THE LATE, GREAT JOHNNY CASH. There isn't much to say about his passing. I will say that I kept thinking of a couple of his songs all weekend. "Pickin' Time" is about his family's experience as sharecroppers in the deep South. It's either his father's or his mother's voice in this bit:

Ev'ry night when I go to bed
I thank the Lord that my kids are fed
They live on beans eight days and nine
But I get 'em fat come Pickin' Time

But the song that really kept coming up was one I know better from Ry Cooder's version, but was one of Cash's early hits. It's a song about how the joy of music is available to anyone who can feel it in every motion he makes. The subject is a shoeshine boy that catches the author's eye. Given the time and circumstances, we have to assume the kid is black. He has nothing but his shoeshine kit and a song in his heart, and pops his rag on "the windy corner of a dirty street" with gusto and as if things were better than they were.

The song makes me think about all the lousy jobs I've had, and about how whenever things were really tough a song would pop into my own head, whether I was loading a truck or delivering a package or bussing tables or even (and this really is a reach, but I swear it's true) working the keys as a writer. It's as if melody and rhthym were gifts from God that made life, even dull, lead-footed, quotidian working life, something that we should be happy to have received.

I think Cash knew what the kid was about, and never forgot it through the many years of his career, swallowing pills, playing for prisoners, stomping his feet, running with the devil, getting right with Jesus, and stroking that old pine box as if a bigger answer than any man knew could be coaxed out that way:

Well, I sat down to listen to the shoeshine boy
And I thought I was gonna jump for joy
Slapped on the shoe polish left and right
He took a shoeshine rag and he held it tight
He stopped once to wipe the sweat away
I said you're a mighty little boy to be-a workin' that way
He said I like it with a big wide grin
Kept on a poppin' and he said again
Get rhythm when you get the blues
Hey, get rhythm when you get the blues
Get a rock 'n' roll feelin' in your bones
Get taps on your toes and get gone
Get rhythm when you get the blues