Hitting The Road With Joe - Spotlight On Johnny Cash ..... Rap Pioneer

"Joelle, how can you listen to this garbage."

"You just don't get it Dad!"

I thought that it must be true. Today's music had just passed me by. However, just when I finally resigned myself to the fact that I should stick to my oldies I had a revelation. Stuck in traffic on the Belt Parkway.....again, at the peak of the Mill Basin Bridge, with the day's sun a memory, I heard that verse again for perhaps the thousandth time.

 

 

My daddy left home when I was three
And he didn't leave much to ma and me
Just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze.
Now, I don't blame him cause he run and hid
But the meanest thing that he ever did
Was before he left, he went and named me "Sue."

Singing along with my favorite singer I suddenly realized I wasn't singing at all. I was rapping. The difference in my rapping was that #1, I understood all the lyrics, #2, the lyrics weren't dirty, and #3, the song told a story.

Well, I knew that snake was my own sweet dad
From a worn-out picture that my mother'd had,
And I knew that scar on his cheek and his evil eye.
He was big and bent and gray and old,
And I looked at him and my blood ran cold
And I said: "My name is 'Sue!' How do you do!
Now your gonna die!!"

There was no doubt what was happening here. I was rapping with the legendary Johnny Cash member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, Rock N Roll Hall of Fame, and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and clearly Rap Pioneer.

And he said: "Son, this world is rough
And if a man's gonna make it, he's gotta be tough
And I knew I wouldn't be there to help ya along.
So I give ya that name and I said goodbye
I knew you'd have to get tough or die
And it's the name that helped to make you strong."

That Baritone voice, the steady rhythmic beat, and those rapping ryhmes, the Man In Black is a true rappers delight. With all respect to the Sugar Hill Gang and Curtis Blow, Cash is rapping circa 1969. Incredibly, Johnny Cash made me musically relevant again.

He said: "Now you just fought one hell of a fight
And I know you hate me, and you got the right
To kill me now, and I wouldn't blame you if you do.
But ya ought to thank me, before I die,
For the gravel in ya guts and the spit in ya eye
Cause I'm the son-of-a-bitch that named you "Sue.'"

I felt musically rejuvenated. I get the music. I'm still hip. It was just the modern lyrics that stunk. I started to think about all the raps songs I had been singing, I mean rapping to for years. There was Jimmy Dean's Big Bad John, Jerry Reed's When You're Hot Your Hot, CW McCall's Convoy, and Charlie Daniel's The Devil Went Down To Georgia (which apparently gave me my first taste of sampling).

All these years my daughters had been treating me as some kind of country music listening outcast, but it turns out I was tuned into rap way before they had ever been born.

That's right.....Classic Country Rap. I wonder if I can get an Sirius/XM gig out of this?