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lirik lagu tony tost - johnny cash's "american recordings" (33 1/3 excerpt)

chapter seven – delia

at his best, cash manipulated his cultural inheritance so it felt immediate—a kind of confession. likewise, his finest personal numbers are animated by a spirit larger than any particular self, expanding those songs beyond the usual boundaries of self and public, spirit and self. in cash’s strongest recordings, the voice comes on as more than a single personality’s self-expression; it sounds more like some buried address, a grand cavernous restless place consenting to song. more expansive than an individualized perspective, this plundering transcendence is cash’s oddly singular possession

the novelist barry hannah, when interviewing cash for a feature in spin shortly after the release of american recordings, noted how its lead track and single, “delia’s gone,” was an especially vicious, -frightening number. “if you’re going to be a criminal, be a criminal,” cash responded. “if you want to sing god’s praises, sing his praises!” that’s one approach. “avoid extremes,” benjamin franklin once wrote, prescribing a different path. “forbear resenting -injuries as much as you think they deserve.” cash bore a different credo. his impulses—like his injuries and grievances—existed in order to carry him, out beyond any middle ground of acceptable behavior. “eat and carouse with bacchus, or munch dry bread with jesus,” d. h. lawrence wrote in direct redress of franklin, “but don’t sit down without one of the gods.” to court the attendance of the gods is not only to invite salvation and reconciliation to one’s feast but also plagues of terror and dissension. “k!ll when you must, and be k!lled the same,” lawrence also wrote, “the must coming from the gods inside you, or from the men in whom you recognize the holy ghost.”

there is no point in resting at cash’s intentions with “delia’s gone” or to merely p-rs- the literal content of the lyrics in order to judge and admonish their excesses. it was forged in a fire larger than cash’s own. but we can’t leave cash’s life out of the calculation of our response either. as a late and inexplicable issue of the american folk tradition, “delia’s gone” is not a self-contained parcel of meanings to be stored and retrieved and closely read in isolation, in a kind of metaphysical autopsy. it is its own history and tributary, fed by sweat, p-ss, jizz and blood. the song channels forces grander than the possession of any earthly self and, before it can really be discussed, those forces have to be felt. this is how it appears to be with great art. we can begin to speak truthfully of it only once it has struck us dumb

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the commingled blood of love and murder has darkened centuries of american song, of course, from “the banks of the ohio” to “frankie and johnny” to “goodbye earl.” a key gets slipped into such songs, unlocking questions of action and consequence. what are the acts one must mortgage with one’s own life? a girl is k!lled and tossed into the ohio river because she will not marry; johnny cheats on frankie, so she shoots him, rooty-toot-toot, through the bedroom door; and because he pummels her into intensive care, earl’s wife and her pal extract his life as payment. each song leads its listener to a threshold that should not have been crossed, and that threshold is never the same. it is not just simple sensationalism or vicarious cruelty feeding interest in these songs, generation after generation; they are parables, set in common language. fifty years ago, a group of minneapolis street-corner troubadours, the blenders, spelled it out for us: you can play around all you want with tnt, you can go grab a tiger by its tail, but you better not f-ck around with love

if cash had not murdered delia, he would have married her. as a vow with the eternal, either act would have sufficed. it is mind courting myth, seeking a sufficient measure, in love and in justice. the folk antihero stagger lee grew legendary, song-worthy, because he k!lled billy lyons for taking lee’s hat off his head. what lent this murder a mythic weight was not the extinguishing of lyons’ particular life for such paltry behavior; any other fool could have stumbled forward out of anonymity and stepped into lyons’ shoes and the song would not have lost an ounce of significance. the song is notable, recurring, because of the murderous transaction that occurred as a result of the absolute value stagger lee placed on style. lyons, playing the rube, found himself trapped in a web of correspondences he did not understand. a bait and switch occurred. he took a bad man’s stetson hat without knowing what it meant. taking my hat, stagger lee’s moral calculus concluded, is the same as putting a bullet hole in your guts. how was lyons supposed to know that all of the pride and vanity a man normally places on the fidelity of his woman, that entire burden of ident-ty, stagger lee had transferred to the p-mp-sh arrangement of felt atop his head?

in dealing with a song that moves through myth, literal truths can only get us inside its labyrinth of correspondences. we have to find our own way once we’re in there. “it’s not an anti-woman song,” cash announced in concert. “it’s just an anti-delia song.” who was this delia that he ended up crooning about, this lover he tied down in a parlor and filled up with lead? was she the sensual embodiment of some spiritual fact? a temptress crouched on the lower throne of cash’s psyche? a sound circling the earth? she was just a woman; trifling, low and mean. she was promiscuous. when waylon jennings sang about her, she was as mysterious as a house in new orleans. she wanted to k!ll him, too. she gambled and cursed her man (if her fella hadn’t shot her she’d have cursed him worse). in the kingston trio’s “one more round,” delia was a girl who had slipped out the back door and was headed now to marble town, laid low at some stranger’s hands. according to johnny western, delia died immediately when her tony shot her and then she bowed her head; they dressed her up in brown and let her settle back into the earth. scores of twentieth century recordings describing young delia’s murder exist, relics of an irretrievable, unshakable american past. for blind willie mctell, delia was just one more citizen gone to the graveyard; her murderous lover was sentenced to stay in his prison cell until she came back to life

she did not stay in the graveyard long. delia migrated, in song, to the bahamas sometime in the 1920s and then returned, in altered form, to america in the 1950s, in the recordings of blind blake alphonso harris, harry belafonte and others. the delia that cash knew, the one that he first sang about—not on american recordings but on a record released thirty years earlier—was the delia who emigrated back to america, not the delia who was slain here. cash cultivated the bahamian strain of the delia legend. in a certain sense, she was already a ghost when he met her

on his initial recording of “delia’s gone” on the sound of johnny cash, released in 1962, cash played it straight, devoting more attention to the legal consequences of the crime than to the act itself. in the opening verses, the plot matches up with the later, more famous american recordings version. but the last three verses of this earlier version move quickly away from the scene of the crime in order to focus on the k!ller’s sentencing. in these verses, the singer declares that he’s not going to reveal his verdict to the listener because, vaguely, he’s “got a brother in memphis doing life or 99.”

on the calypso version of “delia’s gone” recorded a decade earlier by blind blake, the song’s narrator presented a tony who k!lled his delia because of a wicked curse and who believed his sentence of sixty-four years was not so bad because his little brother was serving one that was worse, spanning nine hundred and ninety-nine years. cash, lifting this version’s sentiment while also attempting to re-americanize the song, inserted memphis as a marginal coordinate for the tale, but produced a confused jumble in doing so. the song trots forward anyway, and cash notes how he is haunted by delia’s ghost, almost in afterthought. the last glimpse the song gives is of the singer busting rocks on a chain gang, hearing delia’s name with the splitting of each stone, the song’s lone mythic resonance; the story ends and the singer does not find himself asking any questions, though the earth keeps repeating its one answer anyway, over and over again

replicating much of the lyrical content of blind blake’s decade-old import, which itself was a revision of a decades-old american ballad, cash ended up not only re-americanizing the song but also casting it in the first person, from the k!ller’s point of view, as a guiltless confession. in doing so, cash also ended up retaining the distant, uninvested voice of a third-person reporter, even though he was now singing the song from the k!ller’s perspective. delia is dead and her k!ller is punished, but no motives or even emotions seem to have occurred. in most non-cashian versions of the delia legend, the story has been told from a relatively objective point of view, as a kind of reportage; a tony or a coony or some other lover shoots delia after a particular transgression, usually either cursing or cheating. on blind blake’s seminal version, for instance, the narrator presents the facts of the delia case line by line, and is then joined by a chorale of men on the “delia’s gone, one more round, delia’s gone” refrain, a refrain absent from the pre-bahamian, early american folk instantiations of the song

blind blake’s version sounds like a party or tavern gathering, a community granting authority and witness to the account; a group of men have collected together, to share a local story. in this story, delia’s k!ller gets arrested, and then is sentenced the next day. the listener realizes, as the story unfolds, that both delia and tony are now outside the geography of the song: one is in a prison cell drinking from a silver cup, the other is in the graveyard, never to get up. they can be described by the song but they do not contribute to it. it is neither delia nor her k!ller who will persist after the song’s completion but rather the community from which they were extracted using many of the same words as blind blake, cash tells a very different story. in his 1962 version, he is joined not by fellow storytellers but rather by the sl1ck and deathless background singers of the period, who lend their studio-approved mmmmms and aaaaahhhs to the narration, softening the rawness of cash’s voice. they join the refrain, not as co-owners of the story but as a sort of mindless aural gauze, seemingly unaware of the mayhem they are soundtracking. and it is unclear as to whom cash and the background singers are addressing; fellow prisoners perhaps, or maybe delia’s memory (perhaps the song is meant to chime continuously with the split rocks as the singer does his hard time). no sense of community or collectivity is present in cash’s song. in his first version, the song is simply the story of a domestic murder and its expected, corresponding punishment. one suspects the song would largely be forgotten, would deserve to be forgotten, if it were not the prelude to the late, acoustic, solitary version on -american recordings- that brought cash back into the national consciousness. his first version is a song without motive, emotion or cosmic consequence, a slice of representative sound from the period, but a bit hollow, a little overadorned

- - -

“mine wasn’t soft-core, pop-psychology self-hatred,” cash would write in his second autobiography, “it was a profound, violent, daily holocaust of revulsion and shame.” “delia’s gone” displays a violent and primary mechanism in cash’s life, a violence of ancient pedigree and old testament reckoning, and is similarly the issue of a collective mindset—the american folk tradition—prepared to accept a world in which sons and daughters are punished for the sins of their forefathers, in which men and women are cut down for shadowy transgressions, because it recognizes that justice and retribution are forces larger than the life spans of the individual players involved. the playground of demons and angels, tyrants and totems, such a mindset -ssumes our lives are rarely our own. “see all men and women according to the holy ghost that is within them,” d. h. lawrence wrote. “never yield before the barren.” to such a mind, we each are unmoored in eternity, inside the half-known. the thread by which we are cradled—call it necessity or morality or love—is not to be corrupted; it is what holds us above an oblivious pool

fleeing the barren, cash turned to unsuspected quarters for nourishment. regardless of what the movies say, it was not just simple beneficence that led cash to sing prisoner songs or to perform for actual convicts, singing them back home. when he played at places such as folsom prison and san quentin, cash’s songs tapped into the repressed and wicked impulses pulsing beneath violently composed behaviors. he appeared in these settings like he appears in the imagination, not just as a relief but as a furious revelation. bob johnston, cash’s producer at the time, recalled the prison show that resulted in live at san quentin and the defiant, d-mning song that cash wrote for the occasion: “san quentin,” cash slurred at the end of the song, “may you rot and burn in h-ll.” he played it twice. “it was surprising,” johnston told michael streissguth, “because johnny said, ‘when i sang it again and all of a sudden i looked around and i knew that if i wanted to let those people go all i had to do was say ‘the time is now.’ and all of those prisoners would’ve broken.’” performing with his wife and friends, cash nearly orchestrated a m-ssacre. on the second p-ss through “san quentin,” the spooked guards began aiming their guns at the prisoners who were climbing onto the tables and threatening to riot, responding to cash’s d-mnation of their prison. “all he had to do was say something,” johnston recalled. “it would’ve been a huge riot, and johnny and all his family would’ve been dead out there.”

how did cash regard the potential abyss that opened before him? did he find himself repelled by its invitation? “i was tempted,” he told johnston, afterwards. songs like “delia’s gone” were not far from the strum of cash’s own being. he had started playing san quentin in the 1950s, when a young felon—one with a spider-web tattooed across his back because, as one of his wives would later put it, he felt trapped inside his own body—named merle haggard was among the incarcerated. “there was a connection there,” haggard later said, remembering cash’s performance, “an identification.” it was an identification not only with the contours and impulses of the criminal psyche but also with the pieties of the prisoner, of one who acutely knows the limits and capacities of the self

after the resurrection of his career that the prison albums triggered, cash met with delia again, during the first season of his abc television program. introduced as that episode’s “love song,” cash performed “delia’s gone” with a feral irreverence, his eyes flashing in delight when singing about shooting delia and watching her die. in this performance, instead of the confused lines from the 1962 version about his prison sentence and a brother in memphis, cash inserted a familiar motive into the song. “i saw my backdoor open, ran and looked outside,” cash sang. “i knew she was gone to meet him, durn her mangy hide.” seven years after his initial attempt, at the height of his fame, cash was beginning to veer his account of delia toward the mix of video-game violence and bemused stoicism that would make his american recordings version so -compelling. in this 1969 version, cash’s k!ller formulated his own bizarro vocabulary (“durn,” “mangy hide”), caricaturing his violence with one hand but chiseling out a k!ller’s condescension with the other; from a later perspective, this odd new lyric reads as a test run for the equally odd and ominous “sub-mo-chine” of cash’s final version

the humor was played too broadly on this earlier television performance, however, to have the violence register as immanent to our world—it sounds like a distant occurrence in some other, even more cartoonish world—though we do begin to sense the k!ller’s aloofness, his s-d-stic pose of claustrophobic self-regard. the k!ller gleam in cash’s eyes is in fact the most chilling element of the performance, outstripping even his laconic vocals; it may have been the most authentic remnant of the delia legend to attach itself to this, or any other, version cash would endeavor. “a love song!” cash called to the band at the end the song, still delighted

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there had been an actual delia

back before cash was even plucked from whatever obscure fold in the cosmos and thrust onto the swampy arkansas loam, back in the era of frankie hunting down johnny and the fiery death of casey jones—heralds of the oncoming age, feed for the folksy fables of unsuspecting generations—young delia had lived. afterwards, they would say that her murderer was as drunk as a lord when he walked in through the front door of the home of willie and emma west on christmas eve night in the black section of savannah, georgia in 1900. we do know that everyone was loaded, slumped around the piano, gathered and leaning into song. a new century hid before them. “when my eye-strings break in death,” they were singing, “when i soar to worlds unknown.” these were the words pouring forth from their chosen spiritual, “rock of ages.” delia green was also there in the stupor, bright as a berry in her brand new dress. “let me hide myself in thee,” they sang. christmas was coming and delia was fourteen years of age when her lover, also just fourteen, came slouching into the room with a gun in his hand

for a century, only ballads told the tale. but ten years ago, acting on a tip that the actual delia’s murder occurred in savannah either in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, a university of georgia professor named john garst turned to newspaper records for a lead. to narrow his search, garst first began skimming through doc-mented versions of the song, scanning its endless variations, looking for clues that would date the original crime. in chapman j. milling’s 1937 article in southern folklore quarterly, “delia holmes — a neglected negro ballad,” garst discovered the following verses:nineteen hundred
nineteen hundred and one;
death of po’ delia
has jes’ now begun
nineteen hundred
nineteen hundred and two;
death of po’ delia
jes’ now come true
nineteen hundred
nineteen hundred and three
all those darkies singin’
nearer my god to thee.garst began looking through the microfilm archives of the savannah newspapers for the year 1901, to see what the ballad’s darkies were singing about. within a couple of hours he found reports from the trial of a moses houston, charged with k!lling a young savannah girl named delia. none of the early delia variations pinned the murder on a moses or mose however—her k!ller was often some variation on the name coony (or later, tony)—so it was unclear whether the delia that moses houston k!lled was the delia of the ballads. looking at papers from around the date of houston’s accused crime, garst eventually came across the -following headline:

shot because rejected
––––––––––––
fourteen-year-old girl the victim
of a jealous lover
delia green, a colored girl 14 years old[,] was shot last night about 12 o’clock by coony houston and will probably die from the wound . . .

and so garst found her. and what a strange artifact the newspaper evidence turns out to be; forensic residue of the american mythos, it is a headline right out of harry smith’s old, lethal america. the language is plain, perfunctory, flat and, in its own way, absolutely haunting, with a power derived not from syntax or insight but rather from the strange crossroads it has been fixed as, a kind of perpetual midnight. we can read it even now as though it is still happening. “delia . . . was shot last night about 12 o’clock . . . and will probably die . . .” within the world of these sentences, delia has just been shot but she is not yet gone. in the ordinary language of this newspaper p-ssage, one accesses a middle sp-ce between delia’s complete anonymity prior to the shooting and her legendary afterlife following it. it’s like visiting the spot that songs come from

- - -

bob dylan put out a version of “delia” a year -earlier than cash did, on 1993’s world gone wrong. his delia is a purer remainder of the american folk tradition, funneled from the work of blind willie mctell and reverend gary davis. dylan didn’t pick up the post-bahamian strain but instead recovered the song’s earlier, plainer enchantments, staying truer to the song’s original context while also constricting its mythic afterlife. on world gone wrong, delia’s k!ller expects to pay a fine for the shooting and to end his obligations there. instead, the k!ller ends up disappearing into prison after his sentencing; he spends his days in obscurity, sipping stale water from a tin cup, never to be heard from again

“well,” as blind willie mctell remarked to himself about the k!ller on his version of the song, the one that dylan built his own around, “that’s one more rounder gone.” strangely enough, mctell’s phrase “one more rounder gone” itself came to be transformed, in an american-bahamian game of chinese whispers, into an aloof refrain: “one more round, delia’s gone, one more round.” the process of transformation has been lost to time; all we have left is this inexplicable keepsake. a portion of the mystery of “delia’s gone” as we now know it, post-cash, is the very peculiarity of that refrain. one more round of what? one more round of drinks. one more turn of fortune’s wheel. one more spin through the song’s morose particulars. whenever one tries to crack open the refrain, it keeps revealing the same desolate theme: resignation, the very taste of fate. and when the song finishes, it seems we are left largely unsure as to what it is we are to be resigned. one more round of what, exactly? don’t worry, the song offers in unkind -ssurance, whatever it is, it’ll be back again

according to teresa goddu, it is nothing to be praised. for her, cash’s version of “delia’s gone” slips easily into a d-mnable lineage of songs that “partic-p-te in the ritual misogyny of gothic bluegr-ss without being held accountable for it.” that is, by wrapping the k!ller’s violence in a wink, goddu argues, such songs get to enjoy a hatred of women without owning up to it. in -n-lyzing the vicious posture of “delia’s gone,” goddu focuses in particular on the “one more round” refrain. “while delia’s power is obvious from the many ‘rounds’ it takes to k!ll her,” goddu writes, “the song nevertheless celebrates the man’s excessive violence (he k!lls her twice with a submachine gun).” in a certain sense, goddu is correct. on cash’s -american recordings-, the brutality of delia’s murder is handled with an -adolescent wink. listening to the song, imagining ourselves being driven to sing it, we are unsure whether we are meant to spasm with laughter or disgust. the song puts the dead back into deadpan and then slips off into the uneasy silence from which it had been delivered

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coony houston, delia’s young murderer, considered his crime to be the product of adolescent rough-housing, an unfortunate consequence of puckish impertinence; like a jaywalker or careless driver—like dylan’s pimp in primary colors—he was willing to pay a fine. his lawyer’s clemency pet-tion on his behalf suggests that houston was incapable of comprehending the enormity of his act:

pet-tioner further shows that he was just a mere child at the time when he got into bad company and so unfortunately committed the act that he now suffers for and that it was done by him not only accidentally, but when he was crazed by drink in boisterous company for the first time in his life and that the crowd he was with and in got him drunk . . .

in his own view, houston was merely a drunken, -boisterous child; he was the true victim of his crime

according to the newspaper record, at the moment of houston’s conviction and sentencing, he was quite deaf to the incurability of delia’s silence. “i exhort you to be a man,” the judge remarked to houston, “even in confinement, to repent of your past evil deeds and strive to earn the confidence and respect of those placed in authority over you.” the historian sean wilentz, glossing on garst’s unpublished research, writes, “coony did not cooperate. gaily, he thanked the judge and pranced out of the courtroom in a bailiff’s custody, ‘calm and as debonair . . . as if the experience through which he had just p-ssed was a matter of every day occurrence and of no particular importance.’”

on his final recording of “delia’s gone,” cash corrected even as he carried forward houston’s childish impudence. in the world of american recordings, delia’s k!ller is both unrepentant and nameless. more importantly, he is continually hounded by delia’s ghost. supernatural reparations are at work, marking the song as the product of a mythic world, a world which is resolutely premodern—prior to monetary compensation, prior to rationalized law—in its bearing, if not its jurisdiction. the violence of cash’s final “delia’s gone” is the violence of the sacred, governed by the offices of honor and retribution, not inst-tutional sanction. from cash’s point of view, fate had long ago knitted delia and her k!ller together as an emblem, singular and contorted. to such a state of affairs the k!ller has always been resigned: to delia’s low-down ways, to his inability to resist them, to the necessity of her murder, to the inevitable punishment his crime would call forth, to the long empty hallway of eternity they would together have to share. there is no sense that the k!ller or even delia ever expected to live in any other kind of world. he k!lls delia without ever expecting to get away with it. and even though he is jailed for the crime, we sense that he is beginning to understand that that is not nearly retribution enough, for even after his sentencing delia still haunts his nights and his earthly bed

perhaps he is beginning to realize that the song itself is among his punishments, and that he will have to sing it forever (perhaps he will end up as a split rock ringing out her name). the listener might even start to hear delia’s footsteps as she patters around his cell and climbs onto his bed, kneeling upon his chest and cajoling him to sing her song again. “jailer, oh jailer,” the k!ller whispers to her, gently. “jailer i can’t sleep.” as accepting of these twists of fate as her lover, delia shows herself to be unmoved. her nightly return to his cell is her renewal of their union (she never expected to live in any other kind of world). when she comes to him each night, what is the refrain of her final, recurring request? “‘delia’s gone,’” she demands. “one more round, ‘delia’s gone.’”

- - -

“it’s an old black tune,” cash explained. “i just added memphis, tying her in the chair, and the sub-machine gun.” back on his 1962 recording, when he first adapted “delia’s gone” from its bahamian afterlife in order to refashion it (again) as a ballad of americana, cash had inserted an awkward line about a brother in memphis. for his resurrection of delia on american recordings, cash remade memphis as the central locale of the song’s—and the album’s—inner geography. in the cash mythos, going up to memphis is the same as returning inward, to one’s unruly origins. like elvis presley and jerry lee lewis, cash had marked himself early as an outsider to the nashville mainstream because of his roots in the miscegenational memphis muck, and cash (like his fellow million dollar cohorts) masterfully exploited this marking; it not only granted him the profile of a kind of wandering exile, a refugee from the dark end of the street, it also provided him with a point of origin he could continually return to, a spiritual birthplace that happened to coincide with a larger national fable

if memphis truly does show up in more songs than any other city, clearly it is not because of its architectural or communal triumphs. the city stands for a sound; not only the echoing sound of elvis’ rockabilly yelp meeting scottie moore’s electric strut and bill black’s slapping b-ss, or of jerry lee lewis’ pumping piano and cruel magnificence, or of al green’s holy ghost chasing falsetto, or of bb king’s greasy digits wrenching out notes of blue and wonder from his lucille, or of the famous boom-chika-boom of johnny cash and the tennessee two but of the singular possibility that these sounds, in unison, offer: the potential for lonesome weirdos to step out of the shadows and into a kind of redemption. we might label this sound as being, in miniature, the american dream itself, or just a decent way to k!ll some time, or perhaps both

the sound belongs to memphis, regardless. cash’s first americana album, ride this train, released in 1960, not long after he left memphis’ sun records for columbia, included the song “going to memphis,” dressing cash in familiar dressing. a member of a chain gang, all he wants to do is break loose and get himself lost in memphis’ “honky tonk roll.” cash certainly jumped out as the bad seed he claimed to be in the song. “my brother was k!lled for a deed i did,” he sang, antic-p-ting the jailed brother in memphis of his first delia version two years later, “but i disremember what.” as much as their unrepentant violence, it is the peculiar vocabulary choices of cash’s k!llers that jump out: i disremember? humming somewhere behind his original “delia’s gone,” cash’s even earlier “i’m going to memphis” not only provides a key to delia’s eventual geographic locale, but also to cash’s peculiar notion of the murderous psyche, his tendency to link a giddily eccentric vocabulary—from “disremember” to “durn her mangy hide” to “sub-mo-chine”—with a willingness to step outside the regulatory norms of good behavior. even in confessing to their own atrocities, such cashian k!llers refuse to consent to the boundaries of propriety; this refusal, like their words and deeds, mark the men as those who would prance around their own murder trial, who would regard the death of others with a haughty shrug. “well another boy is down, the shovel burned him out,” cash’s memphis-dreaming bad seed sings. “let me stand on his body to see what the shouting’s about.”

cash’s memphis is american music’s devilish eden. sin and redemption, transcendence and kitsch, god and mammon: flipsides of the same record. it is everything memphis dreams upon: bravado, swagger, danger, racial calamity and collusion, desperate pleas of faith. a place to be a criminal and to praise god both: this memphis is a place that actually exists, but only in song, for maybe two or three minutes at a time. when wyclef jean covered “delia’s gone” at a johnny cash tribute show in 1999, he covered the -american recordings- version, outfitted in cowboy hat and boots, black jeans and black western shirt. in addition to bringing an island lilt back to the song, jean also—in cash’s fashion—made one slightly colossal alteration to the story. “i went up to -brooklyn-,” jean sang, “and i found delia there.” at that moment, when brooklyn replaced memphis, the live audience went a little nuts, recognizing jean’s revision as a small but significant victory. memphis can be found anywhere, jean announced; its redemptions and d-mnations lurk together in the shadows at the edge of any town, any self. it is the outline of a truer geography lurking within an immediate terrain

in his recent book -i shot a man in reno-, graeme thomson points out that cash’s “folsom prison blues” is in fact a cartographical blunder, putting a man in a california prison for a crime committed in nevada, with a texas-bound train inexplicably rolling by. thomson’s insight is very precisely beside the point. you could set these locations side by side, and add memphis and new orleans to the itinerary while you were at it, if you could only find the correct, mysterious train or lost highway or thrumming baritone that would link them all together. cash’s songs exist not in a political or scientific but a mythic landscape, even though that landscape’s hills and gullies so often look like the real thing. if you want to find your angry muse, his songs tell us, you’ll have to go up to your memphis first. you’ll have to cross a threshold. you can go by a fast train, the last train or by god’s train; you can travel by a heavenly aeroplane or by a stolen car. by pick or by sword, by pr-ck or by milk, whatever means of transport you choose: in order to undertake the journey, all veils of familiarity must be rent. if you want to find the eternal, look for it underground, on a hangman’s scaffold or behind prison walls; it may even be waiting within your own parlor, ready to ambush. looking back at his great -at folsom prison- toward the end of his life, cash explained the process. “we are in the timeless now,” he wrote, recollecting that first step onto the folsom stage. “there is no calendar inside the cafeteria today.”

- - -

as it is in so many fables, when death steps into “delia’s gone” it is to take on the role of ovid, metamorphic auteur: through her dying, delia is transformed into every scr-pe of a branch, each cracking of the earth, all of the strange confetti of her k!ller’s fears and dreams. the final drama of the song is that delia cannot be restrained, not even through death. delia’s dying, her getting gone, only ends up tying her more permanently to her k!ller

for cash himself, death was a mythic event, another metamorphosis: ain’t no grave going to hold his body down. its enormity was to be understood and embraced. to a modern consciousness, death is something unknown; taught to behave as though forever young, we regard our own death as either terrifying oblivion or an impossibility. the death of others is reduced even further; it is either simple information or a platform for mindless sentiment. turning away from these barren arrangements, cash and delia have come to be reflections for one another: death is the role for which they both were born, both only fully -ssumed their dominion once they shrugged off their corporeal dressing and slipped into memory. both were finally transformed completely into song

if cash had truly wanted to tap into the emergent gangsta rap mythos of the early 1990s in order, as some commentators have claimed, to resurface his brand with a more marketable, gore-ridden shine, he would have dressed as a stagger lee and clothed himself in that ballad’s particular dream of self-possession, where swagger and style are companion enough. he would have left delia alone. but cash’s “delia’s gone” is not a song of freedom but rather a lament, one that harrows intimacy, all its debts and wages. back in blind willie mctell’s version of “delia,” her k!ller straight up asked the judge what the fuss was about, and his incomprehension, as much as his brutality, was the song’s occasion. a slow learner, by the time of cash’s final version, the k!ller finally knows the fuss all too well. despite teresa goddu’s implications otherwise, cash does not simply butcher delia and then laugh at her in his final version of the song. rather, he opens a window onto the world of delia’s butchering, where death is lightly regarded; he then opens a second window, onto a world where supernatural measures allow justice, finally, to be done

the invitation is to linger and ponder the stereoscopic view. through “delia’s gone,” both the power and the necessity of myth are made palpable: delia’s eternal return attests to the power of myth even as the horridly plain details of her actual death suggest the lack that calls forth a mythic imagination. even in teresa goddu’s critique of cash’s supposed misogyny, a supernatural sensibility slips into the writing, like a cat slipping through a half-closed door. “[t]he song nevertheless celebrates the man’s excessive violence,” wrote goddu, adding parenthetically, “he k!lls her twice with a submachine gun.” cash k!lls her twice. what ghoulish, gothic wonderment goddu’s phrase suggests. delia is k!lled and then resurrected so she can be k!lled again. (behold the rituals of love.)

one can rather easily dismiss goddu’s narrow, unhistorical reading of the “one more round” refrain—as if the song’s refrain floated solitarily within the boundaries of this one particular version of the delia tale, untouched by its own genealogy—but one cannot dismiss how delia’s otherworldly prowess seeps into goddu’s prose. he k!lls her twice. with a slip of the keyboard, goddu provides the same uncanny testimony as cash, ill-strating just how it is one may channel forces more powerful, malignant and strange than one’s intentions or philosophies may suspect

- - -

according to the court records discovered by john garst, moses “coony” houston shot delia green because he grew angry at her when she called him a son of a b-tch. shown unexpected clemency by the judge, houston was paroled by the time he was twenty-six years of age. there is reason to believe he fled to new york city upon his release

through the ballad registered in delia’s name, cash lets us in on an open secret, one that he and delia learned long, long ago: the world is not on our side. acknowledging this, one is forced to turn elsewhere—to fate or bad luck, to songs or to gods—for justice. “not peace but a sword,” wrote norman o. brown. “peace lies in finding the true war.” one must not only hope that moses houston was confronted with delia’s song at every other city street corner, or that he grew to be haunted by her name, or that somewhere in the new york city darkness fate fit him to wear the other mask of violence, or that he felt at his own cruel expiration a familiar sensation of distant disregard. one must break into the world in which such justice can only be so

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