Retiring the Guitar Strap: A Note
After performing in Northampton, MA last night, I dreamed that my beloved guitar strap was stolen.
In the dream, I was completely distraught, as I would be if it actually happened. This morning, I was so shaken that I decided to retire the strap, and when we got home today I put it away and John gave me one of his for the next trip.
I have to admit that I’m a little teary and sad about not wearing it anymore. The CASH patch was from my dad’s Air Force uniform and I found it in his desk after he died. I had it sewn into my strap and I’ve been wearing it since 2003. It’s a miracle it hasn’t been taken or lost before now, as I’ve traveled a million miles and been to a million venues where security is sometimes lax.
My tour manager heaved a sigh of relief this morning when I told him I was retiring it, and said that he worried about it all the time.
Welcome home, dear guitar strap! You’ve served me well!
A message from the children
of Johnny Cash
We were alerted to a video of a young man in Charlottesville, a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi, spewing hatred and bile. He was wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the name of Johnny Cash, our father. We were sickened by the association.
Johnny Cash was a man whose heart beat with the rhythm of love and social justice. He received humanitarian awards from, among others, the Jewish National Fund, B’nai Brith, and the United Nations. He championed the rights of Native Americans, protested the war in Vietnam, was a voice for the poor, the struggling and the disenfranchised, and an advocate for the rights of prisoners. Along with our sister Rosanne, he was on the advisory board of an organization solely devoted to preventing gun violence among children. His pacifism and inclusive patriotism were two of his most defining characteristics. He would be horrified at even a casual use of his name or image for an idea or a cause founded in persecution and hatred. The white supremacists and neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville are poison in our society, and an insult to every American hero who wore a uniform to fight the Nazis in WWII. Several men in the extended Cash family were among those who served with honor.
Our dad told each of us, over and over throughout our lives, ‘Children, you can choose love or hate. I choose love.’
We do not judge race, color, sexual orientation or creed. We value the capacity for love and the impulse towards kindness. We respect diversity, and cherish our shared humanity. We recognize the suffering of other human beings, and remain committed to our natural instinct for compassion and service.
To any who claim supremacy over other human beings, to any who believe in racial or religious hierarchy: we are not you. Our father, as a person, icon, or symbol, is not you. We ask that the Cash name be kept far away from destructive and hateful ideology.
We Choose Love.
Rosanne Cash
Kathy Cash
Cindy Cash
Tara Cash
John Carter Cash
August 16, 2017
‘Not one of us can rest, be happy, be at home, be at peace with ourselves, until we end hatred and division.’
-Rep. John Lewis
A letter from Rosanne about her politically fueled single “Crawl Into The Promised Land”
The pandemic and the protests were a perfect storm of isolation, inspiration, outrage, longing, fear, and hope. Living in New York City was a pressure cooker, particularly in April and May, when the deaths were spiking and the city sealed itself off, and utterly changed. But strangely, there was also a sense of transformation just around the curve, a sense of unity and community, and the potential for transcendence. I kept thinking of the model in physics, where things have to fall apart in order to re-assemble themselves in a more refined, evolved state.
My tour was cancelled, and I was off the road, sequestered in my own home, with time, a stack of writing journals, and a recording studio in the basement. There was nothing to do to accommodate the emotional squeeze, and the rumblings of panic, and no way to articulate the division, and the suffering born of racism and the suffering born of Covid, with reason or logic. The only thing to do was write songs.
We have been at the mercy of grifters with cruel intentions. People who operate out of greed and the most base ambitions. People who value power over human lives, and, shockingly, do not suffer the consequences of wielding that power. At the same moment, we are confronting the systemic racism in America, in a more conscious way, and we have to decide what we will do with the overdue epiphany. The veil is lifting. Hopefully, we are taking the first steps toward reparation and reconciliation. It requires facing some very dark parts of our shared history and our individual pockets of bias and privilege.
I’m angry and bewildered that our leaders consider me and many
others ‘the enemy’. I am a patriot. Every generation of my family has served this country, back to the 18th Century. Both sides of my family fought in the Revolutionary War in order to ‘form a more perfect union.' I want to form a more perfect union than they wanted. One that acknowledges that Black and indigenous people were fighting in the War of Independence on the American side, and that they deserve full enfranchisement that they also earned three centuries back and have yet to be fully given. We’ve been here for centuries, and we’re here to stay. The corrupt motives of those elected to serve us have opened a chasm between North and South, red and blue, American and American. The trashing of norms, the abdication of dignity, values, and true leadership, torments me. I want to see the American dream become the American reality. If it wasn’t possible, it wouldn’t live so vividly in our imagination and our longing.
John Leventhal more than met the impulse that led to my lyrics, and created the music that conveyed all the urgency, and faith, outrage and power. It happened quickly. It had been percolating for awhile.
I want to run away from the moment, to look back at this time from decades in the future, and understand it, and see that we rose to our best selves, so I wrote the lines
‘Fifty years away from here
Sixty, if I run’.
I need more space and time to understand what happened, what we are still going through. Why we elected such an unfit person to guide us, why we kill Black people
with impunity, why our leaders dismantle and mock every institution we have painstakingly created to hold us safe, why some deaths matter and others don’t. I won’t be here ‘fifty years away from here’, but someone I gave birth to, or someone they gave birth to, will live in those times and understand, and maybe pass the knowledge on to me, even in another world or another life. The magnitude of the moment requires time and an ocean of reflection.
The song required a visual corollary. I wanted to connect the past and the present: the Voting Rights Act, and the Women’s March of 2017, the Civil Rights movement and the Black Lives Matter protestors, Harriet Tubman and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the workers in the cotton fields and the lives of those of us who live in privilege because of them, and the necessary gratitude for the humanity we share. There are photos of my mother, of my husband, of my spiritual and cultural ancestors, of my country at war, and my kinfolk in unity. Phyllis Housen and Eric Baker brought their refined visual sensitivity to weave the words, the backbeat, and the pictures.
The song leads into the election. ‘Deliver me from tweets and lies’, begs to be delivered from hatred in the ranks, from division and violence, from conspiracy and delusion, and from those who blow wind into the embers of hatred. We can get back to our dream of America, where the ‘enemy’ is an individual burden, inside each of us, aching for a truce.
‘Only in our dreams we had/faith in bigger lives and plans’. Now it is time to give breath to those dreams and ‘put away those broken vows’. We’re exhausted. We’re disoriented. But I know we have the strength and will to deliver ourselves, to crawl into the promised land.
