Johnny Cash - The Man In Black

Icon Number 04 – Ltd 45 prints

He wore black for a reason.

For the poor and the beaten down. For the prisoner who'd long since paid for it. For the lonely and the ones who'd been forgotten by everybody else. Johnny Cash said as much, and then he spent a career proving he meant it.

Most country stars sang to their audience.

Cash went and stood in front of the people nobody wanted to look at. He played Folsom Prison and San Quentin and sang to men the rest of the world had written off, and they roared back at him because for once somebody had turned up who wasn't there to judge.

That voice — deep enough to come up through the floor — wasn't pretty. It was true. It carried every mile he'd walked and every mistake he'd made and never once pretended otherwise.

Right at the end, an old man recorded Hurt, and made a young band's song sound like it had been waiting fifty years for him to find it.

Some artists sing about the darkness.

Cash walked straight into it, and sang his way back out.