I'm sitting in the coffee shop, working on some piece or another, when Johnny Cash's cover of "Solitary Man" (penned by Neil Diamond) pipes through the speakers, warm and gravelly, sounding almost as if he's in the room. This was always his strength, I think—the intimacy of his voice, and how it seems private and personal, even from a crowd of thousands, even from the grooves of a vinyl disc. This coincides with my reading of his biography which, although written with a professional author, sounds like it came right from the horse's mouth. And I think, nobody has ever had a voice like that. No one will ever have a voice like that again.

I grew up listening to my parents' LP of Folsom Prison Blues. As a child, this album was a delectable novelty. I was mightily amused by the morbid humor of songs like "Twenty-five Minutes to Go" and "Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart," but there was more to my fascination than just his blunt, backwoods lyricism. Cash had a distinct sound, an authenticity I'd never heard before. Not that country music was new to me—there was plenty of country music in my small town, but it was all of the twangy, soulless variety, and I didn't much care for it. Cash transcended the limitations of country. He was meta-country, if you will. In the dark age of my childhood, when every song nearly buckled under the weight of synthesizers (much like Giles Corey with his pressing stones), I welcomed anything that sounded different, anything that seemed to cut through the crap of existence and get right to the soul of things. And Johnny Cash fit the bill. To a tee.

As I entered my angst-fueled teen years, I liked this guy more and more. Here was someone who seemed just as irritated about society as I was. Here was someone who noticed that sometimes people fell through the cracks. And as I began to undergo a bit of musical training, I came to a more complex appreciation for the music itself. It was astonishing, all those deftly orchestrated chord progressions that evened out into something like simplicity, but were in fact anything but simple.

For a long time, I thought I had discovered the Man in Black myself. No one else I knew had ever heard of him (I never asked the grown-ups, of course—children are often on a desert island of their own creation). Same with Arlo Guthrie and the Doors. Same with Jefferson Airplane and Grand Funk Railroad. In my parents' record collection, I had this little treasure trove of artists jamming just for me. But Johnny Cash, especially. He was all mine.

Sometime when you're feeling that all the joy has passed out of the world, just listen to Cash sing his version of "Danny Boy," with that melancholy pipe organ backing him up. I promise, it'll break your heart and mend it all over again.

Tags: music