Do we like Johnny Cash?
Our score: 8 out of 10. He took a career-risking stand for Native Americans, sang for prisoners and pushed for reform, with nothing harmful found in his own words and a gap on LGBTQ+ issues.
Johnny Cash was born in 1932 and rose from a poor Arkansas farming background to become one of the best-known names in American music. The Academy of Achievement lists the lot: 11 Grammys plus a Lifetime Achievement Award, the Kennedy Center Honors, the National Medal of the Arts and spots in the Country, Rock and Roll and Songwriters halls of fame. He died in 2003, so there is no fresh drama to chase, only a legacy to weigh up.
The story that says the most about him is Bitter Tears, his 1964 album about Native American history. Columbia and plenty of radio stations gave it the cold shoulder, so he bought back copies, put a protest letter in each, and ran a Billboard ad asking “where are your guts?” of the DJs and station managers. He took that backlash on his own career, which is the opposite of a safe celebrity cause.
The scandals are small and very human. In May 1965 a Starkville, Mississippi, officer arrested him after a show, citing drunk and disorderly conduct. He paced his cell, shouted at the guards and kicked the door hard enough to break his toe, then walked out the next morning after paying a $36 fine. He turned it into a song, and in 2007 he got a symbolic pardon.
Nothing new has surfaced about him lately beyond reissues and tribute shows, so there is no live stoush to report. This is a deceased artist whose record has been stable for decades. The record is thin on some modern questions, but what is there leans clearly one way.
So would we support him? Yes. He wasn't perfect, he was a man who spent a night in a Mississippi cell and kicked a door, but the pattern is a guy who sided with the people nobody wanted to play on the radio. Put him on the playlist without checking over your shoulder.