"He’s a poet, he’s a picker

“He’s a prophet, he’s a pusher

“He’s a pilgrim and a preacher, and a problem when he’s stoned

“He’s a walkin’ contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,

“Takin’ ev’ry wrong direction on his lonely way back home.”

That’s how Kris Kristofferson viewed his friend and mentor Johnny Cash back in 1971, when he wrote and recorded “The Pilgrim: Chapter 33.”

Today, in addition to having to sing about Cash in the past tense, Kristofferson would have to add American icon to his list.

That’s how J.R. Cash is now seen — a man who many have suggested should be remembered in the same manner as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt.

“I think he will be remembered for the way he grew as a person and as an artist,” Kristofferson wrote in an April 2004 Rolling Stone tribute to Cash. “He went from being this guy who was as wild as Hank Williams to being as respected as one of the fathers of our country. He was friends with presidents and Billy Graham. You felt like he should’ve had his face on Mt. Rushmore.”

The drills and hammers haven’t started work in South Dakota yet. Nor are they ever likely to.

But in the four years since his passing, Cash has become even more beloved and iconic than he was before his death, if that is possible. And that love for him  transcends generations.

 “When we have our request Thursdays, we get more requests for Johnny Cash than any other artist, and it comes from everybody,” said KZKX radio’s Carol Turner. “It might be a 50-year-old woman or a 20-year-old guy, somebody retired or a construction worker. For some reason, he’s the guy who is multigenerational.”

Not only is Cash’s appeal multigenerational, it extends from traditional country fans to people like Chris Webster, frontman for the intense Lincoln rock band The M*F* Saints.

“Cash is my hero,” Webster said. “I’m a fanatic. It’s close to obsession for me and Cash. He’s all over our music, even though most people can’t hear it.”

Cash’s popularity isn’t restricted to the United States. When Gerardo Meza, singer of the Mezcal Brothers, donned his black suit and took the stage in Sweden, audience members started calling him Johnny Cash. After Meza threw some Cash-like stage moves into the act, the response was even more intense.

“They’d go crazy,” he said. “In Sweden they are fanatical about Johnny Cash. I was walking down the street in Malmo and ran into a guy with a huge tattoo of  Johnny on his shoulder. When I’d get up there in my black suit, I’d hear ‘You are just like Johnny Cash.’”

For Meza, that was a compliment in many ways. A fan since he was a kid, Meza acknowledges Cash’s influence on his songwriting, performing and life.

Cash, he and others say, has become one of THE American musical touchstones.

“He’s the bread for the butter you put on,” Meza said. “You need that before anything else.”

In the years since his death, the Man in Black has been honored in nearly every way our entertainment culture can pay its respects.

First there was an all-star concert in which Nashville, which turned its back on Cash in the last three decades of his life, embraced him as country music incarnate.

In 2005, Hollywood told his story — and that of his wife June Carter Cash — in “Walk the Line,” a conventional, well-made biopic that got Reese Witherspoon an Oscar for her portrayal of June and elevated Joaquin Phoenix to the upper echelon of actors for his role as Johnny.

This week, “Ring of Fire,” a musical that uses songs identified with Cash, such as “Five Feet High and Rising,” “Daddy Sang Bass,”  “I Walk the Line” and “I’ve Been Everywhere,” to tell the story of American lives, arrives at the Lied Center for Performing Arts for a two-night run.

Cash’s recordings have been repackaged into “essential” collections, be it a single CD or boxed set, and a DVD of highlights from his 1969-71 TV show generated much buzz last year.

That ABC show had a great impact on the perception of Cash, who by the time it aired had been a late ‘50s/early ‘60s hitmaker, then a troubled man who had seen his life, marriage and career crumble in a downward spiral of drug abuse and self-destructive behavior, only to rebound to musical prominence and a national stage.

“The show also encapsulated the major themes of Cash’s art: rural life, Christ’s teachings, the West, common struggle and America’s virtue and failings,” writes Michael Streissguth in his instructive “Johnny Cash: The Biography. “In his mind and on his television stage, America’s soul lived in a heartland where dreams rode on trains, God saved men, and the disenfranchised enjoyed a shot at justice and reward. Such beliefs were never so clearly stated by Cash as when he expressed them on ‘The Johnny Cash Show.’”

The show featured guests like Bob Dylan, making his first television appearance in years, along with Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, artists who were outsiders then, pushing against the mainstream.

“Johnny was never afraid to take a chance,” said KZKX’s Keith Allen. “Look at what he did with his TV show. Where else were these people on TV? The TV show had an attitude and an edge that was pure Johnny Cash.”

The show helped cement Cash’s legend and made him a lifelong ambassador for country music. But it also helped to broaden American musical horizons as he embraced the music that some saw as rebellious.

“He jumped on that wagon to make people conscious of it,” Meza said. “Coming from a very conservative audience, the country audience, he opened a lot of doors in that respect. That’s what true artists do. People like him and Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, they knew what true country music was and opened those doors.”

*** 

For Dave Mlnarik, executive director of the Nebraska Sports Council and a country musician and songwriter, Cash is the quintessential American musical storyteller.

“As far as I’m concerned, he’s one of the very few believable storytellers of song,” Mlnarik said. “When he sang a song, you felt like he’d lived it. You just believed him.”

That believability, he said, gives Cash an authority only a handful of others have had, allowing him to directly convey the meanings and messages of his songs.

The songs connect with the young Meza, who also sings and writes songs for acoustic country band The Bellflowers.

“When I was a kid, I always went back to that rhythm Johnny Cash came up with,” Meza said. “It didn’t always make sense musically, but it was very human. It made sense that way. The way I write now for The Bellflowers, I’ve started seeing that influence. Those songs are so simple. But they’re really direct. They’re straightforward, not trying to fool you.”

The directness and honesty are what drew Lincoln rocker Webster to Cash and his music.

“That’s what I took from him — be bare bones, brutally honest and be who you are,” Webster said.

The bare bones element comes from Cash’s final recordings.

Largely abandoned by the country music business in the ‘80s after sales faltered and his recordings became ever more tepid, a cash-strapped Cash found himself trapped in the purgatory of Branson, Mo., before rock/rap producer Rick Rubin pushed him back into the spotlight.

First recording just Cash and his guitar, then pairing him with sympathetic contemporary musicians such as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and his former son-in-law Marty Stuart, Rubin produced a series of “American Recordings” of Cash doing a mixture of music that included songs from hard rock acts such as Soundgarden and Ministry.

Those were the records that hooked Webster.

“As a kid, it was all punk rock and metal,” Webster said. “What got me going was ‘Rusty Cage.’ I thought, ‘Here’s this old guy doing this Soundgarden song and it sounds cool.’ It was really honest, there was nothing phony about it. I was trying to find new music and I went backwards and found his stuff.”

But Meza points out that Cash was crafting a singular sound from the beginning, developing his signature ‘chucka-boom’ rhythm and honing his stark songwriting style in the 1950s while recording at Sun Records, the studio that gave birth to rock ‘n’ roll with Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Cash.

“He was around when the whole thing started,” Meza said. “He had a humble beginning like most of those guys. But most of his songs were originals, where Elvis didn’t write songs and neither did Jerry Lee.”

Many of those who picked up on Cash in the last decade of his life came to him because he was seen as a rebel, a dark figure who’d battled drug addiction and personal problems, fighting demons through his music.

That wasn’t the first time that persona had pushed him to the hip culture front.

The late ‘60s hip crowd embraced him after 1968’s “Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison” and the next year’s “Johnny Cash at San Quentin,” a pair of live recordings done with prisoners in the audience that, whether intentionally (San Quentin) or not (Folsom), capitalized on Cash’s reputation as a bad man.

But the rock crowd soon turned on their new hero, abandoning him after the country star cozied up to President Richard Nixon. That only showed that they didn’t truly know the mercurial Cash, who could be a very different person at different times.

“He’s got that kind of outlaw persona around him,” Webster said. “But the fact is, he’d openly admit ‘I’m not that person, that outlaw person.’ There was part of him that was like that. But he was into his faith and family. There was nothing pretentious about him. He admitted his faults.”

In fact, much of Cash’s rebel persona is pure myth. He was arrested on a couple of occasions, including once for bringing in a load of pills from Mexico. But he never did serious jail time. Nor was the scar on his face from a knife fight. It was the result of botched dental surgery.

*** 

In “Johnny Cash: The Biography,” Streissguth emphasizes the word “redemption” in regard to Cash.

For many, that term is related to his repeated comebacks in the musical arena. But for Cash himself, it was spiritual as well.

A devout Christian who earned a correspondence divinity degree, Cash poured much of his fortune and the goodwill his commercial success earned him to faith-based projects, like “The Gospel Road,” his early ‘70s film about the life of Christ. He and June regularly appeared on Billy Graham’s crusades, and he recorded gospel albums whenever he got the opportunity, including during his “American Recordings” period.

Cash’s spirituality extended to compassion for others. He didn’t wear black because it looked mysterious, somewhat threatening and cool. Instead, as he wrote in “Man in Black”: “I wear black for the poor and beaten down … for those who never read or listened to the words that Jesus said … for the sick and lonely old …”

Those are words to live by for Webster, who works at Cedar’s Home for Children and called to talk late one night after distributing sleeping bags and coats to homeless men who were going to  spend the night outdoors in frigid temperatures.

“He took up the cause for the poor and indigent, I got that,” Webster said. “I can’t be compared to Cash in any way. But I know how he felt and how people need help.”

That Cash can provide that kind of personal inspiration adds another element to his enduring legacy.

Meza also draws another kind of inspiration from Cash, comparing his own life with singer/songwriter Kristen Bailey to that of Johnny’s relationship with June, calling it an ideal love story between musicians.

Meeting Johnny Cash was an unforgettable experience. What “Walk the Line” couldn’t show was the man’s imposing physical presence. Phoenix is a small man; Cash was very tall and, by the latter part of his life, had filled out from the rail-thin amphetamine-popping young man.

The last time I talked to Cash was at the South By Southwest Music Conference in March 1994, near the time when his first “American Recordings” disc was released. He’d given the conference’s keynote “address” by playing a handful of songs and came back into a press room for a photo session.

After the pictures were taken, I walked up to Cash, asked for an autograph for my father and told him that he’d sent me a photo and a note after I’d written to him while his TV show was on the air.

“I don’t think I remember you,” he said with a laugh.

That was Johnny Cash in nutshell. An iconic, towering, but down to earth figure. That too is part of his enduring appeal.

“He was above no one and no one was above him,” Turner said. “He wasn’t too good for you and you were always good enough for him. He was so accepting of people.”

That acceptance created empathy and that empathy with the common person came through in his songs, his voice and his life.

*** 

Perhaps the ultimate measure of Cash’s place in our culture isn’t in the tributes or the biopic or the musical. Rather, it is in the fact that his songs are regularly performed by the contestants in the glorified karaoke contest called “American Idol.”

Most notably, Chris Daughtry created a stir two years ago when he did a version of “I Walk the Line” that was very similar to a recorded cover of Cash’s classic by the band Live. That, of course, was fodder for the “Idol” gossip mill. But the song choice was instructive.

“People can identify with them,” Turner said. “The lyrics are so good and the songs are so well-written, the fact they were done with a steel guitar in the background doesn’t matter. Everyone can identify with Johnny Cash.”

Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.