HARD, HARD RELIGION: FAITH and CLASS in the NEW SOUTH By
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HARD, HARD RELIGION: FAITH AND CLASS IN THE NEW SOUTH by JOHN HERBERT HAYES (Under the Direction of KATHLEEN CLARK) ABSTRACT “Hard, Hard Religion: Faith and Class in the New South” argues that a fervent people’s religious culture permeated the rural New South, and was a central element in the persona and music of an iconic figure from that world, Johnny Cash. A distinct religious sensibility—a regional “popular religion,” or what one white farm laborer called “hard, hard religion”—constituted a central medium through which the rural poor, white and black, articulated and engaged with the hard everyday forces in their lives in the New South: confinement, marginality, injustice, and ridicule. This sensibility was not a static “old time religion,” an “otherworldly” compensation, or a psychological coping mechanism. Indeed, through the mediated forms of “folk” music and early “hillbilly” and “race” records, this popular religion has recurrently attracted outsiders for its complex engagement with modernity and its discontents, even though the dominant categories of historical analysis, those that conceptualize southern power relations and religion solely through the lens of race, have obscured it. I focus in on the persona and music of Johnny Cash, demonstrating that a principal aspect of his durable popular appeal was his creative engagement with the “hard, hard religion” he absorbed in his youth, in a rural community in Arkansas in the 1930s and ‘40s. In wrestling with the meaning of his inherited faith, Cash sang basic themes from the older culture—an abiding sense of evil and of perpetual struggle against darkness, a via negativa as the path to God, a feeling of mystery and the stark limit in life, and a democratic spirit of favoritism for the lowly—into American popular culture from the 1960s until his death in 2003. INDEX WORDS: Cash, Johnny; Poor—Southern States; Southern States—Religion; Southern States—History—1865-1950 HARD, HARD RELIGION: FAITH AND CLASS IN THE NEW SOUTH by JOHN HERBERT HAYES B.A., Wake Forest University, 1995 M.T.S., Duke Divinity School, 2000 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2007 © 2007 John Herbert Hayes All Rights Reserved HARD, HARD RELIGION: FAITH AND CLASS IN THE NEW SOUTH by JOHN HERBERT HAYES Major Professor: Kathleen Clark Committee: James Cobb Michael Winship Allan Kulikoff Michael Kwass Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia December 2007 IN GRATEFUL MEMORY ELLEN HARVEY JERVIS HERBERT BETHEA HAYES WARREN TYREE CARR iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page PREFACE With a Bible and a Gun..........................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1 Magic to Take Me Through the Dark Places.................................................................5 2 “Hard, Hard Religion:” The Invisible Institution of the New South ...........................36 3 “Jesus Was Our Savior—Cotton Was Our King”........................................................89 4 Evil and Ecstasy.........................................................................................................153 5 Liminality and the Via Negativa................................................................................203 6 Mystery and Limit......................................................................................................237 7 Orality and Social Critique ........................................................................................279 8 W.J., Johnny, and the Nature of Struggle ..................................................................317 9 The Man in Black and the Man of Revelation...........................................................358 10 Ghosts and the Cultural Passage................................................................................405 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................413 v PREFACE WITH A BIBLE AND A GUN It was summer 1993, and I was standing in a record shop in Amsterdam, jet-lagged, half- asleep, flipping absentmindedly through rows of cassette tapes. The sounds coming out of the store’s speakers were keeping me awake: it was the strange new U2 album Zooropa, and I stood there in a daze listening intently to electronic noises, distorted voices, and lyrics springing out of that curious period of immediate post-Cold War uncertainty. Francis Fukuyama had recently proclaimed “the end of history” and the “victory of the VCR,” for to him the demise of state socialism in eastern Europe demonstrated Western capitalism to be the social model that best “satisfies the most basic of human longings.”1 Certainly Europe felt like a place that history had just happened to, but what I could make out of the portrait on Zooropa hardly seemed satisfied. Then, though the electronica and distortion continued, there was a new voice, stark and clear. As a plodding, fuzzy bass beat out a space age cowboy rhythm, it rang out: “I went out searching/ looking for one good man/ a spirit who would not bend or break/ who would sit at his father’s right hand.” Wait…that’s—Johnny Cash? I listened more closely: “I went out walking/ with a Bible and a gun/ the word of God lay heavy on my heart/ I was sure I was the one/ now Jesus, don’t you wait up/ Jesus, I’ll be home soon…”2 Garth Brooks’ kitschy songs were about the only country I really knew, but that voice was unmistakable. Many hours later, several thousand feet above the Atlantic, I listened repeatedly to my new purchase. I’d woken up but was still puzzled and confused. Much of the album appeared to 1 Fukuyama quoted in Daniel M. Bell, Jr. Liberation Theology: The Refusal to Cease Suffering (London: Routledge, 2001):1. 2 U2 with Johnny Cash, “The Wanderer” Zooropa (Island Records, 1993) 1 be high satire, burlesque portraits of a world that seemed like some kind of carnivalesque zoo. That last song seemed like something different, though, and the liner notes told me it was “The Wanderer Starring Johnny Cash.” In the song, Cash’s character drifted through a decaying industrial dystopia, “where the ground won’t turn and the rain it burns,” where people sit outside a church and “say they want the kingdom but they don’t want God in it,” where “a thousand signs” on “that ol’ eight lane” signify only an alienated anomie. It struck me as quite serious, and Johnny’s spoken recitation in the middle of the song seemed like a retroactive confession: “Yeah I went out there/ in search of experience/ to taste and to touch/ and to feel as much/ as a man can/ before he repents.” “Repents?” Not exactly a word, or concept, that I heard in pop music. The closest thing I could relate Cash’s Wanderer to was the restlessly troubled, “Christ-haunted” southern backwoods characters I’d recently been reading about in the enigmatic stories of Flannery O’Connor.3 Knowing practically nothing about country music, not then a student of history, I heard Johnny Cash on “The Wanderer” then as a timeless voice, or rather one out of some very different past, singing of strange religious longings in a broken-down, apocalyptic modern world. I’d heard him sing the Bonanza theme song on the TV re-runs I used to watch when I was about nine, and “A Boy Named Sue” on the eight-track player in the family station wagon headed to Florida. And I’d heard “I Walk the Line” a few times on the oldies station. Those were the sum total of my associations. In the summer of 1997, by spur-of-the-moment happenstance, I saw Cash play in a small venue in Atlanta. Not knowing he was in town, a friend and I got stuck in traffic and learned that Cash was the reason for the crowd. We bought scalped tickets and hurried in on the third song, 3 Flannery O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction” (1960 lecture at Wesleyan College) in Sally Fitzgerald, ed. Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works (New York: Library of America, 1988):818 2 and Cash had a remarkable charisma. I was particularly struck by a song that Cash said was a new piece, a song called “Unchained.” It was basically a confessional prayer borne of confinement and humility: “…Oh have I seen an angel/ oh have I seen a ghost/ where’s that rock of ages/ when I need it most/ oh, oh, I am weak/ oh, I know I am vain/ take this weight from me/ let my spirit be/ unchained…”4 I bought my first Cash album, the Unchained album, and while some of the songs were really good, others I thought could have been left off. But I was really intrigued by Cash’s liner notes, how reflective and backward-looking they were, and written in a certain tight rhythm that I associated with older southern people I’d known, storytellers and purveyors of the past. The accompanying artwork furthered the mood: Cash sat against the weathered wood of an old farm building, and in a hayfield where a low sun made the broomsedge glow. And there he was as a boy in an old black-and-white. He wrote about his father, who rode the rails as a hobo in search of work in the hard years of the thirties, jumping off the slowing train before it reached the depot. He recalled hard labor in the cotton fields as a child, with mule, plow, hoe, and songs to sing. He remembered the excitement of hitch-hiking to Memphis to see the 12 noon Louvin Brothers radio show. He evoked the powerful religion that he encountered at an early age. “The first preachers I heard…in Dyess, Arkansas scared me. The talk about sin and death and eternal hell without redemption, made a mark on me. At four, I’d peep out the window of our farmhouse at night, and if, in the distance, I saw a grass fire or forest fire, I knew hell was almost here.” And he reflected on his mother’s admonitory description of his talent: “My mother used to say, ‘God has his hand on you.