Submitted Resolutions: Senate Concurrent Resolution 68-Honoring the Life of Johnny Cash

SUBMITTED RESOLUTIONS: SENATE CONCURRENT RESOLUTION 68—HONORING THE LIFE OF JOHNNY CASH

Mr. ALEXANDER (for himself, Mr. FRIST, Mrs. LINCOLN, and Mr. PRYOR) submitted the following concurrent resolution; which was ordered held at the desk.

S. CON. RES. 68

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, today I am introducing a concurrent resolution honoring Johnny Cash.

Johnny Cash died on Friday in Nashville. The man whose singing voice sounded like a big freight train coming, is gone. The concurrent resolution I introduce today is on behalf of my colleague, the majority leader, Senator BILL FRIST of Tennessee, the Senators from Arkansas, Mrs. Lincoln and Mr. Pryor, and the distinguished Senator Roberts, who probably knows the words to "I Walk the Line," as do most of us all over the world.

Johnny Cash lived a little bit outside of Nashville. I was in his home one time and I asked him: Johnny, how many nights do you perform on the road?

He looked at me with some surprise. He said: Oh, about 300 a year.

Why do you do that, I asked him in amazement?

He looked back at me equally amazed. He said: That is what I do.

All weekend the radio stations have been playing the songs of the man who performed 300 times a year for all of us, the "man in black." Stores all over Nashville and all over the world were stocking up on Johnny Cash memorabilia this weekend.

So much has been said in newspapers and on TV that one wonders what else we Senators might say about Johnny Cash. I mean, what could I say better, for example, than what Steven Greenhouse wrote on Johnny on page 1 of the New York
Times on Saturday:

Beginning in the mid-1950s, when he made his first record for the Sun label, Mr. Cash forged a lean, hard-bitten country-folk music that at its most powerful seemed to erase the lines between singing, storytelling and grueling life experience.
Born in poverty in Arkansas at the height of the Depression, he was country music's foremost poet of the working poor. His stripped-down songs described the lives of coal miners and sharecroppers, convicts and cowboys, railroad workers and laborers.

"Foremost poet of the working poor." Mr. Greenhouse was not the only one who wrote beautifully about the foremost poet of the working poor. So did Louie Estrada and David Segal in the Washington Post. So did Craig Havighurst and several other writers in the Tennessean in Nashville, as well as John Sparks in the Memphis Commercial Appeal.
I have no doubt that in Wichita, Topeka, and important cities all over the country and world there were writers who were writing as best they could about the music and the sound of Johnny Cash.

Why do we wait until Johnny Cash dies to write of his poetry? John R. Cash is not the only such poet who ever lived in
Nashville, TN. Bob Dylan, Johnny's friend, once said that Hank Williams was America's greatest poet. At last count, there are several thousand songwriters living in Nashville struggling to write poetry, some of which will be known and remembered everywhere in the world one day.

Alice Randall, a Nashville songwriter, a writer of songs and books, once observed that it is odd that there is so little serious literary criticism of the poetry of Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, and other country music songwriters. The outpouring of articles that accompanied Johnny's death this weekend suggest that most of the serious criticism of the poetry found in country music is done by pop music critics in our major newspapers.

But why is there not a department or a chair or at least a conference occasionally dedicated to criticism of the poetry or at least the literature of country music? Literary criticism is a fundamental part of the departments of English in universities all across America. Some of the most famous of these were among the "Fugitives" who met during the 1920s at Vanderbilt University. Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Andrew Lytle were some of those literary critics who began their careers then.

If Vanderbilt University, my alma mater, is such a center of literary criticism, then why has Vanderbilt University not done more about the literature that is country music? Or why does Belmont University in Nashville or the University of Tennessee or the University of Memphis not do it?

These Nashville and Memphis songwriters are certainly among the most famous poets in the world. But why do we wait for the New York Times and Bob Dylan to tell us that Johnny Cash and Hank Williams are also among the best poets when Vanderbilt University, among others, lives right there among them?

There are hundreds of good English professors in dozens of northeastern universities writing thousands of pages of criticism about average poets, while our Tennessee universities are doing almost nothing to write about poets who others say are among the best in the world. We have had a habit in Tennessee of not being willing to look right in front of our own noses to celebrate what is special about us. We sometimes worry about producing only average Chopin when right down the block lives the best harmonica player in the world.

I am all for Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach. I have played their music on the piano with symphonies all across Tennessee, but I have also performed with those symphonies some of the most beautiful of the unique American music we call country music.

The death of our friend Johnny Cash, the poet of the working poor, is a good time for our Tennessee universities to consider whether they might want to celebrate our excellence by encouraging literary criticism of some of the best known poets in the world: Our songwriters. Our universities might discover what others have suggested, that some of our songwriters are also among the best in the world.

Mrs. LINCOLN. Madam President, I rise to join Senators ALEXANDER, FRIST, and PRYOR to introduce a resolution in honor of a great American, and one of our greatest Arkansans—Johnny Cash, who passed away on Friday, September 12, at the age of 71.

John R. Cash was born in Kingsland, AR on February 26, 1932. When he was just 3 years old, his father moved the family to Dyess Colony, a New Deal program that set up new farming communities on uncleared land near the Mississippi River.
The family had 20 acres upon which they farmed cotton and other seasonal crops and from the beginning, John was taught to work for a living. It was this time spent farming and living in Northeast Arkansas, that inspired songs such as "Look at
Them Beans" and "Five Feet High and Rising." At the age of six, he was hauling water for a road crew. At twelve he was chopping cotton. When he reached high school he was singing on the radio in Blytheville. Still, John didn't pick up a guitar until he was stationed in West Germany as a soldier in the Army. The instrument was so cheap, he said, that "it didn't even have a brand name."

When he returned from Germany, John moved to Memphis, determined to make it in the music industry. He sold appliances door-to-door and went to broadcasting school on the GI bill, playing music whenever he could. Finally, he managed to get an audition before Sam Phillips, the owner of the legendary Sun Records studio. The first time Phillips heard
Cash sing, he turned him down, saying that he sounded "too country." John returned with a more rockabilly sound and Phillips began to send his group out with another artist on the Sun Records label, Elvis Presley. Phillips also began to refer to John as Johnny, a name Cash disliked because he thought it made him sound too young. Johnny would go on to record some of his most cherished songs for the label, including such classics as "Cry, Cry, Cry" and "I Walk the Line".

Over the next 5 decades, Johnny Cash recorded over 400 albums, with 48 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 and over 130 hits
on the Billboard country music charts. In the process, the boy from Dyess Colony managed to sell over 50 million records.
He is part of a distinguished group of musicians from Arkansas including: Conway Twitty, Sonny Boy Williamson, Glen Campbell, and Charlie Rich. Even though Johnny Cash and these other distinguished artists found fame outside of Arkansas, the experience of growing up in Arkansas gave them a unique perspective on the feelings of the common man and woman, working hard to just get by, a perspective which came through in their music.

The number of artists he has influenced is immeasurable. He has been inducted into the Country & Western Hall of Fame, the Nashville Songwriter's Hall of Fame, and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He received 11 Grammy Awards including the Lifetime Achievement Award, and has been honored by both the Kennedy Center for his contribution to American Culture and the United Nations, receiving the Humanitarian Award. The last two awards illustrate how Johnny Cash became so much more than a musician.

His songs shined a light on aspects of American culture that are integral to our Nation's history but too often overlooked.

He never forgot where he came from and the people he met along the way. He told stories about people who worked hard just to survive, people so poor they couldn't afford a car so they snuck out the parts to build one from the plant where they worked, "One Piece At A Time". And he told it all with a voice that once was described as "the perfect voice for a man of his spirit. It's unmistakable. It doesn't sound like anybody else. And it sounds like the real thing, which is what he is."

I ask that all my colleagues in the Senate join me in honoring a true American original, a prodigiously talented musician, with a conscience that matched those gifts. Our deepest condolences go out to his family and friends.