Johnny Cash, "Greystone Chapel"

This is quite the appropriate song to start off the RSS series. In the last couple of years I've been able to listen again to some of that music from my childhood and hear it with fresh ears and even enjoy it, this being one of those prime cases. When I was growing up, the earliest two artists I can recall are Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell. This is because my brother and I had a portable tape cassette recorder and our parents allowed us each to buy one prerecorded cassette. My brother got Johnny Cash's Greatest Hits and I got Glen Campbell's, and those two cassettes were the ones that got played the most for at least a year or two. At the time I didn't really care for Cash, although I liked one or two songs on the cassette, and instead favored Glen Campbell's more pop-oriented country. This was partly due to my incipient rebellion as my parents and grandparents favored country music. Having listened to my mother's Columbia House record collection and my grandfather's 8-Track collection, I already knew that my musical taste didn't necessarily correspond with theirs. For example, it took my until I was in my 30s before I could get over the constant Bob Wills' "Ah-ha!"s to enjoy his Western-style Swing. The stuff that I did favor tended to smooth over the countryness of music. I discovered Glen Campbell through my grandfather's 8-Track that had "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" on it. I was initially taken aback, as the title was a direct reference to one of my favorite science fiction books and although the song itself didn't reference anything in the book, it has a haunting refrain that has been with me ever since. I also favored my grandfather's well-played Statler Brothers' Greatest Hits. From my mother's collection, I would often listen to Elvis Presley and The Kingston Trio, neither which would be considered country, although they were far away from the rock music of the time.

That's all to say that my distaste for country music started fairly early. It was cemented in the 1980s when I worked for the local radio station as a DJ. It was a wonderful job, except for the music. It was a bit like being a fisherman who hated to eat fish. The 1980s were a particularly low point in country music, too (not that there haven't been some major troughs since). Two songs still drive me up the wall, as I swear I had to play them at least daily for months: Sylvia's "Nobody" and John Anderson's "Swingin'." (The only high point in the job was being able to put on the Eagle's "Lying Eyes," which was long enough to be able to go to the bathroom and get back in time to get another song cued up. At the time, most country songs rarely ran over 3 minutes, and this was in the time where records were records and not CDs, so getting another one ready meant you had to start the record in your local monitors until the song started, then spin the record backwards three turns so that you knew when you flicked the turntable switch that the song would start in three seconds.)

I started to come back to country music in the 1990s through the efforts of certain artists that bucked the Nashville establishment: Lyle Lovett, Dwight Yoakam, k.d. lang, and Rosanne Cash. These were "new" artists, though, and not the country and western establishment that I associated with the music of my childhood, all twang and slide guitar.

Johnny Cash was one of those traditional artists, or at least I thought he was. But then I heard his albums with Rick Rubin, including his cover of Soundgarden's "Rusty Cage," which seems as if it had been written for him (and really, is much better than the original). The biopic Walk the Line had me revisit my assumptions about Cash as well as the fact that my band started to cover his "Cocaine Blues," a song I had been unfamiliar with before. Eventually I picked up the album, At Folsom Prison, that features that song as well as provides the beginning/opening of the movie. Finally, I was able to appreciate Cash as something more than just another country crooner.

"Greystone Chapel" isn't the best song on the album, but it is unique. It was written by a Folsom inmate named Glenn Shirley that Cash befriended (and whom he tried to help once the man was released from prison). Cash had only sung it in concert once before the recording session, and it's not the most polished song, but it fits perfectly into Cash's ouvre, what with its combination of sin and salvation. The style of the song isn't anything special, a basic country shuffle, but when you listen to it you can hear all the things that made Cash's appearance at Folsom great: his connection to the inmates through his own sins, his honest belief, the backing of both June Carter Cash and the Statlers, and the rapturous applause of the crowd. This track also features a bit of business from the prison at the end that truly marks its time and place, with an announcement about one of the inmates needing to go to the custody office, introducing Johnny Cash's father, an "appreciation gift" from the Assistant Warden (which sounds like they are putting manacles on him), and then the instructions for how the prisoners should leave, complete with clanking chains.