Okinawa – Jim Stafford's BlogOKC

Why The Man in Black’s music, impact endures

In 1968, my parents went to see a concert by Johnny Cash while we were living as a military family on the island of Okinawa. That should tell you how big of a star the Man in Black was in the ’60s, because my parents never, ever went to a concert unless it was Southern Gospel like the Gaithers.

Cash was an Arkansas native, as were my parents, so there was a connection. We were among the nearly 100,000 American military personnel and dependents living on the island that year at the height of the Vietnam war.

Johnny’s concert for military personnel on Okinawa occurred the same year that my dad bought the ‘Johnny Cash Live at Folsom Prison’ album, which got a lot of play in our house over the years.

Maybe because I heard the album so often I became a fan of Johnny Cash, although my knowledge of his song catalog from among his more than 100(!) albums doesn’t go very deep.

My friend Ed Godfrey can offer much more insight into Johnny’s music.

Johnny Cash began as sort of a rockabilly star in the 1950s, recording at the famous Sun Studios in Memphis. Then he became a genuine pop culture phenomenon in the 1960s when a wider audience embraced his music.

In fact, he starred in his own network TV show in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and recorded popular duets with his wife, June Carter Cash, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and many others.

If you saw the movie “Walk the Line,” you know that Cash had some well documented run-ins with the law in the ’60s because of a drug addiction. He revived his career with help of June Carter and the release of the Live at Folsom Prison album.

His star power dimmed a bit in the ’80s and ’90s, although it seems to me the impact and legend of Johnny Cash has only grown since his 2003 death.

I think his legend endures because he was the complete package, great music, songwriter, deep bass vocals, the familiar guitar licks, the hair and, most of all, the courage to stand up for those rejected by society when that was far from the norm among entertainers.

Johnny Cash made it a point to vocally support for Native Americans, the imprisoned, the poor, and the oppressed. He said that was why he always wore black when performing.

Listen to his song, “Man in Black,” to gain some perspective.

In his final years, with his health waning, Johnny Cash covered other artists’ songs that I think are some of his best, even if he was frail and his voice had lost a lot of its force. My favorites are Hurt, and, especially, Further on Up the Road, an awesome cover of a Bruce Springsteen song.

Anyway, I decided to make a list of my top 10 favorite Johnny Cash recordings, whether written by him or covers of other artists. I’ve also invited Ed Godfrey to weigh in with his list, too.

Here are my top 10 songs recorded by Johnny Cash:

No. 1 — Folsom Prison Blues
A song he wrote in the early 1950s while still in the Air Force, it became probably his more popular recording and his signature song.

No. 2 — Ring of Fire
The horns, the imagery … a great song that was co-written by June Carter Cash before she married Johnny. Must have been a hot romance!

No. 3 — I Walk the Line
Cash’s deep bass voice, the guitar intro, Johnny’s hum at the beginning of each chorus, the pledge of fidelity — I love it all. Of course, the Gregory Peck movie based off this song was all about infidelity. Oh, the irony.

No. 4 — Sunday Morning Coming Down
I can just see a lonely, broke alcoholic ambling along on a big city sidewalk on a Sunday morning, longing for a life in this awesome Kris Kristofferson cover.

No. 5 — Further on Up the Road
Another superb cover, this one written by Bruce Springsteen. Ed says that he’s adding it to his funeral playlist. Me, too.

No. 6 — A Boy Named Sue
My dad and I had a great time listening to this song together back in the ’60s. Written by Shel Silverstein.

No. 7 — Girl from the North Country
A great song of lost love, and wonderful duet with Bob Dylan, the song’s author.

No. 8 — Jackson
Fun duet by Johnny and June Carter Cash; this got lots of airplay over the years.

No. 9 — Hurt
A late-in-life cover of a Nine Inch Nails song, Great guitar, piano that backed Johnny’s delivery.

No. 10 — The Man Comes Around
Johnny wrote this song and recorded it one year before his death. It’s obvious that he saw the end coming

BONUS SONGS

Don’t take your guns to town — Johnny had a way of telling a sad story; this one fits right in.

Five Feet High and Rising — Might not be everyone’s favorite, but I’ve liked this song for decades. I can just see Johnny as a kid with his family panicked over water that’s flooding the family’s hardscrabble acres.

Now, I present the Johnny Cash top 10 list from Ed Godfrey that you should really respect:

No. 1 – Sunday Morning Coming Down
When Cash first performed this on his TV show, network executives asked him not to sing the lyric “wishing I was stoned.” Cash sang it just as Kris Kristofferson wrote it anyway. I guess the network executives had no problem with having a beer for breakfast and one more for dessert.

No. 2 – Cocaine Blues
Cash’s version of this song on his “Live From Folsom Prison” album is just fantastic.

No. 3 – Ring of Fire
Cash said the idea to add Mexican trumpets to June Carter’s and Merle Kilgore’s lyrics came to him in a dream.

No. 4 – Unchained
Unchained is a song on Cash’s album by the same name produced by Rick Rubin. Their collaboration caused a resurgence of Cash’s career in the ’90s. Unchained is an album of covers and my favorite Cash album, even eclipsing “Live From Folsom Prison.” I have left instructions with my family to have Unchained played at my funeral.

No. 5 – I Walk The Line
Cash wrote the song as a promise of fidelity to his first wife. That didn’t work out, but the song is still great.

No. 6 – Flesh And Blood
I love the details in the lyrics of this song. It begins, “Beside a singin’ mountain stream, where the willow grew, where the silver leaf of maple, sparkled in the mornin’ dew.” Then in the next verse after the chorus, “I leaned against a bark of birch, and I breathed the honey dew, I saw a north-bound flock of geese, against a sky of baby blue.” I close my eyes and picture myself there.

No. 7 – Meet Me In Heaven
Another song off the Unchained album that I have asked to be played at my funeral.

No. 8 – Hurt
I am not a big fan of music videos, but this song is actually better and more powerful with the video. It was another collaboration with Rubin.

No. 9 – Folsom Prison Blues
I mean, this song has to be included, right? I can’t leave off Folsom Prison Blues on a list of best Johnny Cash songs.

No. 10 – I’ve Been Everywhere
Did I mention how much I like the Unchained album? This is another song off that album. Hank Snow first adapted it from a song originally written with Australian place names, but nobody performs it better than Cash.

Honorable Mentions: God’s Gonna Cut You Down and The Kneeling Drunkard’s Plea. Two more songs that came from the six albums Cash made with Rubin. The Kneeling Drunkard’s Plea also is on the Unchained album.

BONUS CONTENT FROM KENT TAYLOR:

You know Jim, I’ve been thinking about your Johnny Cash article since you posted it. I also grew up listening to my parent’s Johnny Cash vinyls. I’d have to put A Boy Named Sue at the top because it reminds me of my dad every time I hear it. He loved that song.

I thought that, as a kid, I had heard every JC song ever sung. However, it wasn’t until the past 10-15 years or so that I’ve heard songs I’d never heard before. One that I have grown fond of is Chicken in Black. If you’ve not heard it, I’d encourage you to listen to it.

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The ’65 Mustang was my Aunt Dee’s ride or die

Screenshot — A black ’65 Mustang that looks exactly as I remember the one driven by my Aunt Dee.

This is a story of the Ford Mustang. Or, rather, two Ford Mustangs. One of them did not have a happy ending, and I was in it.

If you are hazy on your Ford Mustang history, I’ll catch you up to date a bit. The Mustang was conceived by a team at Ford led by Lee Iacocca, who later gained fame as the man who saved Chrysler.

The first Mustang was introduced to the public in April 1964, as the “1964-1/2” Mustang. It was an instant hit. The public fell in love with it because it had a unique, sporty body style compared to what U.S. autos had been, which were cars shaped like boxes and quite unattractive.

Purchasing a brand new Mustang off the showroom floor in 1964-65 would set you back $2,400, according to cars.com. Today, those antique vehicles bring from $16,000 for the coupe to $33,000 for the fastback model.

My dad was among the millions of Americans who were taken by the Mustang and eventually bought one when he was stationed on the island of Okinawa while in the military. I’ll come back to that.

Anyway, the Mustang was beloved by my dad and so many others because it had a long nose, short rear end and distinctive grill and tail lights. Eventually, it came in a 2-door coupe, convertible and the incredibly popular fast-back.

I’m writing about the Mustang because my 5 year-old grandson, Solomon, and I discovered a show on the Roku channel called “Counting Cars,” which follows a shop in Las Vegas that rehabs older vehicles and turns them into showpieces.

We streamed an episode this morning in which the shop refurbished a ’65 Mustang and turned it into a perfect candy apple-red rendition of how it must have looked on the showroom floor in 1965. Solomon could not get enough, running through the house to get his grandmother to come in and see the beautiful car.

So, two Mustang stories.

When I was a senior in high school, I lived with my aunt and uncle in Fort Smith, Ark. My aunt Dee drove a black ’65 Mustang and was so in love with the car that she told everyone she would never drive another. Its compact size made it easy for her to maneuver on the road.

Fast forward to roughly 1980, when I was a young sports reporter at the Southwest Times Record, which had its offices and newsroom in downtown Fort Smith.

One day, as I stepped out of the building onto the sidewalk, my uncle, L.R. Mendenhall, drove up and parked Aunt Dee’s Mustang right outside the SWTR’s door along Rogers Ave.

At virtually the same moment, Leroy Fry, who was the newspaper’s managing editor, walked out of the building and spotted the Mustang. I introduced my Uncle “Blue Eyes” (as he was known to our family) to Leroy. The editor told him that he had to have that Mustang and how much would my uncle sell it to him for.

“It’s not for sale,” Blue Eyes told him. “It’s my wife’s car and she says it’s the only one she will ever drive.”

End of story.

That black Mustang was my Aunt Dee’s ride or die, and I’m pretty sure when she died in roughly 2000 that the car was still in her family’s possession.

My second Mustang story involved the 1967 Mustang my dad bought while on Okinawa. He was in the Army, so our whole family lived on the island. This was in 1968 when I was 15 years old.

Dad loved his Mustang, which was painted in a sort of burnt-orange color, and drove it every day to work. He was a hot GI in a hot vehicle.

I wanted to drive it, too, and begged him to let me get behind the wheel. So one weekend he asked the son of a family friend who was about 19 years old to drive me and the Mustang to an abandoned Japanese airstrip where I could drive it and stay out of harm’s way.

I remember driving back and forth on the airstrip multiple times and getting a feel for the car. Then we decided to head back to the military base where our families lived. I moved over to the passenger side, and the older kid (can’t think of his name now) took the wheel.

We drove off the airstrip and back onto the rural two-lane road that was adjacent to a field of sugar cane. My young driving instructor said, “let’s see what this car can do,” and gunned it.

I’m not sure how fast the car was traveling, but we roared down that rural road until my driver suddenly realized there was a 90-degree turn at the end and started screaming that we weren’t going to make it.

We didn’t.

The car flew off the end of the road at the hairpin curve, hit hard in the sugar cane field and landed on its side. Neither one of us had buckled our seatbelt (hey, this was the ’60s), but we were mostly uninjured. My friend cut his hand on the steering wheel when the padding came off.

We climbed out of the driver’s side, which was facing the sky and then tried to figure out how to contact our parents in this era before the cellphone was a gleam in anyone’s eye.

There was a military installation about a half mile away, so we walked to it, told the guards at the security gate what happened, and they let us call our parents. Of course, we told them exactly how it happened.

The car looked OK to me, but had to be towed to a shop somewhere on the island. Turns out the frame was bent and the insurance company declared it a total loss.

My dad was heartbroken, of course. But the fact that we were unhurt took some of the steam out.

He never owned another Mustang.

Precious memories in black-and-white

When I was a kid, one of my favorite things was looking through stacks of old black-and-white photos at my grandmother’s house. It was a trip back through the decades before I was born, seeing my grandparents as young adults and ancestors I never had the opportunity to meet.

In my mind, I can still hear my Grandmother say “Daddy, get the Kodak” whenever there was a photo opportunity at a family gathering. Those “Kodak moments” created some precious memories.

So, now I’m an adult with a stack of old photos of my own. And this past weekend I pulled a couple of my favorites out of the digital drawer and posted them on Facebook in honor of my late father’s birthday and for “Sibling Day,” as if that’s really a thing.

The two photos I posted are the favorite snapshots in my possession.

The one posted at the top of this blog post is No. 1 on my personal hit parade. It was taken (by my grandfather, I think) at the Fort Smith, Ark., airport moments before my mother, sister and I boarded a Braniff Airways turboprop to begin our journey to the island of Okinawa.

I told my mother that I loved this photo because of all it represents. Traveling 8,000 miles to join my father, who was in the military and stationed on the island. We would live there for about 18 months. I would begin high school at an American school for military dependents on the island.

There’s more. All three of us were dressed in our Sunday best like we were headed to church on Easter because that’s how you traveled in those days. At least in our family. I’ve never let my mother forget that she made me travel 8,000 miles in a suit coat and clip-on tie.

The second photo, posted to the left, shows my dad and me in the front yard of our home at Fort Buckner, on the island. It was military housing, with my dad’s name and rank posted near the front door.

I don’t remember the circumstances of the photo. It’s obviously early in the morning because of the shadows. I’m clowning by putting my dad’s pipe in my mouth as we pose. Ha ha. But it’s a moment of time that I now cherish more than 50 years later.

The point of all this is that these two photos have motivated me to find those old photos that were my grandmother’s and digitize as many of them as possible.

I want to share those precious memories with my children and grandchildren.