It’s weird, but I had forgotten what a tremendous impact Johnny Cash’s music had on me as a child until the opening moments of Walk the Line: the film begins with Cash’s legendary concert at Folsom Prison, which was recorded and went on to become one of the hottest selling albums of 1969, and probably of all time. And suddenly, watching the movie and feeling the thump-thump-thump of the heavy rockabilly beat reverberating in my chest, I remembered that, man, my dad used to play that album all the time -- the San Quentin one, too. And that’s gotta be part of the reason why I’ve been so haunted by the film and can’t wait to see it again: it’s the story of the music of my childhood.
It never occurred to me that I might not be the only one who grew up with this music, though, until I came across this, in an article about the film and Xer director James Mangold in Time Out New York:
As a kid, director James Mangold remembers there was one particular record that always seemed to be spinning on the hi-fi. "It was Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison," he says, speaking over the phone from his office in Los Angeles. "My dad played it all the time...."
My jaw dropped when I read that -- it was my Johnny Cash childhood exactly. But it’s hardly surprising, is it? If At Folsom Prison was what all the grownups were listening to when we were kids, then there must be lots of Xers whose brains got warped by Johnny Cash at a tender age. Right? Or are Mangold and I the only ones? I know lots of music lovers today who were far too young to have been Cash’s fans the first time around -- or who hadn’t even been born yet -- got into his work with his American Recordings series of covers of rock songs, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Is Johnny Cash a heretofore unacknowledged influence on Generation X’s formative years, and is that why the film did relatively well at the box office this past weekend, more than holding its own against the new Harry Potter film? Were the audiences full of nostalgic Xers?
