Lament

This may be a literary blog but this is an entry about music and I’m not going to apologise for that. I don’t see a fixed line between music and language, except that music is more fundamental, is deeper and can move us in ways that simple language can’t – but the best poetry, and some prose, can, because it dips into that wellspring of meaning that is beyond words or any language in particular; that is the natural home of music. Every time I write I try to write with music – not a soundtrack but a counterpoint, music that inhabits and informs the language – not always in a way that would be apparent or even helpful to the reader. It’s just there.

I didn’t grow up in a musical household. For a long time my parents owned only one LP – and no record player. We only got a player for that record when my granddad died, in 1975. I was 9 years old. The album was Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.

We weren’t completely without music before that. We had a big old wireless that sat on a shelf in the living room, and on a Sunday we’d wait for the charts to come on, on the FM frequency that Radio 1 shared with Radio 2. Medium wave reception was pretty much non-existent, up in the Dales. Dad always wanted to know what was top of the ‘hit parade’, and if he was home on a Thursday we’d tune in to Top of the Pops. There’s nothing like your Dad liking something to make it seem uncool.

But listening to records was different – listening to them over and over, hearing them properly, learning the words, letting them become part of you.

There were other records around the house – singles mostly: Herman’s Hermits, other bands I’ve forgotten, an Action Man record and we had a Rolf Harris album… but the Johnny Cash album was the only proper, grown up record we had and the songs were about things we didn’t hear about in the charts, Jesus and the devil and trains and poverty. Things that meant something to a boy who’s life was a cramped cottage and no money and trains and chapel. Maybe it didn’t so much become part of me, it had always been a part of me.

I've been in and out of love with a lot of other music between that time and rediscovering Cash’s music with the American Recordings. In between, I remember the surreal experience of being in a country and western bar in Wilhelmshaven on Germany’s North Sea coast with the owner unlocking the jukebox and putting on every Johnny Cash single and B-side, from Boy Named Sue to Chicken in Black. And Rosanne carries on the legacy, especially with The List: I’ve come to think, when it comes to American song writing, that if one of the Cash family hasn’t recorded it… it probably isn’t any good.

Johnny could make the Atlantic seem very small, make Langcliffe, West Riding of Yorkshire, seem very close to Tennessee, or to Dyess, Arkansas. He died shortly after I returned to England in 2003, but still his music is one of the few things all of my family can share, can agree about. That’s something. And the music’s always there, playing now, but inside of me at any time. So this is not a lament for Johnny Cash. It’s a lament for vinyl, for long playing records, for a time when music was hard to get hold of, was precious and enduring, and for a time and place I can’t return to.