![]() But it also nods to Cash’s liner notes for one of his later albums, “Unchained,” from 1996, which include a stranger, more thorough, and more beautiful list:Ī lot of country musicians make their careers off of nouns, but Cash did without the pickup trucks and Mason jars, homing in instead on the harder stuff of that jumbled list. The title was inspired partly by Beck’s son, who jokes that Johnny Cash’s songs are all about murder, trains, and Jesus. He’s written an odd little book, a hodgepodge of music criticism, theodicy, biography, exegesis, meditations on fatherhood, and musings on his own prison ministry. Beck is a psychology professor who teaches a weekly Bible study at the French Robertson Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, a maximum-security facility in Abilene, Texas. I was listening to that recording when I got a copy of Richard Beck’s new book, “ Trains, Jesus, and Murder: The Gospel According to Johnny Cash” (Fortress Press). For decades, his mother begged him to record himself reading the Bible, and when he finally did, he read the whole of the New Testament-nearly nineteen hours of the King James Version, released in 2004, by the Christian publisher Thomas Nelson. Cash later recorded an acoustic album in her honor, called “My Mother’s Hymn Book,” filled with the spirituals of his childhood, such as “Softly and Tenderly” and “Where We’ll Never Grow Old,” and he swore it was his favorite record. His paternal grandfather was a circuit preacher, but it was Cash’s mother, Carrie, who taught her seven children to love the Lord. He grew up in the church, going to worship every Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday evening, in Dyess, Arkansas, a New Deal town near the Mississippi River, where, throughout the week, he’d sing hymns in the cotton fields. Gospel music changed Cash’s career, and the gospel of Jesus Christ changed his life. “Black is better for church,” Cash said at the time, although later he’d go further, singing, “I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,” including those “who’ve never read / Or listened to the words that Jesus said.” It was the only color shirt that he and his two bandmates had in common when they were asked to sing gospel songs at an evening service in Memphis, Tennessee. Johnny Cash became the Man in Black by accident. ![]() Photograph from Michael Ochs Archives / Getty ![]() “Trains, Jesus, and Murder” makes its way through Johnny Cash’s core religious ideas.
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