Tony Tost - American Recordings (Chapter One excerpt) lyrics

Chapter One- Permanence (1) Johnny Cash introduced one great character to the field: the mythic version of himself. It's the Cash we like to prop up as the authentic one, the evil old sanctified soothsayer that Kris Kristofferson called a biblical character, "some old preacher, one of those dangerous old wild ones," a final prophet in a slow fervor at his pulpit. Pistol in one hand, a page of Revelation in the other? Taste of blood rising in his throat? Sort of a stock character by now, one foot on a ladder to paradise, the other on some sh**s**er's corpse. This version of the man, being made of myth, answers to a list of names: usually to Cash, sometimes to the Man in Black, rarely to John, never to JR, now and then to Sue. Hounded by prisons and trains and violent regrets, chased onto posters, he's the lean fierce wildman of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the somber leviathan of the final decade. But it wasn't until very late in this dream, until the first American Recordings album, that the mythic Cash finally walked forward and backward at once, carrying himself out beyond his time. He had greater celebrity before his final period, bigger albums and better songs, but not the permanence that hung around him at the end. That's the story we are hunting for-his arrival into permanence. American Recordings is the album that did it, and the story is better than true.