A Little Cash

This article recently appeared in abbreviated form in the latest issue of Travelogue, the Sojourn Community's bimonthly newsletter. I present it now to my Monkey Maniacs in its glorious entirety. Click HERE to see the lyrics if you are unfamiliar with the song.


Anatomy Of A Song -- “Like The 309” With Johnny Cash By Bobby Gilles

Johnny Cash wrote his first song in 1955, a song about a train called “Hey Porter.” His final composition, just released on the posthumous “American V: A Hundred Highways,” is also about a train. The Delta blues-inspired “Like The 309” shows that, while age and sickness may have ravaged Cash’s voice and taken his ability to play guitar on his later recordings, he remained a master storyteller to the end.

“Hey Porter” heralded the sound of a young man arriving -- an eager, brash hipster who couldn’t wait to get off the train, to reach his destination, to smell the frost, to breathe the air. The narrator of “Like The 309” isn’t daydreaming about breathing fresh air; he just wishes he could breathe freely. It may be, as critic Sean O’Hagan put it, “the first asthma blues” song (Cash suffered from asthma in his final years). It’s the song of a man waiting, this time, to board a train -- one that stands as a metaphor for dying.

Cash’s weather-worn voice is perfect for the delivery. He makes the most of it, and producer Rick Rubin is spot-on with delicate yet lively guitars and percussion that chugs along yet doesn’t lose Cash in the mix.

The rhyme scheme is simple, the lines concise. The train is all the more real to us because he’s given it a specific name: “The 309.” Then he starts the first line with, “It should be awhile before I see Dr. Death,” personifying death (that is, turning it into a character) and giving it an ironic title: “Doctor.” Death as a healer. We have theology here, as much, though not so obvious, as any line on “A Hundred Highways’ ” gospel songs: “Help Me,” “God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” “I Came To Believe.”

Humor keeps this song-meditation on death from becoming maudlin: “Take me to the depot, put me to bed / Blow an electric fan on my gnarly old head / Everybody take a look -- see I’m doing fine / Then load my box on the 309.” This kind of humor, this humble, tongue-in-cheek look at life and death permeates the album and enables him to include more stark, sorrowful fare like Hank Williams, “On The Evening Train.” It’s a lesson that many a weepy, young neo-folk singer should heed: unrelenting lament creates melodrama, not gravitas.

Cash draws the listener into the story by telling us what to do for him with strong, direct action verbs that need no modifiers: kiss, draw, sweep, write, tell, load.

More theology in decidedly different terms than are bandied about in most seminaries: “Give a drink of my wine to my Jersey cow / I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for my journey now.” Wine is a symbol of affluence, temporal success. He is saying “My trophies, my hits, my possessions -- I can’t take them with me so give ‘em to the cow.” In a similar way he blows to pieces the notion that his talent makes him worthy of adoration in his cover of Don Gibson’s “A Legend In My Time:” “If they gave gold statuettes for tears and regrets / I’d be a legend in my time.”

This honest assessment of one’s life is typical of Cash, and, were it heeded by more CCM celebrities, would give them the moral authority to, like Cash, sing warnings like “God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” without being so easily dismissed. In this gospel standard, he tells “long-tongued liars, backbiters,” and assorted sinners “But as sure as God made black and white / what’s done in the dark will be brought to light,” and we say “Yes sir,” because we understand he is in that boat with us. No use telling the messenger “You’re no better than me” because he’s never tried to hide it and would make no claim to the contrary.

Back on the 309 we have more humor: “Asthma coming down like the 309.” Asthma as a locomotive -- one that symbolizes death, at that. Fresh imagery, yet anyone who has ever suffered an asthma attack could say, “Yep, that’s what it feels like.” Cash sings the line and then he exhales, wheezes into the microphone. One more second, a little more effect, and it would become a kitschy moment, but his comedic timing is impeccable.

One final verse, a statement of assurance in the face of temporal judgment: “Write me a letter, sing me a song / Tell me all about it -- what I did wrong / Meanwhile I will be doing fine / Then load my box on the 309.” It makes sense in the context of the album and works with the other Cash composition therein, “I Came To Believe,” his statement of salvation.

One last exhortation to “load my box on the 309” and the music fades out. It’s a colorful song that holds up well on an album filled with the work of strong composers like Williams, Gibson, Bruce Springsteen and Larry Gatlin. “309” won’t be remembered as a towering masterpiece in the order of “I Walk The Line,” or “Folsom Prison Blues,” and future generations won’t regard it as the major artistic statement of the final leg of his career (that honor belongs to his cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt”) but it is a satisfying denouement to a legendary career. One final sojourner’s song, one more train to write about, sing about and board. He came to us on a literary train; he left us on a train. And he taught us a few things in between.