Sorry, to double up on the Cash threads, but I keep forgetting to post this piece. This is a wonderful tribute piece to the life of Johnny Cash. If you haven't read it yet, please take the time to do so.
Salud!, Johnny.
God's Lonely Man -- Johnny Cash was a Christian who didn't cast stones, a patriot who wasn't a bullyhttp://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/03/davis.htm"In 1956, when he recorded "I Walk the Line" for Sun Records, Johnny Cash became an overnight sensation. But it was his many years of singing as if he knew from personal experience all of humankind's strengths and failings—as if he had both committed murder and been accepted into God's light—that made him a favorite of liberals and conservatives, MTV and the Grand Ole Opry, Gary Gilmore and Billy Graham. A tall piece of timber, Cash was often likened to John Wayne, to whom he otherwise bore only the slightest resemblance. The biggest difference was that Wayne never really lived up to (and probably only dimly comprehended) the democratic ideals he personified on screen—which were more likely the ideals of the directors he worked with anyway. Cash took on a greater variety of roles as a singer than Wayne did as an actor, and both he and the characters he gave voice to admitted their weaknesses. From song to song he was a cowboy or a white outcast who rode with Indians, a family man or a drifter, a believer in eternal life or a condemned murderer with no tomorrows anywhere. His credibility as all of these owed as much to the moral effort involved in endlessly putting himself in others' shoes as it did to his professional savvy in putting a song across.
Waking to the radio last September 12 and hearing that Cash had died in the middle of the night, I remembered thinking about Cash just days after the attacks two years earlier, while watching a nationally televised prayer service attended by the President and the First Lady and featuring a performance by the mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves. It should have been moving—but as I listened to a mannered black diva render an old spiritual as if it were a European art song, it was impossible not to think that the occasion called for a more homegrown performance style. If the point was to rally Americans to draw on their inner resources, it would have been a comfort to hear from Johnny Cash, who stood for what Christopher Wren, his first biographer, called "the dignity of the commonplace and the redeeming grace of hard knocks." 
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