The white stain of the man in black

Once again I catch myself thinking about the man in black.

A student once told me that I seemed to be fascinated with the theme of violence. Guilty as charged. That happened because I started discussing the book The Giving Tree and went into Shel Silverstein's ghostwriting work for Johnny Cash in the masterful song "25 Minutes to Go", where a prisoner counts his last minutes before meeting the gallows, and I had already previously discussed themes of violence in culture mostly using Ted Gioia's Music: A Subversive History as a source. It's not untrue. Violence is a taboo in culture, and as with any other taboo, it doesn't go away by pretending it does not exist in our daily lives.

Johnny Cash was not a gangster in any way, even if his cultural image might suggest so. Yes, he did have some passages in prison, but most of them were not serious. Actually, one of them was notoriously due to trespassing to pick some flowers on someone else's property. The other, however, still shows the scars of a man who's been through some things. At different points of his life, Cash was addicted to different substances, both downers and uppers, amphetamines (speed) and tranquilizers. Even worse, his alcoholism used to make the other addictions even worse. He never shied away from it.

He was not a violent person, but his violent personal imagery reflected in his work. Arguably his biggest song, "Folsom Prison Blues", tells the story of a man who shot another due to sheer boredom, "just to watch him die". As we all know, boredom is the root of all evil, so it should not surprise us that a bored man would do such a thing.

The narrator of the song is not a good guy that suffered some sort of injustice. Far from it, he's a villain, and he knows it. He is constantly reminded of his mistakes and how he threw it all away just to get a short rush of adrenaline. Yet, Cash makes us feel for him — it's not that hard to imagine ourselves being violent for the sake of not dealing with the deadly empty space of boredom. Doesn't silence judge us? Anything, but judgment! Do not dare to make me feel small! Anything but this hellish, finger-pointing boredom!

The contrast between Cash's life and the beauty he could find and perform — even in the most unexpected of places! — reminds me of a Tom Waits quote made immortal by Blank on Blank's animation. Regarding the constant stimulus presented by New York, often decadent, ugly and unwholesome to say the least, he says

I think it's good. It fractures you a little bit, or (...) I think it's stimulating for artists because if you're visually susceptible to images as optically, it's constantly bombarding you with a lot of information if you can take it without becoming part of it.

Cash took that information and ran with it. At times, he became part of it. It's not hard to see him giving in and turning into the character of "Cocaine Blues", one of his hits from his live album At Folsom Prison of 1968. The help of his muse June Carter was absolutely necessary, given that nobody is completely independent, but he did it. Ah, did he do it.

Prison may be seen nowadays by the law-abiding citizen as some sort of playground for violent men, but it wasn't always like that. The characters from traditional songs were violent and they had some conscience of the moral code they were trespassing, there wasn't the idea of a romantic criminal, kind of like the prisoners from Dostoevsky's Notes from a Dead House, his quasi-memoir of the long years in prison. And much like in Dostoevsky's book, Cash shows us how close the criminal is to the everyday guy, in their virtues, their flaws and their remorse. That jolt of excitement of killing someone is not worth it.

If you peek into traditional music, themes of love (or sex) and violence are abundant. But what might be left unseen but still catches my attention in "Folsom Prison Blues" is the world building. "I hear the train coming, it's rolling around the bend," he sings. The sound of trains is nostalgic in itself.

I rode a train once in my life, in Minas Gerais, going from Belo Horizonte to Governador Valadares, to the marriage of two dear friends. There is something inherently nostalgic about trains. I had never ridden one before, yet seeing the "serrinha" filled my heart for a nostalgia for something I had not yet lived, to quote the footballer.

Trains have always appeared in Bob Dylan's discography, which is rooted in traditional music. For example, his debut one has three of them mentioning trains. "House of the Rising Sun" has the narrator standing with one foot on the platform and another on the train, exactly in the middle. Trains represent difficult decisions. Once you are inside that boxcar, if you decide to look back, you're turned into stone. If you get frozen in between, you quite literally die. "Man of Constant Sorrow" follows on this logic: "I'm a-bound to ride that morning railroad, perhaps I'll die upon that train". The last one, "Freight Train Blues", is the only one that explicitly deals with this image, and associates the train to all sorts of emotions, making the orphan who sings it reminisce about the train teaching him how to cry and also bringing laughter with the blow of the whistle.

If you take a look at the albums with songs that mention trains the most, you'll see that many of them are either from the late 90s onward, when Dylan was bringing up these ideas on purpose, or from the early 60s, when he was borrowing directly from traditional popular music. In fact, that applies to all but four of the top 14, one of which has a title-track named "Slow Train", as you can see in the following table.

The title of 1975's Blood on the Tracks may be a reference to the bleeding songs that form its body. "Simple Twist of Fate" talks about the main character feeling "the heat of the night hit him like a freight train", maybe spilling the blood that baptizes the album. Of course, it can also be a reference to "music tracks", but why not both simultaneously?

"Idiot Wind" has two beautiful references to trains: "There's a small soldier on the cross, smoke pouring out of a boxcar door", and "down the highway, down the tracks, down the road to ecstasy". A song about ending a painful relationship paints the picture of the narrator watching a soldier that has been through the same tracks that he is now over, unlikely winning a war, and leaving behind the haunting memories of the past relationship. Is that not a difficult decision?

You're on the crossroads. That's where you make the big decision. You are on highway 61 and you fall down on your knees, you ask the Lord for forgiveness and deem your soul to hell by bargaining with the devil.

And then the whistle blows. You "hang your head and cry". Back to "Folsom Prison Blues".

You are stuck in a bad decision while others are moving, freely on the train. And the whistle blows your blues away.

Dostoevsky's Notes from a Dead House portrays violent men who knew what they had done wrong. Akoulka's husband is probably the best example, having killed the only angel to pass by his life, Akoulka. But, somehow, when they do not feel as their crimes were justified and accept their guilt, these men are not monsters. They show their soul in the theater, trying to act the best way they can, when helping one another. But they also show their flaws when beating up one another or drinking until they pass out. Life is harsh.

One shoots a man in Reno just to watch him die. Another takes a shot of cocaine and shoots his woman down. In Eastern Europe, another drinks and axes his wife to death. Now they can only repent and try to live with dignity even inside of prison, against all odds. This is now their purpose.

Listen to that Duquesne whistle blowing...

I know I can't be free...

At Folsom Prison, Johnny Cash sang a song by Glen Sherley, one of the prisoners, called "Greystone Chapel". This man was living among the lowest of low-lives: murderers, drug addicts, all kinds of criminals. And he had a solution to life in prison, which he put down in the beautiful lyrics of his song. Even though "you wouldn't think that God had a place at Folsom", He "saved the souls of many lost men", and even though they are in a literal prison, "the door to the house of God is never locked".

There are men here that don't ever worship,
There are men here who scoff at the ones who pray
But I've got down on my knees in that grey stone chapel,
And I've thanked the Lord for helping me each day
Now, this grey stone chapel here at Folsom,
It has a touch of God's hand on every stone
It's a flower of light in a field of darkness,
And it's given me the strength to carry on

Inside the walls of prison my body may be,
But the Lord has set my soul free