Gather round me people,

there’s a story I would tell,

about a brave, young musician,

that became mad as Hell.

Everyone knows Johnny Cash for such hits as “I Walk the Line,” “Ring of Fire” and “Folsom Prison Blues”.  He’s famous for his live albums recorded at Folsom and San Quentin Prisons and his American Recordings under the direction of veteran producer Rick Rubin.  But how many have heard of the album that may just be Cash’s best, Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian?

Author Antonino D’Ambrosio corrects this injustice by shining a burning light on Cash’s controversial attempt to bring the plight of the Native people to the forefront of the American consciousness in “A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears.”  The act of recording and releasing an album sounds mundane compared to the pleasure of listening to its music, but D’Ambrosio shows us that there was nothing simple about the release of Cash’s 1964 indictment of the white man’s treatment of Native people.  In fact, the events that led to its release stretch back decades, to a little boy in Arkansas who listened fervently to the sounds of The Carter Family and Jimmie “The Brakeman” Rogers; folk superstars to Cash who would inspire the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s led by Pete Seeger; and later, Bob Dylan.

It’s also the story of the Civil Rights Movement which provided a blueprint for the Native movement to follow.  Folksingers like Pete Seeger and Odetta led the musical march for freedom under such banners as “We Shall Overcome” and “This is Your Land.”  But along the edges of the civil rights movement, pushed to the edge of the counterculture revolution of the 1960s, was the Native movement.   D’Ambrosio juggles these overlooked and seemingly unrelated events by putting Johnny Cash and his Bitter Tears album at the center of the action.

“A Heartbeat and a Guitar” seeks to inform the reader of the courage of the Native people in their struggle for justice and the music, more specifically the stirring protest anthems of Peter La Farge, which brought much needed attention to their pursuit.  The broken treaties with the Seneca tribe and the appalling travesties of cutting off tribal reservations from government aid, also known as termination, are displayed in La Farge’s songs “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” and “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow.”  The life of Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian from Arizona who became legendary for being one of six Marines to raise the American flag at Iwo Jima and was later found dead under mysterious circumstances in a ditch, mirrors that of La Farge himself.

D’Ambrosio’s book focuses its attention on La Farge as much as it does on Johnny Cash, paying dues to one of the lost voices of the Folk Revival.  Although his identity as a pure blood Native was largely his own fabrication, La Farge was surely an outsider to the folk movement of Greenwich Village and he pushed for fringe issues like the treatment of Native people.  His pleas for justice were largely ignored by the folk community as they saw their primary battle being civil rights for blacks.   Like Ira Hayes, La Farge died young, but he died unsure why justice for people couldn’t be fought for through music and grassroots movements.

There was one musician who heard the Native people’s pleas.  He was an outsider himself, continually pigeonholed by the record industry and even his own fans.  But D’Ambrosio points out that even during the late 1950s, Cash thought of himself as a folksinger first.  Anything else—country star, rock star, crooner—came second.  Even as Cash’s addiction to amphetamines steadily increased, at one point taking as many as 100 pills per day, his steely determination to expand on his musical ability was rivaled only by his growing anger at the shameful treatment of Native tribes across the U.S.  Slowly, the Native movement was coming together to create such political action groups as the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) and later, the American Indian Movement (AIM).  Cash befriended La Farge and the result was Bitter Tears, a collection of original La Farge ballads and a few penned by Cash himself, but all from the perspective of the American Indian.

The resulting backlash tested Cash’s nerve and would arguably shape the artist that he became from that point forward.  He not only challenged Columbia Records but also radio DJs, taking out a full-page ad in Billboard Magazine that challenged them to get some guts and play “Ira Hayes.”

“A Heartbeat and a Guitar” is a music lover’s dream.  It is a musical journey that contains in its pages a history that beats with life even as one hears the boom-chicka-boom of Cash’s guitar and the screams of the Native people, still calling for justice.

– Jonathan Michels