Hello Folks, I'm Johnny Cash

Last night we watched Walk the Line. This is the story of how Johnny Cash and June Carter, both country music stars, met and sang together and then married and fell in love.

During the movie, my husband remembered how his grandfather would close up the store early every Saturday night so he could rush home to watch The Johnny Cash Show on TV. His grandfather ran a grocery store in Fincastle. My husband spent Saturday nights with his grandparents and then went to church with them on Sunday.

Apparently, Folsom Prison was his grandfather's favorite song. My husband remembered this fondly and with great enthusiasm. He relished this memory and the movie gave him a lot of pleasure because it brought this back to him.

My memory during the movie was of my parents. My father used to play in a Top-40 cover band, back when bands could actually regurgitate Top 40 hits and play them without being penalized by the music copyright police. His band was called Music, Inc. and for a long time it was one of the top bands in the valley. Or so I remember, anyway.

I did not see his band play very much, but sometimes my parents could not get a sitter, or they were playing a family-friendly venue. My brother and I would go and play with other children, then, and I as I got a little older I would sit with the girlfriends and wives of the other band members.

After a time my mother started singing with the band sometimes. My father would call her up on stage for particular songs. "Glen," he'd say into the microphone, "come on up here." My mother's name was Glenda.

My father was not a great singer but he was not bad. He was untrained and his voice strained. He also played guitar, though he wasn't very good at that, either. He could manage well enough, I suppose, but eventually I played much better than he ever thought about. (That was a long time ago, and may not be true anymore.)

What my father did have was a lot of self-importance and ego. He thought he was great and people who think that about themselves seem to impose that perception upon others. I guess you might call that charisma although that seems like a more positive word than the way I interpret this. Of course, I also have issues with my father so my point of view is poisoned.

So my father's stage presence was impenetrable and strong. That alone is a saleable quality, and was even in the 1970s when all of this took place.

My mother also had a decent voice and she was a pretty woman. People used to compare her favorably to a young Elizabeth Taylor. She also had a lot of stage presence but it was because of her beauty, not the aura about her.

I think the first time I realized with certainty that the problems between my parents were not the stuff of nightmares was when I saw my parents together on stage. Growing up I was often told I was imagining things. ("You dreamed your daddy and I fought," or "you dreamed that we threw plates at one another," or "you dreamed there was blood," my mother would tell me firmly in the car the next morning. "It didn't really happen.").

If you have ever listened, really listened, to June Carter and Johnny Cash sing, you'll hear the undertone of two strong-willed people pulling at each other, sometimes even sniping. They use words like "shut your mouth" and call each other names, though polite names.

For me there is an undercurrent of force in many of their songs and I never have any trouble imagining that the Cashes threw plates at one another when they weren't singing together.

So the first time I saw my mother on stage with my father, I was struck by the force of the antagonism between them. He was singing, she was singing, each trading off, and there was an electric current fraying the air between them. And the sang the lyrics like they had personal meaning.

They sang "Jackson," and I knew then that my nightmares were reality as I watched them trading unspoken barbs through the song.