A Heartbeat and a Guitar

The university had graciously offered to grant me access to its prestigious Music Library and Sound Recordings Archives. I soon found myself in the third-floor office of the gregarious archivist Bill Schurk, who regaled me with stories about music and the things archivists find exciting—which I happen to find exciting, too, including the documenting of materials that may seem worthless but over time provide an invaluable record of a moment that has slipped away but thankfully has been preserved forever.

For anyone who loves music, the Sound Recordings Archives is a magnificent place—every recording in human history seems to be housed there. I was excited to get into the shelves of rare LPs, music books, and other music-related media. After speaking with Schurk and his staff, I felt like Tom Hanks’s character in the film Big when he was unleashed in FAO Schwarz and danced joyfully on the huge piano. I requested as many records as I could possibly listen to in my allotted time. The list was long and contained mostly recordings I’d never heard of, including rare albums by Woody Guthrie, The Carter Family, Django Reinhardt, Spencer Davis, Charlie Parker, and The Clash.

After thanking the student who had given me the records, I handled each one as if it were a priceless artifact. (To me they actually all were priceless artifacts.) I listened intently to all of them. Then, near the bottom of the stack, I came upon a Johnny Cash record that I’d checked off the list as an afterthought. I was happy, though, that the record was part of the archives; I had discovered this little-known Cash record while writing about Cash’s collaboration with The Clash’s former front man Joe Strummer for my previous book.

But now, as Cash’s gaunt face and steely eyes stared back at me from the Bitter Tears album cover, I realized that there was something striking, even unsettling about this image. This wasn’t the myth, the persona that has become Johnny Cash, but rather something truer, more authentically John R. Cash, the former sharecropper and cotton picker from Arkansas. In contrast to looking rock ’n’ roll hip—a swaggering, pompadoured balladeer with an acoustic guitar slung over his shoulder—here his famous head of hair was cropped short and ringed by a red headband. The look in his eyes seemed troubled, as if what he was about to share was something heavy and hard.

I slid the record out of its sleeve and a piece of paper fell out, landing at my feet. Picking it up, I saw that it was a copy of a letter Cash had penned on his own letterhead, with his cursive signature at the top, and the proclamation

The disc in my hand was not the original pressing. Bear Family Records, a German independent record label, reissued it in 1984 with lyrics, photos, quotes, commentary, and a few extra songs. It was quite clear from reading the essay-like liner notes that lots of people had lots to say about this Cash record.

The title, Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian, prompted a question: What had Cash been up to? I looked at the recording date: 1964. Barely a year earlier, Cash had scored one of his biggest hits ever with “Ring of Fire.” But the year added another layer of intrigue to the story, for it was a bellwether year in U.S. history. The headlines shouted about the Beatles, Muhammad Ali, the Vietnam War, the Newport Folk Festival, and Martin Luther King Jr.; the Johnson-Goldwater presidential election, the Civil Rights Act, Johnson’s Great Society, and the early stirrings of what a few years later would become known as “Red Power”—taking its cue from the term “Black Power”—the Native movement that took hold in the 1960s and grew in the 1970s among Native people. Recorded four years before Cash’s Folsom Prison performance and the American Indian Movement’s takeover of Alcatraz Island, Bitter Tears was released smack in the middle of the roiling civil rights movement and escalating war in Vietnam. In the face of such momentous change and conflict, an album sympathetic to Native people’s issues and their seemingly never-ending search for justice now seemed to me both a compelling and a daring undertaking.¹ At the time, Cash was a music superstar. What kind of response did he get to this album? How did the radio stations respond to a musician who was giving voice to an oppressed group fighting to be heard? A thousand more questions began swirling in my mind, but one was at the root of them all: Why did Cash make this record?

These lyrics are the opening lines to “Ballad of Ira Hayes,” clearly a folksong but not in the traditional sense popularized by The Carter Family in the 1920s and 1930s. “Ballad of Ira Hayes” is instead very much a product of the folk revival that was occurring in the 1960s. As the record spun on the turntable, I could sense Woody Guthrie’s spirit embedded in the grooves. I knew Cash had great feeling for Guthrie, who himself had idolized The Carter Family. I could feel the three distinct musical legends, each with family members who became important musicians in their own right—The Carter Family, Woody Guthrie, and Johnny Cash—coming together to form one unique folk family tree. The “topical folksong movement,” as it was called, famously produced scores of musicians who were Guthrie disciples, with Bob Dylan pushing the movement to the forefront of America’s consciousness. Its articulate, impassioned goodwill ambassador was Pete Seeger, but other musicians who walked the streets of Greenwich Village during the folk revival were righteous soldiers of conscience, armed with acoustic guitars and songs telling stories that sought a new America. Judy Collins, Tom Paxton, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Mark Spolestra, Guy Carawan, John Cohen, Len Chandler, and Joan Baez were some of the major voices in this growing U.S. counterculture chorus. “Ballad of Ira Hayes” is a graphic, poetic account of a Pima named Ira Hayes who goes off to war, becomes a war hero, and then returns home to eventually die an ignoble death blanketed by pain, abandonment, and humiliation. Hayes was not only a Pima who fought in World War II, but he had actually been immortalized in the famous photo of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima. But when I listened to the song that day, I didn’t know Ira Hayes from Von Hayes, a second-rate baseball player on my hometown team, the Philadelphia Phillies, in the 1980s. So much for immortality.

I played the song again and again and again and again. When I looked up at the clock, I’d spent more than an hour listening to just that one song. The other songs were, if not as powerful, certainly as thought-provoking and demanding. The album was a challenge to my senses; it didn’t just open my eyes, it ripped open my mind. Cash not only boldly gave voice to issues of injustice afflicting Native people but musically told the world that compassion was at the very heart of who he was as a person and a musician. He was a storyteller interested in telling the stories of real people, those ignored by the press and politicians. Johnny Cash was a folksinger.

Four hours later, I was still listening to the record, having lost count around the fifteenth time. I looked closely at all the material packed into the sleeve describing various details of what I soon realized was a tremendously controversial album. And then the name Peter La Farge caught my eye. La Farge was listed as the writer of “Ballad of Ira Hayes.” A number of the other songs appearing on the record were also credited to La Farge. My mind was buzzing, eager to learn more about this record and Cash’s collaboration with Peter La Farge.

As my senses sharpened around Bitter Tears, I felt that of all the personas that Johnny Cash embodied, here was the album that really embodied his true nature: the rebellious troubadour. It seemed to me that nothing in Cash’s life work matched Bitter Tears in its scale and courage.

Throughout his career, Cash was no stranger to controversy—battling, and sometimes shaming, record industry executives when they acted with willful ignorance or prejudice against his music because it didn’t fit into their comfortable, easily compartmentalized view of who he was or who he should be as a performer. As I thought about this, I was surprised to discover, among the other items stuffed inside the album’s sleeve, a 1964 Billboard ad in the form of another letter that Cash had written on behalf of Bitter Tears, this one to the record industry. Appearing in the August 22, 1964, issue of the magazine, the letter was blistering, offering no less than an indictment of a music establishment that Cash deemed guilty of the worst kind of crime: censorship. As I read the letter, it seemed to breathe life into words that William Blake had written a century before: “When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do.” Cash wrote that “‘Ballad of Ira Hayes’ is strong medicine.” When I glanced at the last sentence, I knew that Cash was not afraid to put it all on the line. He wrote: “I had to fight back when I realized that so many stations are afraid of ‘Ira Hayes.’ Just one question: Why?”

Oh, my.

And so the story begins. . . .