A Politics of Empathy: Johnny Cash, the Vietnam War, and the ‘Walking Contradiction’ Myth Dismantled
Popular Music and Society ISSN: 0300-7766 (Print) 1740-1712 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpms20 A Politics of Empathy: Johnny Cash, the Vietnam War, and the ‘Walking Contradiction’ Myth Dismantled Michael Stewart Foley To cite this article: Michael Stewart Foley (2014) A Politics of Empathy: Johnny Cash, the Vietnam War, and the ‘Walking Contradiction’ Myth Dismantled, Popular Music and Society, 37:3, 338-359, DOI: 10.1080/03007766.2013.798928 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2013.798928 Published online: 26 Jun 2013. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 253 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rpms20 Download by: [University of Groningen] Date: 23 March 2016, At: 04:33 Popular Music and Society, 2014 Vol. 37, No. 3, 338–359, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2013.798928 A Politics of Empathy: Johnny Cash, the Vietnam War, and the ‘Walking Contradiction’ Myth Dismantled Michael Stewart Foley In the years since Johnny Cash’s death in 2003, popular and scholarly writing has persisted in framing Cash’s politics as contradictory—thus seeming to support Kris Kristofferson’s line, often assumed to be about Cash: a “walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.” This essay argues that, although Cash may have seemed conflicted in the late 1960s and early 1970s, his political views on Native Americans, prison reform, and the Vietnam War, especially, were remarkably consistent in that they were based not on ideological views as much as on emotion, instinct, and an ability to relate to familial suffering.
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