If you bought Johnny Cash's American Recordings when it was first released in 1994 a little insert came with your CD--a reproduction of six pages of Cash's handwritten memories of his mother's guitar-playing, learning to play guitar himself, and guitars he'd loved and lost to the rigors of life on the road. As a child of 11 or 12, he was inspired by a friend named Jesse Barnhill...
...who lived three miles farther down the road. Jesse had had polio, and his right hand and foot were withered, but with his left hand he made the chords as he beat a perfect rhythm with his tiny right hand. It was an old Gibson flattop, and I thought, if I could play the guitar like that I'd sing on the radio one day.
The final passage has a lot of resonance for me as someone who's often easily distracted by trivial details and who can be overly concerned with doing things a certain way. (The "right" way, of course.) Not Cash--he's focused on what matters, and he makes his way the right way:
When performing, it doesn't matter the brand, the color or the cost. All that matters is that the guitar and I are one. I have to feel that the sound of [the] instrument comes out of me with the song, from inside, from the gut. And it doesn't matter to me that I only know three or four chords. With the left fingers on the frets, the heel of my right hand hugging the body of the guitar, letting just my right thumb lead and drive the rhythm, sometimes it's magic, and I just believe that when it all comes together it's the right way for me to do it. Like Jesse Barnhill did it. Like Mama did it.
Somehow I think Johnny Cash knew more than four chords, but his larger points hits home for me all the same: Don't worry about the right way to play, just play it your way.
Cash's own style is readily apparent is this performance of "Redemption", a song he wrote for American Recordings:
