Ring of Fire

Ray Charles

I used to watch "The Johnny Cash Show" as a kid. You know that scar on Johnny's left cheek? I was sure it was a bullet wound. He was just that indestructible.

My folks also had all of Ray Charles's country albums.

You may watch this video and think, man, Ray Charles had balls. He sang "Ring of Fire" for Johnny Cash's audience? Hell, why not offer catechism for the Pope?

But then there's Johnny Cash. Just a few years before this performance, Bob Dylan went electric at Newport, and the audience booed. Johnny was backstage. Johnny was perplexed. "Why won't they just let him play his music?" he asked.

Johnny knew that that was the thing: you have to play your music.

Hurt

I remember everything.

I was raised to assume that Johnny Cash would survive us all. I guess if he is gone, any of us can go.

It's too locked up, one thing on another. Pop died. Nanny is well, but she'll go one day, following her parents, the ones who helped to raise me, and her two husbands to the heaven she plans. I'll be there to carry the casket. She'll be buried between her two husbands.

I've got a plot nearby, but I pray I'm not buried there.

The people who grow old to die are lucky. I want to die old, to remember my friends who died young.

This was Johnny Cash's last video. It was taped in his museum, just after it was ruined by floods, washing away his memory. June looked on, knowing he was near death.

He survived June.