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| BECAUSE YOU’RE MINE…
THE MAN IN BLACKJohnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) on stage with June Carter, played by Reese Witherspoon. walk the line
Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley first met in the legendary Sun Records in Memphis, where both lived in the mid-fifties, with the same aim of getting into the music business. Cash was three year’s Elvis’ senior and had already done his military service (in the USAF: Elvis was in the Army). And, when the records they cut for Sun’s Sam Philips became hits, they toured together with the convoy of buses and cars that criss-crossed the South and South-West United States, from Florida to Texas, on shows with names like ‘Louisiana Hayride’. Also on the tour were, at different times, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and June Carter, the latter country music royalty: a member of the Carter Family, who had been singing - as Elvis puts it to Johnny in Walk the Line, the new biopic about the Man in Black - “since we were bitin’ ankles”. All of this (and a lot more) is in Walk the Line, written and directed by James Mangold (Girl, Interrupted, Copland), with Cash portrayed (and sung) by Joaquin Phoenix, Carter played (and sung) by Reese Witherspoon, alongside musicians Waylon Payne, Johnathan Rice and Tyler Hilton as Lewis, Orbison and Presley respectively. Also in the line-up is Shooter Jennings, son of the late great country legend, Waylon Jennings, who plays his father in the film. Cash, of course, outlived Presley by a quarter of a century, dying in September 2003, four months after June, his wife of 35 years. By then, Phoenix told Newsweek recently, recalling a meeting in 2000, his hands shook and the great, deep voice was cracked. But, when he picked up his guitar, “the moment he touches the strings, the shake is gone”. Cash’s death triggered a series of tributes and an outpouring of emotion equalled only by those that followed the deaths of Presley himself and, in 1997, Frank Sinatra. But the respect shown to Cash is all the more remarkable in that the music he sang - country music - has never had the international popularity of rock ‘n’ roll nor the aura that, for all the gossip surrounding his life, accompanied Sinatra. There can, however, be very few people in the English-speaking world who, on hearing these lines from Cash’s best-known song ‘I keep a close watch on this heart of mine Because you’re mine, I walk the line’ could not hum or sing the tune to which they were set. They are words which figure prominently in Walk the Line, which is the rock ‘n’ roll love story to end all rock ‘n’ roll love stories. For one thing, country music may have provided both his roots and most of his fame, but Johnny Cash began his professional career on the various tours mentioned above, where the dividing line between rock ‘n’ roll and country was blurred. ‘Hillbilly music’ was how many critics dismissed early Elvis, but he - along with artists like Jerry Lee Lewis and the Everly Brothers - belong as much in the country tradition as Cash himself does in the world of rock. |
