The Gospel According to Johnny Cash

We didn't watch the Academy Awards this year so didn't see Joaquin Pheonix win Best Actor for The Joker, a film we likely won't see. You may recall that way back in 2006 Phoenix was nominated for Best Actor in Walk the Line, a biopic about Johnny Cash. It was a "warts and all" portrayal which included his infidelities and sketchy history as a parent during his rise to fame. Reese Witherspoon did win an Oscar for playing Cash's wife, June Carter.

Despite his sometimes troubled life Cash was a person of faith, raised as an evangelical Christian by a devout mother. Along the way Johnny recorded the entirety of the New Testament -- 19 hours of speaking -- from the King James Version of the bible.

There is a new book by Richard Beck about Cash and his Christian faith called Trains, Jesus, and Murder: The Gospel According to Johnny Cash. The title came from a comment about Cash's recurring themes by the author's son.



In a review by Casey Kep in the New Yorker she suggests that the book is uneven, stretching for meaning at time but also concedes that:

...Cash is the country star who went to Israel to make a movie about the life of Jesus (“Gospel Road,” very much worth viewing), wrote a novel about the life of the Apostle Paul (“Man in White,” only for the completists), and denounced the devil on his national television program, “The Johnny Cash Show”? (“I think we’ve made the devil pretty mad because on our show we’ve been mentioning God’s name,” Cash said on air. “Well, this probably made the devil pretty mad alright, and he may be coming after me again, but I’ll be ready for him.”)

I can't say that I'm a big Johnny Cash fan,  but i do find it intriguing that he always believed in redemption for those who may have seemed lost, and Jesus was never that far away from his life and music. 

Are you a Cash fan? Did you know about his faith? 

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/johnny-cashs-gospel