almost have that split in the covers as well. So it's. I think there's that, too. And by the way, when I talk about currency, I'm not running down the COVID I think we all. I think fandom is often serves as. Especially when you're younger. Fandom often stands in for identity in a lot of different ways. Like, we figure out who we are and who we are to the world by our preferences, and we. You try to find other people with the same preferences. That's just a natural way of people coming together, I think.
- [35:00]
Michael Hines
And I think it's also interesting, you know, there were plenty of people we encountered at one point or another, you know, and we go right back to Charlie at the beginning of the project. He had no interest in listening to anybody's cover version of Ring of Fire. In fact, it was kind of, you know, totally not something he really would consider.
- [35:21]
Jonathan Silverman
Why.
- [35:22]
Michael Hines
Why would any Johnny Cash fan want to listen to a cover of Bringing Fire was his logic. And so that, again, I suppose, just. It's just that, you know, this. I think this comes back to actually what we find. I think this is quite an unusual book in its own way, it's kind of an unusual shape. It takes unusual tangents, goes in unusual directions. Things that we didn't really quite anticipate. But I think that's because that's what we found Johnny Cash fandom to be like. You know, that it was. There were contemplative, quite scholarly people, but then people entirely given over to this idea of performance and, you know, a kind of projective view of experiences, you know, really fascinating to encounter.
- [36:09]
Rebecca Buchanan
And this idea of one of. We haven't talked about Marco yet, and Ring of Fire always makes me, as a little punk rocker that I was, think of Social Distortion and Johnny Cash has sort of move into that realm. So I really appreciated this look at Marco and the French and sort of the Brookolage work you talk about. So can you talk a bit about that fandom? Because we have these people sort of bringing Johnny Cash to others as well. So.
- [36:40]
Michael Hines
Yeah, and. And, you know, Marco. It was such an extraordinary experience meeting Marco because you just. In terms of his gradual release of truly extraordinary information over the space of three hours that I was talking to still astonishes me, you know, I think it was about halfway through where, you know, he announced that he toured with Johnny Thunders and things like that. And yet what was very interesting talking to him about that is that he kind of. Marco still would kind of describe himself as a punk rocker. He's a lot of other things, too. And his interests in music are actually pretty broad at this point. But funnily enough, I kind of felt that he kept. That the Johnny Cash activity was slightly separate from everything else he did and was interesting, given he's a performer, bass player, you know, pretty handy bass player, as far as I can make out. He had never had any interest in playing Cash, he said, and he had no. He was another one saying he didn't really have any interest in Cash tribute bands that, you know, his whole point being no, you know, do it yourself. Look, he sort of attached himself to that kind of punk philosophy. Of course, he's on shaky ground there because his own band, their most celebrated single was a cover of La Mar. And of course, there's a great, you know, a great punk tradition of covers and, you know, so. And of course, in the Portugal chapter, we talked about the. The TDO Boys cover of Folsom, Folsom Prison Blues. But interestingly, for Marco, he had created a kind of special zone for Cash. And I think that in part was because it was so foundational in his own experience and growing up, you know, as you Saw Rebecca, you know, he talks about living in Nigeria as a young boy and his father going in these annual trips to London and coming back with records, and then, you know, they would learn how to play songs from those records. And that his dad brought back. His dad brought back Johnny Cash. And it came. And it came from that. And it's quite at the same time, very, very clear. Even though he doesn't talk much about connecting Cash to, you know, what he did later at the same time was absolutely foundational. And of course, it brings us into a further. I mean, there were other things that we found out in the project after that. I mean, there was this group called. Of people called the Johnny Cash Appreciation Society in Dublin in the 1980s, and they were punk performers who met purposely to perform Cash music and indeed expanded that into punkifying other country standards as well. But this comes back to maybe the earlier question about what's unique about Cash? I mean, that. Or what particularly draws them to them. And I can't remember, was it Rebecca or you, Jonathan, who just used the word cool. Cash obviously represents a very particular version of cool. He represents a very particular angle on culture and society for people. I think that actually that angle can vary, but I think that people really love the fact that he appears to.
- [40:00]
Rebecca Buchanan
Be.
- [40:02]
Michael Hines
Integral to society to some degree, but at the same time, at a very, very interesting commentarial angle upon it, you know, and that that is compounded if you're a fan and you feel slightly dislocated yourself. And for Marco, Cash was incredibly valuable for him in terms of trying to articulate his own relationship to French society. I mean, I'm not sure it's ne. You know, Marco was sort of pretty adamant that there was no. That Johnny Cash has no profile in France. That's not, strictly speaking, true. You know, you'll find Johnny Cash records if you go to any French record store and you can hear Johnny Cash music and there are Johnny Cash impersonators. But at the same time, it probably is true that Cash is not culturally central or as important in France as he might be in some other European countries. But in many ways, that's not what's really important here. What's really important is that Marco felt he had a kind of mission to show France Johnny Cash as it should find him. And the version of Cash that he constructed was a very. A very Marcoish version of Johnny Cash and a very punkish version. I mean, going back to talking about the Internet, Marco's website for the Johnny Cash. I'm trying to remember the proper name of the club, Is it Johnny Cash Fan Club France?
- [41:29]
Jonathan Silverman
I think, I think so. I think that's right.
- [41:31]
Michael Hines
He's now changed the name to Johnny Cash Fan Club France and Europe. Yes, he's got that, you know, imperious kind of like ambition. But the website is not, it's not polished. It's got, it's a, it's got things put in from all over the place and it has these kind of playlists that sometimes work and sometimes don't. But so it's not, it's definitely not the kind of, it's not the kind of website that you could imagine a record company generating. However, it's entirely the kind of website that you can imagine a fan generating. And I think that what Marco does, in many ways he was modeling a kind of fandom for France. Yeah.
- [42:13]
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- [42:24]
Michael Hines
Think he is misunderstood.
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Rebecca Buchanan
You see everyone face consequences.
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Michael Hines
It's intoxicating.
- [42:28]
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Michael Hines
It's nothing you would expect.
- [42:34]
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- [42:43]
Jonathan Silverman
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- [43:32]
Rebecca Buchanan
And one of the you mentioned Portugal when you were talking and some of this relates to that and how Marco's dad brought home records. They learned it. You talk about this idea of cash bombing and another in a Johnny Lydon reference. So we have to talk about talk about that. So can you talk a bit about that idea? Of import, when you talk about Portugal and that idea of Cash bombing.
- [43:55]
Michael Hines
And what was really intriguing about the Portugal trip was that and what emerged quickly because like I said earlier, you know, the original idea was to go over and talk about cash and, you know, make a cash nuisance, like just insert cash wherever I could. I. I didn't into discourse. I didn't need to really do it because once I gave the talk or once then I, you know, encountered people who'd come to the talk, I became kind of it. It was a matter of just trying to kind of fight people off because there was so much to talk about. But what was really remarkable about Portugal and in particular remarkable by contrast, was how liking Cash became in itself a way of not understanding Johnny Cash, but of understanding Portugal. And again, it was a generational thing. The vast majority of the people that I were talking to were people who had gone into Cash fairly recently and in particular since the Rick Rubin albums and stuff like that. But they were also describing how they had, you know, made presence of Johnny Cash records to their parents and sort of like, oh, you know, this is, you know, expanding upon this and why have you done that? But of course, with the history of Portugal, where it was more or less a kind of a pretty much hermetically sealed culture until the mid-1970s when the Salazar regime was finally deposed, it was more or less impossible. Well, certainly in kind of any large scale way to. To import music from outside, unless of course, it was state sanctioned. And Johnny Cash was just the kind of performer that Portuguese people of a certain generation had not seen. And it seemed to be. I was intrigued by this phenomenon of these Portuguese students and people of a kind of more recent generation, almost kind of trying to insist to their parents that Johnny Cash is an experience they should have had. And that I thought it was quite funny when the parents didn't necessarily agree that's just some old guy from the 50s, let's forget about that. Maybe they don't want to remember that they didn't have that 1950s. But at the same time it was intriguing to me in that again, it seemed to be that Cash feels not just culturally significant, but intergenerationally significant. And at the same time that here's. Here's a model of how to live almost or how to think. And that's definitely what we. What would come across in some of these conversations, like with say, Pedro, the rockabilly singer who runs the bar in the town at Coimbra, the city in Portugal that I was in. And I should Add that, you know, Pedro began as a punk and, you know, sort of gradually kind of moved his way over to rockabilly, but did not see any contradiction in that, you know, and. And at the same time, make great play of the fact that he thought of Johnny Cash as a punk as well. His favorite Johnny Cash video was the one where Johnny Cash imitates Elvis. I don't know if you know, the one where he kind of muses his air up. What's that in Jonathan?
- [47:11]
Jonathan Silverman
It's on the. It's on 19. 1959. Town hall party.
- [47:16]
Michael Hines
Town hall party. Just this extraordinary, you know, thing where yet again. And, you know, Johnny Cash is setting himself up as a kind of comic opposition, you could say, but it also is a kind of critical opposition. And I think that's another thing that. I'm not sure how much we got into this with Cash, but I always thought that with Elvis, a big part of Elvis fandom is the desire to sleep with him. That there's an erotic dimension to the appeal in Elvis, whereas I think with Cash, an awful lot of his appeal is intellectual. And I think that Cash's version of cool can be understood in those terms. That means that people are looking to claim that intellectual authority some of the time, which is why it becomes important sometimes for people to contest the meaning of Cash fandom, why so many people want to kind of claim some of that authenticity.
- [48:14]
Rebecca Buchanan
And.
- [48:15]
Michael Hines
And Portugal struck me as a fascinating example of that, because the politics of the culture are so apparent and so tangible that any discussion you have about music or any discussion you have about anything, whether it's sport or any phenomenon of popular culture, you can feel that at the same time, you're pressing pretty hard and instantaneously on the immediate politics of. Of. Of the nation and beyond.
- [48:46]
Jonathan Silverman
Yeah, so. No, go ahead. Go ahead.
- [48:47]
Michael Hines
No, go on. No, add more or less. Finish my thought.
- [48:50]
Jonathan Silverman
I was going to. And I was going to add that I think as much intellectual. I think it's also. I think it's also empathetic. I mean, the. That people find in Cash a sort of emotional counterpart compared to Elvis. Right. The Ring of Fire is about feeling a particular way about love. Hurt is about feeling a particular way about being in the world. Whereas even Elvis's most emotional songs are. There's. You don't really make the connection with Elvis about a subject with Johnny Cash. So much of Johnny Cash's music, and also the speed and the. The speed and everything else of. You know, often his songs are a little bit slower or they vary in speed quite a bit. I think there's that, too. I mean, there's a type of. Where people sort of feel that Johnny Cash gets them, even in a way that, you know, they'll obviously never meet and how could he? But somehow there seems to be something there. And that's why there's, I think, also so many Johnny Cash tattoos. If you put a Johnny Cash tattoo on your body, you're sort of acknowledging that this is a person who I feel a connection with in some way, or says something about me, I guess, too, but. Or. Or combination of. Of all of them.
- [50:16]
Michael Hines
Well, it's like my. My favorite comment in the entire book, as Jonathan knows, is we.
- [50:21]
Rebecca Buchanan
We.
- [50:21]
Michael Hines
You know, just it. Going back to the surveys, there was this Argentinian guy who came up with this formulation saying, johnny Cash is the feeling you have when you sit at the edge of your bed in the morning and wondering if it's worth carrying on. The point about that, to quote Boston, is that that's more than a feeling. That's an understanding of a feeling and a framing of a feeling. It's a very intelligent way of talking about a feeling. And I think that's exactly what Cash does. Now, there were plenty of people who didn't feel quite as desolate about Cash as that, and, you know, it's important, and I know Jonathan's very strong, but this. I mean, like, Cash is a great comedian as well. Right. And plenty of people respond to that, too.
- [51:11]
Jonathan Silverman
Yeah. I mean, the other thing I think that that has made Cash such a broad success is really that he works in so many different genres. You know, he sort of began as a folk slash, country slash rockabilly, then sort of moves into rock, and then basically, along with Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson and a bunch of other, you know, older white male performers, Americana. Oh, that's not true. I think there's a lot of female and African American Americanas. But I think if you ask which of the artists that are sort of connected to that, I think Johnny Cash is one of the first ones, at least, you know, just John Carter. Cash claims that he. He has founded that genre, though. I mean, if you start doing the work backwards, you know, Robert Johnson or, you know.
- [52:08]
Michael Hines
Origin stories are tricky, right?
- [52:10]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yes, yes.
- [52:11]
Michael Hines
Especially in the U.S. i mean, one of the things that I think is that Cash remarkably. And again, this is not so much for people who are expressively, singularly fans of Johnny Cash, but one of the things that's come across this is actually, since the book's come out as well, various communications I have with people who either read it or are looking to get it or contact me about it. Funny enough, they'll quite often say, I love Johnny Cash. I don't necessarily consider myself a Johnny Cash fan. I'm actually really into Slayer Spot. But seriously. But at the same time, I heard this and I heard this by Cash at this particular moment. And I'm absolutely. I'm just intrigued and hooked. And so it means that I think that what Cash is, Cash is exists on a kind of chain of signification for nearly everybody, you know, in terms of their likes or in terms of their cultural preferences, that there's a way you can find yourself to Cash because somehow or other he manages to leave an imprint or he creates a kind of connectivity to just so much across not just the American tradition, but actually beyond that, but let's say kind of an American based tradition, whatever genre you want to call it. I mean, Jonathan and me were really so happy. Our happiest moment in the entire YouTube marathon sessions, it was when we came across these reggae versions of. Well, not so much reggae versions of Ring of Fire, but reggae songs that used Ring of Fire as a kind of sample or used the kind of brass from Ring of Fire. And just even hearing the variation within that, there was just something so joyous and sort of phenomenally interesting about it. But of course, the only way to go from there really was to go right back to Cash again and then think about all of the other significations that have been derived from that same song and from that same couple of bars of music.
- [54:20]
Rebecca Buchanan
Well, and when you both were talking, one of the things that comes up, and Jonathan mentioned that idea of Americana, but you also talk about those people and you mentioned this a little at the beginning of the. Who travel to the United States who really want to sort of document and have this sort of. You don't like the word authentic, but that experience of being in these spaces where Cash was. And so you talk about that. The. I think the collector chapter. So can you talk a bit about that too? What you saw with this wanting to be in the space where Cash was and really wanting to be a part of those spaces in those areas.
- [55:03]
Jonathan Silverman
Yeah, that's interesting. The. The way that both groups of. Of people travel through there. The one person we haven't really talked about is Walter Ringhofer and he is a. He's the proprietor of I. What I think is the only other Johnny Cash museum in the world besides the one in Nashville, which is the Johnny Cash Museum. And it's in I always get. Michael, what's the name of that town?
- [55:33]
Michael Hines
I'll have to.
- [55:34]
Jonathan Silverman
It's a small town in Austria.
- [55:38]
Michael Hines
It's barely a town. But, Rebecca, what we should add in here is that. And my wife pointed this out to me about a week after the book came out, that of course, Walter's surname is Ringhofer, which is very exclusive to Ring of Fire. And it never even occurred to us to make any play in that pun. So, you know Riedlingsdorf, Austria. Sorry, Riedlingsdorf.
- [56:02]
Jonathan Silverman
And so when he was there, when he was traveling throughout this, doing this trip he took. He and his wife took eight. 8,000 photographs and videos. At least 8,000. There might be. Actually be more. And, you know, that tells you one first something about technology, right? That to take 8,000 photos in 1975, you could only be a professional photographer on a high price to gig from a national magazine. Where here, this guy who just basically starts a museum from the Internet. I'm sure that most of his purchases came from ebay and various forms of ebay and communications through fan sites and everything else. So he goes to the US and takes photographs, and he wants to be in the space. I. I don't know if the trip. I don't know if the trip is connected materially to the museum, but it's part of the same impulse to sort of see how much Johnny Cash you can get into your life and what in one way or the other. I think it was the first time he had come to the United States. It may have been the first time he was on a plane. I'm not. All right. Yeah. And so he said, so. Yeah. And so all of a sudden you have this person in this small town in Austria who's expanding his perspective by coming to the United States, and Johnny Cash is the vehicle for that. But, you know, a lot of the photos not in the. A lot of the photos in the. In the stream are not. There are a lot of Johnny Cash things, for sure, but they're a lot just. Just of the area on the airplane. You know, there's a lot of photographs of just taking photos out the wing of. In of her. His traveling companions on the plane. And so that's one. Elvira. I don't think, um, Elvira's trip is, I think, less to inhabit the space that Johnny Cash inhabited and more as a way of making connections with people and also showing people what they can see if they leave where they're from and go travel. And Johnny Cash is, I guess, a type of vehicle in that way, to sort of get people across borders to come experience the United States in a different way.
- [58:39]
Michael Hines
It was also an interesting challenge in actually writing because the. The giving an account of, say, Barry's trip and giving an account of Elvara's trip. I mean, I wasn't there, so it was entirely so I could sit back and relax. But Jonathan was able to write those as. As travelogues. But how do you write about 8,000 photographs and the attendant videos? And how do you. You know. And those videos. It was very funny in a way, you know, that the videos and the images were off the same trip that Jonathan had been on as a participant with Barry. So in a way, ultimately we couldn't re. Narrate our way through all those photographs. The way that we had to actually write about Voltaire was to go back and look at the museum and to see that the photography in itself was not necessarily an extension, but certainly another manifestation of the same impulse that had him build the museum, make the museum. What's to say that those photographs in their own rights aren't some kind of, you know, a museum in their own right. That Voltaire is a remarkable figure in this regard. You know, his desire to collect and to show is something really remarkable. And it was interesting for us to compare notes on from. And this is where we get back to. We haven't really talked about it much, I suppose, the international transnational aspects of that that, you know, Walter had brought. Had brought back, against all laws, of course, a ball of cotton that he picked up in Arkansas and brought it back to the museum. And I went to visit the Cash Homestead myself a few months after with a friend. We were over for a conference and we did the exact same thing. As soon as we saw cotton, we stopped the car. It was actually snowing in Arkansas. When we were there amidst the snow, we were graveling around picking up cotton and smuggled it back into the country to look at it in Ireland, because it's just a signifier of such significance to it, something that we've never seen in its kind of raw form. And then you think about how freighted with history that particular commodity is. And at the same time, I don't know. I mean, obviously I'm not saying that an American takes cotton for granted when they drive past them in the field, but to a kind of European fan with an interest in music coming from the Mid south or the Deep south, it makes their hair stand and end when they see a ball of cotton.
- [61:24]
Rebecca Buchanan
Well, you end. We've Been talking for a while. So you end the book with this thinking of fandoms, and you mentioned the south, but this is in Ireland, in the south, with this sort of performance at the Spike island and the 50th anniversary of Folsom Prison Blues. So can you talk a little bit about that choice of an ending and how that concert with Barry's band really sort of brings your everything back to, you know, brings the circle, closes the circle.
- [62:07]
Jonathan Silverman
Well, I mean, yeah, I think. You think you just said that. So, yeah, I think that showed. I actually, in a way, it just showed. It showed a few things that sort of run throughout the. Run throughout the book. One, Elvira's desire to make connection. So to bring her band over to play with Barry's band. To play with Barry. Barry's goal to recreate Cash and perform Cash wherever he could, and then to do that with an audience. And then for us, when we interviewed the people on the boat, finding out how many different weird threads of Johnny Cash fandom was. Were everywhere. So we. We were on the boat with this one man who was a. Who was there for, I think, a choir sing along. If I'm not. If I recall correctly, we said, oh, so you're not there for the concert? Like there's a concert? He says, my friends and I get together every year and sing. What was. What was it? Ring of Fire? No, it wasn't Ring of Fire. They sang something else, but they had a. Just this random Johnny Cash, this Johnny Cash sing along. And I said, well, that's really interesting. We don't really think of people getting together for a Johnny Cash sing along, you know, and that's one of the other things, is that Michael and I noticed wherever we. Once we started looking for Johnny Cash, he. He's pretty much everywhere. You know, you'd go, I'd go out for a walk in Ireland, in downtown, and someone would be covering them on the street. I was with my mom and my nephew traveling, and I saw two or three buskers playing Johnny Cash in Toronto, and all playing in a very different way. Some playing them very maudlin versions and some playing them very upbeat versions. I met someone else who had done the same thing that Barry did in. In Winnipeg, Canada. So this concert was this connection between Barry and Elvira, who had stayed in touch the entire time that we were writing after they met. Because even though they're not the same, exactly the same type of fan, I think Elvira always appreciates someone else who really is as passionate about Johnny Cash as she is. Even if in a different way. And I think Barry feels the same way. And. And so, yeah, and it was, you know, and then you look at the crowd, and the crowd is all ages and all in, you know, equal in gender. And they're all there to listen to this band who's from the Netherlands and from Ireland, playing an American album that was recorded in our prison 50 years ago. That's really a weird mix of time, place and person. And so I think that's. It seemed like the way to end the book. And I think we say in the book, too, that we were going to arrange our own concert, but of course, we didn't need to do that.
- [65:38]
Michael Hines
It's also where we were on the boats coming away from the concert, and we talked to another guy and he, you know, begins to expand for us on how, you know, Johnny Cash is like Bob Marley, you know, that he, you know, that this is something that he wanted to communicate to us. And the other interesting thing, I suppose that we had some interesting feedback then from Barry the day after the concert, where he clearly wanted to still discuss things and talk about things. And that led us into something yet again, which was a kind of subtle reorientation at the start of the book. We've been talking to people a lot about Cash and Americanness, trying to tease out whether or not it was the idea of Americanness that somehow was drawing people to them. And we weren't really progressing that much with that kind of question. We were finding some interesting things. But in many ways, I think over time, the more people we talked to, and, of course, just the more interesting it became to find out about them and where they were from and how Cash became a lens for viewing their own place. Not so much worrying too much about America or an American perspective, but how does Johnny Cash make the city of Cork look? And in many ways, I think we could find implicitly that Barry, who's from Cork, I think they kind of made Cash into a kind of imaginary Cork man, or an honorary Cork man, I mean, or maybe imaginary as well. And the same thing, I think, happened in. In other places, too, that Cash became this way of. Not exact. You know, it wasn't that he just exemplifies who he was, but it became a way of. For them, defining how they would like to relate themselves to their home place, to their own country. And I thought that was a remarkably powerful thing and something that I didn't really anticipate when we started the project.
- [67:35]
Rebecca Buchanan
So, Mike, usually. Which. That is really interesting, actually, that idea of Johnny Cash being sort of part of those spaces. So usually I end with this question or allowing you to talk about what you're working on next. So I know this just came out. So I don't know if there is anything in the pipes that you're, you know, either of you or both of you are working on or if there's anything with this book that you're trying to sort of push out. So I'll just open that up to see if either of you have any sort of last words about this or new projects.
- [68:13]
Jonathan Silverman
Well, I'm actually doing a collection on the Houston Astros cheating scandal and Michael is writing an essay for the collections with his. With his American colleague about, about cheating and the American way of cheating, I guess. And then I had this long term project on horse racing which I'm not sure I'll ever finish, but I've been, I've only been working on it for 30 years, so I'm sure it's going to come together very, very soon.
- [68:49]
Michael Hines
We should add that that was another thing. The first evening that we met, apart from Johnny Cash's appointed connection, we were having dinner afterwards and it emerged that we both shared not just a kind of love of horse racing, but an interest in it and an interest. We've both written about horse racing, so you can. We both have a season that the Cambridge Companion to Horse Racing. And we know a lot about racehorses named after Johnny Cash songs at this point too, which is interesting to know. We're open to movie offers, of course, for the Cash book. We're not exactly sure how it would play out, but you know, you can.
- [69:24]
Rebecca Buchanan
Get Joaquin Phoenix to revive his giant one.
- [69:29]
Michael Hines
Yeah, well, except. Except unfortunately for him, he would have to keep running into Johnny Cash fans who would critique his performance and tell him that they didn't pick for. Yes, I'd like to get Marco in a movie, though. That would be good.
- [69:42]
Jonathan Silverman
Well, we have this idea, we do have this idea for a screenplay. And the screenplay would simply just be four different types of Johnny Cash fans preparing to cover Ring of Fire. But I don't know. I do not believe that. I don't believe that movie's going to be made.
- [70:01]
Michael Hines
We could just start with Charlie opening his shop and putting on his, you know, putting on his cassette player and then let it flow from there. And, you know, you can do the.
- [70:10]
Rebecca Buchanan
Johnny Cash version of Clerks. Right. Wasn't that the whole like.
- [70:15]
Jonathan Silverman
Yeah, well, that'd be kind of like. Or like a Warhol movie. Probably just sort of like the same. Well, Charlie behind the. Charlie behind the counter.
- [70:27]
Michael Hines
We did. When we were talking about the. When we were looking at all those YouTube videos, there was a. We used to talk about the rabbit hole, and the rabbit hole is not a friendly place. You know, once you were down there. And one Johnny Cash video led to yet another Johnny Cash cover video. To yet another Johnny Cash cover video. And some of the videos, I still wonder if I actually, you know, hallucinated them because we weren't able to find everything. We were going back through our notes for the book. Some of the things that we were sure we'd seen had disappeared and couldn't be retrieved.
- [71:02]
Jonathan Silverman
I mean, that happened more. That happened more than once. Yeah.
- [71:05]
Michael Hines
I wonder what's up there now. You know, that. That's another part of that web stuff. My goodness. You know, just. It's a. A deep. A deep. A deep world. A deep honeycomb never ending.
- [71:19]
Rebecca Buchanan
So this has been Michael Hines and Jonathan Silverman, the authors of Johnny Cash International how and why Fans Love the Man in Black. Thanks for talking with me for the New Books Network.
- [71:33]
Michael Hines
Thank you.
- [71:34]
Rebecca Buchanan
Awesome.
- [71:49]
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