'A Heartbeat And A Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears'

By Harvey Kubernik

A Heartbeat And A Guitar Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears is a truly absorbing book on Cash and the making of his seminal LP Bitter Tears: Ballad of the American Indian by author Antonino D'Ambrosio. The literary work features cover art by Shepard Fairey, and thirty-four never-before-seen photographs from Jim Marshall and Diana Davies.       

Chuck D of Public Enemy declares Brooklyn-based Antonino D'Ambrosio as "the voice of a new generation--passionate, intelligent, and fierce--whose work educates and inspires. He now brings his unique voice to tell the story of Johnny Cash's recording of the protest record Bitter Tears. It's the album no one knows about but is perhaps Cash's greatest record--and Antonino proves it."

In his new examination of Johnny Cash and th album, featuring the "controversial" Peter La Farge song "The Ballad Of Ira Hayes," D'Ambrosio not only brings us into an overlooked and important Cash disc but in the process delivers a stirring portrait of an American force of nature.     

"The Ballad of Ira Hayes" details the life of Hayes, the Pima Indian and U.S. Marine Corpsman who is one of the servicemen captured in the iconic photo of the flag raising on Iwo Jima. "Ira Hayes" other selections reinforce the radical spirit of the Bitter Tears project.

Johnny Cash was born in Kingsland, Arkansas, on February 26, 1932, the same date as Fats Domino, Cyrus Faryar, Bob Hite, Paul Cotton, Michael Bolton, George Harrison, Jackie Gleason and Sandie Shaw.

In July 1950 he enlisted in the Air Force when the United States was embroiled in the Korean conflict. Stationed in Germany, Cash purchased his first guitar. During the four years he spent as a military cryptographer he practiced the guitar while reading history books.

After debuting on Sun Records in 1955, Cash then inked a recording agreement with Columbia Records in 1958.    

Johnny Cash's physical and geographical relationship to Southern California, Los Angeles, and Hollywood in particular has been somewhat neglected in our revisionist media defined world when Cash's career is chronicled.   

He spent large portions of a decade of his life after leaving Sun Records, doing his first gospel LP after first splitting from Memphis to Ventura County.

On August 13, 1957 at a party in California Cash first met British-born record producer Don Law after a local television appearance. He first touted Johnny about joining Columbia Records after Cash's contract with Sun ended on August 1, 1958.       

In August 1958 Cash and clan moved to California and he rented an apartment on Coldwater Canyon in North Hollywood.  Later that year Cash and his family bought a ranch house from comedian/TV host Johnny Carson on Hayvenhurst Avenue in Encino in the San Fernando Valley. Johnny Cash Enterprises was once located on Sunset Blvd. at the Crossroads of the World complex in Hollywood.      

Johnny did his first real movie work out in Southern California and countless television appearances in the area over the decades, including the L.A. based Town Hall Party program in 1960. Johnny even did an autograph signing in 1961 at Pal Records in Topanga.

In 2003 I attended June Carter Cash's autograph signing at the Virgin Super Store in West Hollywood where the Groove Company record shop once stood.  

Hollywood and Los Angeles informed Johnny Cash's art more than most folks want to admit. Cash's regional ties with California continued for decades, culminating in his acclaimed Rick Rubin-produced recordings, including "Hurt."

When Johnny Cash died in 2003, writer Todd Everett told me about a 1963 Ventura College benefit Cash did for the police department, "‘cause Johnny was always getting in trouble in an area between Ventura County and Ojai California, his young girls with his first wife Vivian (Liberto) grew up there. And Cash purchased his father a trailer home. And if that ain't country you can kiss my ass."

Johnny always insisted he was part Cherokee Indian, and evidence supports his claim.  In 1968 Cash toured Wounded Knee, South Dakota with descendents of the survivors of the 1890 massacre and played songs from Bitter Tears at a benefit performance at Cemetery Hill for the tribe. Johnny Cash offered thoughts and solutions on Native People's problems and helped the Sioux raise money for schools.

Before Man in Black and his epic Live from Folsom Prison, Johnny Cash recorded what should have been a career-defining album. Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian, waxed in collaboration with folk-artist Peter La Farge. 

The LP is a somber vinyl outing that identified Cash as an advocate for human rights and social justice. He had met La Farge, who played him Indian Songs. The original album pressing is a collection of recordings, musical story telling and social consciousness recorded in Nashville, Tennessee, with record producers Don Law and Frank Jones, anchored and grounded by La Farge's material like "Ira Hayes," Custer" and "As Long as the Grass Shall Grow." Guitarist Norman Blake is on the sessions.   

This Cash LP, cut in 1964, his 19th album, should have cemented Cash's reputation as social activist. However, the audio venture immediately fell into obscurity.  Deemed "un-American" and incendiary, the album was banned, censored, and erased from the airwaves. The country music purists rejected the LP. So, instead of hailing and cementing Cash's reputation as humanitarian and activist, the album fell into obscurity.

Cash's passionate and empathetic career-enhancing album had all but disappeared from the airwaves, record stores and retail outlets. Months before, Johnny had been riding high on the success of "Ring of Fire" but when Bitter Tears was issued, Cash found himself in the middle of a controversy that threatened his career. Then, it inspired a backlash of overwhelming proportions that included hateful protests. Columbia Records pulled all advertising. Johnny Cash, now somewhat abandoned by Columbia, and without the support of the global music community, took matters into his own hands.

Billboard magazine had earlier also refused to review Cash's Bitter Tears, so then Johnny paid for his own full-page advertisement in a letter to the music business and radio stations. In the ad, Cash asks, "I had to fight back when I realized that so many stations are afraid of ‘Ira Hayes.' Just one question: Why?" 

Cash, and his pal, guitarist, singer and live show emcee, Johnny Western, along with Pat Shields, a PR guy doing promotions for Liberty Records, had a company together called Great Western Enterprises on Western Avenue in Hollywood.

Johnny and the duo sent out letters and copies of "Ira Hayes," after Cash purchased a thousand of them from Columbia and sent the entire batch to every radio station in the country. It broke into the Billboard top ten in December 1964.

Cash during ‘64 incorporated "Ira Hayes" as the closing number of his Newport Folk Festival appearance that year, following "I Walk The Line," and Bob Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" in his set.   

"The Ballad of Ira Hayes" is included on 40 related Cash re-releases and compilations, and has been covered by Townes Van Zandt, Kris Kristofferson, Hazel Dickens, Kinky Friedman, Charley Pride, and Patrick Sky. Bob Dylan did a rendition during sessions for "New Morning" that surfaced on the 1973 Dylan album.

In January 2009, the Nation magazine picked the protest song "Ballad of Ira Hayes" as one of the ten best progressive anthems of all time.      

On his own "Johnny Cash Show" that aired on ABC-TV from the 1969-1971, Cash booked former HUAC blacklist victim Pete Seeger, who sang the anti war song "Big Muddy," and musician/songwriter Buffy Saint-Marie, a full blood Native American, who covered La Farge's "Custer" on the program.    

"The Johnny Cash Show" featured Cash's road band with Carl Perkins. "One reason country music has expanded the way it has is that we haven't let ourselves become locked into any category. We do what we feel," Johnny Cash explained in 1975 when he was staying in Orange County.

Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian is now a tiny footnote on Cash's biography. The original album was reissued as an expanded edition import item in 1984 from the German Bear Family label. In fact, Cash composed "Big Foot" after his profound experience at Wounded Knee. When Bitter Tears was scheduled for re-release, it was added to the lineup.     

In the late ‘80s, Steve Popovich, who formerly worked for Columbia Records since 1962, and was an advocate of Cash during his label tenure, became vice president of marketing for Polygram Records and brought Cash to Polygram. 

A Heartbeat And A Guitar is the story of the infamous album. The subsequent print journey has D'Ambrosio recounting the album's creation and delineates the influence of Bitter Tears on the Native People's rights movement, the legacy of Peter LaFarge, the actual story of Ira Hayes, the Pima Indian whose heroic efforts as a U.S. Marine and dismal life as a civilian are the subject of the album's only single.

D'Ambrosio's effort on Cash also illustrates the enduring, and endearing friendships between Johnny Cash and LaFarge, Pete Seeger, record producer Bob Johnson and Bob Dylan.

"Antonino D'Ambrosio's book on the making of Johnny Cash's album is much more than the story behind those extraordinary songs," suggests political historian and author Howard Zinn. "It is a rich history, not only of Johnny Cash's life, but of the Indian struggle for justice, which inspired Peter La Farge to write the song ‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes' and Cash to sing it. The book is full of fascinating character sketches of the great folk singers of the Sixties, and their part in the social movements of that exciting era. I believe D'Ambrosio has made an important contribution to the cultural history of our time."

In my 1975 Melody Maker interview with Cash conducted in Anaheim, California, later excerpted by author Robert Shelton in his No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, I asked Johnny about Bob Dylan.

"I became aware of Bob Dylan when the Freewheelin' album came out in 1963. I thought he was one of the best country singers I had ever heard. I always felt a lot in common with him. I knew a lot about him before we had ever met. I knew he had heard and listened to country music. I heard a lot of inflections from country artists I was familiar with. I was in Las Vegas in '63 and '64 and wrote him a letter telling him how much I liked his work. I got a letter back and we developed a correspondence."

"We finally met at Newport in 1965. It was like we were two old friends. There was none of this standing back, trying to figure each other out. He's unique and original. I keep lookin' around as we pass the middle of the 70s and I don't see anybody come close to Bob Dylan. I respect him. Dylan is a few years younger than I am but we share a bond that hasn't diminished. I get inspiration from him."

As a teenager, Dylan once hitchhiked from Hibbing, Minnesota, to Duluth to see Cash and the Tennessee Two (Marshall Grant and Luther Perkins) at the Duluth amphitheater.

Johnny Western reveals to Antonino D'Ambrosio in an interview witnessing a Dylan and Cash exchange where Dylan proclaims, "Man, I didn't just dig you; I breathed you."

Apparently Cash stuck his head inside the Columbia Records studio when talent scout/A&R man John Hammond was producing Dylan's debut record.

Dylan was also grateful that Cash would constantly endorse his talents to skeptical Columbia Records executives after the initial weak sales of his first platter, some calling it "Hammond's folly," a jab at Hammond who signed Dylan to the label after Peter La Farge.    

It is no surprise that Johnny and June Carter Cash's son, John Carter Cash, a music producer and an Executive Producer on the their I Walk The Line biopic movie, told an amusing story describing Bob Dylan's initial encounter with his dad for the first time in the December 2, 2005 issue of USA Weekend. "Dad would chuckle when he'd tell me how Bob Dylan acted like a silly kid when they first met. He burst into Dad's hotel room and began jumping on the bed, shouting, ‘I met Johnny Cash! I finally met Johnny Cash!'"


Sonic Boomers: You first discovered Bitter Tears album in 2005. And, consequently this lead to the writing of the Cash book.

Antonino D'Ambrosio: It was a conflation of things. He looked so different on the cover of the record. I saw the letter he wrote to radio stations inside this Bear Family Records 1984 reissue; it was so cinematic in many ways. The letter was filled with just this fierceness and spirit. Also, it's scathing. I was so moved. Those two things initially when I put the record on had already filled my heart in such a way that I was gonna hear it in this completely unique way. Compared to anything I had heard from Cash before.

I'm learning about the record that was made in 1964 and it's shocking to me. That this record even happened in 1964, let alone could have happened in ‘68 or '76. The reason I feel that way is it matches, in the spirit, something very similar to what The Clash were doing in the late ‘70s. Even what Public Enemy was doing in the mid to late ‘80s. It was so direct and intense in its purpose and I really, really respected that. And I felt that there was something here that was really a truer portrait of him as a person. A citizen living in the world. In terms of how he saw himself and what he was trying to do.

The album was ignored, and the single "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" initially was ignored. Johnny Cash was sincere and had no idea there would be a backlash against it. It was authentic and not a pose. That was one of the reasons he joined Columbia Records after Sun fought him all the way through about doing these concept records. These Americana records. The only reason he was about to do the Bitter Tears album was because he had just had the monster hit "Ring of Fire." It gave him coverage. 
        

Sonic Boomers: What is your feeling about the book and album pairing? 

Antonino D'Ambrosio: Johnny Cash used his art in achieving I think the most powerful thing art can achieve. Which is telling the truth. And that is what moved me and I think that is what moved Cash. Here's a story about this guy who is a war hero and is immortalized. His hands were the hands holding the flag in the flag-raising Iwo Jima photo. He's asked to come back, then paraded around the country and he dies this really terrible death. When you learn about the history of the Pima Indians, which he was, and the fact that they had been these amazing engineers and created the most sophisticated irrigation system that lasted a few thousands years and then the army core of engineers came in the late 1800's and destroyed it. They were dying of thirst. Because their land, which they had lived off in harmony with their river, was depleted. It dried up. And Ira Hayes died in shallow waters drunk.

Sonic Boomers: We tend to look and remember Cash's 1968 California live recorded albums as San Quentin and Folsom Prison yet Bitter Tears was four years earlier.

Antonino D'Ambrosio: It's four years before The American Indian Movement. And it's right at the beginning of the escalation of the Vietnam War in '64. And Johnny Cash was in the army, and Ira Hayes was one of the first paratroopers, an amazing soldier. And, Peter La Farge, who wrote the song, was in the Navy and they were all badly, in their own way, scarred by war. 

Sonic Boomers: Numerous musicians have done versions of "The Ballad of Ira Hayes."

Antonino D'Ambrosio: The interesting thing is that Bob Dylan said that he believed that Peter La Farge was the best of the protest balladeers. The folk singers. In the book I kind of paint these trios, and one of these trios is Dylan, La Farge and Cash, who were all creative and all had dark sides. Which probably fed their creativity, you know. Dylan was deeply moved by the songwriting. The reality is that La Farge may have not been the greatest musician, but he really was an inheritor to the songwriting style of someone like (Woody) Guthrie or the Carter Family. And certainly in what Dylan was doing.

Sonic Boomers: And Dylan does the song in a characterlogical narrative manner. Like "John Wesley Harding" or "Joey." 

Antonino D'Ambrosio: You're exactly right. And, that's what attracted Johnny Cash. Here's a sophisticated, complex nuance song that tells a long history in a format you can do in 3:40. That is really, really powerful. Kris Kristofferson does a beautiful version. And, he's got a lot more obvious reason for doing it. He's very progressive, he had his own relationship with Cash for decades and he also did it to honor La Farge. This story is interesting in terms of Native Americans and their plight are even more invisible in many ways than they were then.       

Sonic Boomers: Is there a correlation of how Cash or this album impacts your own writing?  

Antonino D'Ambrosio: I am influenced by the storytellers of the world, including Johnny Cash. These things do not happen in a vacuum. They like to do that and calcified the myth of Johnny Cash, "The Man in Black" and all those things, and I think that dishonors the kind of truer portrait of who he was. He was very intelligent.

Sonic Boomers: And this extends to the way he constructed his live program and the repertoire. He ended his 1964 show at The Newport Folk Festival with "The Ballad of Ira Hayes." That was taking a chance.

Antonino D'Ambrosio: My perspective to Cash comes from a way different generation. That was one of the very first things that came into my head when I knew I was gonna write this story. What I do is tell five stories with the one over-arching. La Farge, Cash, folk revival, Native movement and civil rights. And I thought to myself as I got all the notes together, ‘cause I got all the session notes, and when he recorded. He finishes everything in June 1964. Then he goes off to do a mini-tour and his first stop is at Newport, where he famously gives Dylan the Martin Guitar. He shows up there with the entire Carter Family. Johnny Cash honored history. All the great artists do that. They don't pretend that they were the first.

Sonic Boomers: Cash and Bob Dylan had a friendship.

Antonino D'Ambrosio: In my book I write about Cash's defense of Dylan helped John Hammond a lot, ‘cause Hammond, as you know, was hearing "Hammond's folly" and these comments. Columbia was very close to dropping Dylan. What is interesting is that the very first folk musician that Hammond signed was Peter La Farge. three months before Dylan. And I think the reason for that was because Peter La Farge's songwriting was so valid. Buffy Saint Marie did "Custer." I think she did "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" with Cash but it's never been released.

Sonic Boomers: The Bitter Tears album was developed by Cash listening, with his producer and engineer, to a slew of Peter Las Farge songs.  

Antonino D'Ambrosio: They did that for him. They sat in a room and listened to La Farge material. And Don Law in particular said, "You can do this John. You can make this record happen."

Sonic Boomers: And June Carter Cash is a lovely addition to the album.

Antonino D'Ambrosio: He was with June before in 1964. She was a very powerful musical influence and also kind of an instrument for him. If you listen to the record she adds that beautiful depth to the backing vocals that makes the songs even more heart breaking. She is on most of the tracks. "Apache Tears," "The Ballad of Ira Hayes." She's there and brought in some of the other Carter sisters.

Sonic Boomers: You also enlist the voices of John Trudell and Dennis Banks of the American Indian Movement. And, both of them cite Bitter Tears as a landmark.

Antonino D'Ambrosio: The thing that was really powerful for me was the interview with Dennis Banks, the co-founder of the American Indian Movement and John Trudell in particular. Those two have different perspectives. ‘Cause Dennis Banks is more of Cash's generation. And John Trudell is more of the Sixties generation. And there are like 15 activists that I interviewed as well, they all said the same thing. Johnny Cash helped spearhead the movement, because there was no movement in that kind of popular culture statement. And this is one of the thrusts on my book. Dennis Banks tells me that Cash in Bitter Tears is "that he made it in such a way where people would listen to it and they wouldn't even realize they were raising their shackles with us." And that was important. To get people to even be exposed, because that history was not even taught to me when I was a kid.          

Sonic Boomers: Your book is not a music biography.

Antonino D'Ambrosio: And it is very important for me that this was not a musical biography. It's really a revealed cultural history of an unknown moment in American history. To go to this level, and talk about the issues surrounding Native people, was just a bold move in many ways. I think the backlash he faced and all these radio stations and people and the last thing they wanted was someone of that stature who they had already given a second chance.

The thing was that Cash was adding another place in the case of American injustice. And this is the apex of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King, Jr. wins the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. This was a very sincere and authentic situation and he felt it in his heart. And then by accident in his own way he stepped into the middle of a major movement.       

Sonic Boomers: "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" did reach the top ten in Billboard but I think it wasn't until Cash did his Folsom Prison recording and TV show did his recording career fully recover.

Antonino D'Ambrosio: Essentially, "Ballad of Ira Hayes" becomes a hit but it took months of him doing promotions, publishing that letter, he bought his own record and he sends it out personally to a thousand DJ's with him and Johnny Western doing this whole campaign together. It took months. Then he drifts. 1964 was probably the worse he was with pills. So it took him a little while to kind of unravel from that obviously. In '65 Cash triumphs in his return to Carnegie Hall in New York.

Bitter Tears did cost him some bookings and of course some record sales. The album essentially disappeared even though it had a hit single in it.      

Sonic Boomers: Besides the newly discovered photos in your book by Jim Marshall and Diana Davies, you invited the artist Shepard Fairy to do the front cover design.

Antonino D'Ambrosio: Shepard was a big fan of my book on the Clash, Let Fury Have the House: The Punk Politics of Joe Strummer. And we have similar sensibilities. We both came up on the Clash and punk and rap. And we always encountered each other and he reached out to me on the Strummer stuff and said, ‘if you ever want to collaborate. I'd love to collaborate with you.' And I said the feeling was mutual. And I said, by the way, I have this idea for another book, let's talk about it.

He loved the idea and was psyched to do this. I told him I had the picture already in mind that I wanted him to do his thing with. Because this picture on the cover he was really thin. He was a big guy. I wanted to do something that was entirely different and I gave it to Shepard and I gave him some of the writing I already I had early on, and "here's where I'm going."

And, Jim Marshall had unpublished photos of Peter La Farge that we used in the book and I feel that added a powerful story telling dimension. Here is an up and coming photographer before he was making a name for himself and he chronicles this guy who has his disappearance from history. He did a photo shoot and portraits of La Farge for his record.

The Diana Davies photos were from someone immersed in the New York scene. Everyday life kind of photos like musicians in Washington Square Park,  photos of Arlo Guthrie no one has ever seen. She had photos of the Broadside magazine gatherings, which no one knows about.    

Sonic Boomers: Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer recorded a version of Bob Marley's "Redemption Song" together.

Antonino D'Ambrosio: It's only been released on the Johnny Cash box set Unearthed. If you hear it then you will weep, because Johnny Cash's voice is quivering because he's ill. When you hear it you know they both die like not soon after.

Sonic Boomers: Why the title of the book.

Antonino D'Ambrosio: As a writer I write in a way where I have to have the main points like the framing of a house. It has to be there for me. I always felt that the musicians that really touched me it was more of this very honest and sincere way they just picked up a guitar with their heart and performed with a heartbeat and a guitar. And that allowed them to be timeless and relevant for generations after they performed. And I had that up front and it really became an over-arching theme for me. You see what the essence of Johnny Cash was. He was human. He lived with his heart. He was moved by his heartbeat.          

Sonic Boomers: When multi-instrumentalist Chris Darrow first heard "I Walk The Line" on his AM radio he asked himself, "Who is that?" 

Antonino D'Ambrosio: The deep baritone voice and the insistent clip-clop of his signature beat make me know immediately that he meant business, Darrow remembered, saying "You just never forget those moments in your life. Johnny sang with both grit and sincerity and with an integrity that made you think that he was telling you the truth. You could hear it in his voice." 

Darrow performed at The Troubadour Club in West Hollywood at a benefit for Leonard Peltier hosted by genius recording producer and Indian rights activist, Nik Venet. After that gig, Venet gifted Darrow with a Navaho rug that previously was wrapped around the bodies of Dennis Banks and Peltier.     

Later, Johnny Cash became "Elder Cool," a term Chris Darrow coined after Cash's creative and commercial recording renaissance under the guidance of Rick Rubin.

Sonic Boomers: Why does his legacy keep being investigated and growing? I mean, guys like yourself, who didn't interview Johnny, or see him a dozen times in four different decades, are writing major books on a person you never met before. Is it that he's now beyond legend status? 

Antonino D'Ambrosio: I truly believe in many ways America has become one day. What I mean by that is that there is no history. No past or no future. It only is what it is today. And tomorrow it will be what it is tomorrow. But today will be forgotten. It is a very dangerous moment in history that we are in. As you can tell with the various wars we're involved in, the economic crisis, I think looking at someone like Johnny Cash, you are looking at one of the real icons of music. There's only a handful.


A Heartbeat And A Guitar Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears by Antonino D'Ambrosio is available for purchase here.