Nine Choices: Johnny Cash and American Culture.

Mather, Olivia Carter

Nine Choices: Johnny Cash and American Culture. By Jonathan Silverman. Amherst: University of Massachnsetts Press, 2010. [xi, 278 p. ISBN 9781558498266 (hardcover), $80; ISBN 9781558498273 (paperback), $26.95.] Illustrations, endnotes, index.

Whet country musician Johnny (lash died in 2003, he had in some sense climbed to the height of his career. With award-winning albums produced by Rick Rubin (known for his work in hip-hop) and outreach to new markets (NPR listeners and MTV viewers), he did what other aging country stars had failed to do: stage a lasting comeback with new material. Cash's career had begun at Sun Records in Memphis alongside those of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins. With his first few hits in hand, he signed with Columbia and wound his way through folk and gospel, but had the biggest album successes of his career with recordings dubbed live at prison performances (At Folsom Prison [1968] and At San Quentm [1969]). By the mid 1970s, Cash's career had begun to decline, at least in terms of the music industry's definition of success. His label dropped him in the 1980s and country radio virtually ignored him (as well as other stars of his generation) in favor of new, younger acts.

How then did Cash regain cultural relevance? Or had he lost it in the first place? What would account for multiple Country Music Association and Grammy awards in the years surrounding his death? And why did listeners outside of his traditional audience begin buying his records? These are some of the questions that Jonathan Silverman sets out to answer in his book Nine Chokes: Johnny Cash and American Culture, Silverman's work is a welcome addition to a growing subfield in studies of Cash, as well as the broader fields of country music and American culture. Over the past six years, biographies, academic books, at least one dissertation, and the biopic of Cash's life Walk the Line (2005) have mined his image and music. Silverman's contribution is not in the area of biography or musical analysis but interpretation. He attempts to explain Cash's career through a very particular lens, that of Cash's own choices about his life and career. Silverman's theoretical underpinning serves also as a main argument of the book, that everything, including an individual's decisions, can be "read" as a text. By focusing on how Cash made the choices he did (when intent is recoverable or even known), the context in which he made them, and their effects on his career, the author presents new and nuanced understandings of his subject. When dealing with a figure of the complexity and symbolic weight of Cash, an author may be tempted to present the subject as static or mysterious. Silverman's method protects him from these pitfalls by demystifying Cash and allowing the reader to see him as a complex, inconsistent, and even irrational human being. At the same time, the author detects persistent patterns that underscore a storyline.

As the title indicates, Silverman has organized the book around nine choices that Cash made about his life and career, with each chapter devoted to one of the choices. The chapters are ordered chronologically, beginning with Cash's move to Memphis at the start of his recording career, and ending with his and his family's hiring of Sotheby's to auction items left in the Cash estate after his death and that of his wife June Carter Cash. In between we learn of his marriages, his faith, his relationship to Columbia, his politics, his attention to prison reform, and so on, each framed in terms of Cash's own agency. Silverman covers every period in the performer's career, often bouncing between his first success in the 1950s and his 1990s comeback within the course of any given chapter.

What at first glance would seem too narrow a focus (a small selection of Cash's actions) provides balance to the project; limiting each chapter to one choice allows Silverman to be at once specific and general, since he uses the main topics as springboards into discussions about reception, background, and country music. The choices "function as windows, as texts, as umbrellas for discussion of issues related to Cash and American culture" (p. 4). For example, in chapter 5 ("Cash Chooses [Not to Choose] Vietnam"), the author discusses politics in country music and Cash's pre-Vietnam political statements (artistic or otherwise) while evaluating the musician's positions. We see here, as we do in every chapter, that to treat Cash as the non-unified subject that he was is to come closest to the truth. As we "read" this and other choices as texts, we learn not to find clear answers but to be content in contradictions and unknowns. Most writers either assume that all country musicians are conservative, or cling to the few who aren't and expect from them a consistent devotion to oppositional politics within the country music industry. As the chapter's title implies, Cash never stated directly whether he opposed or supported the war. Though he appears to have been a life-long Democrat (by sympathy if not by voter registration), he met with Nixon and encouraged others to stand behind him. At the same time, he courageously stood for prison reform and Native American rights. His title as the "Man in Black," as he later explained in the song of the same name, put social justice at the forefront of his career, but he rarely (if ever) critiqued a presidential administration by name.

One of the strengths of the book is its author's willingness to engage in topics that scholars of popular music overlook. The chapters on Cash's television show (chap. 6) and his faith (chap. 7) are two such examples, each important for different reasons. Most authors view musicians' ventures in television and film as predictable but necessary marketing in an age of commercialized music. Rarely do scholars or critics take such side projects seriously, especially if they were short-lived or deemed unsuccessful by producers. Silverman argues that The Johnny Cash Show affected American political culture in a small but timely way; it invited the nation into the "home" of a Southerner during a time when the region was viewed with suspicion. Cash may have been one of the Few country stars able to achieve such a feat with positive results, having crossed over with his late 1960s prison albums. The author also notes when national media outlets unfairly stereotyped Gash according to his regional background. His treatment of Cash's religion likewise shows great sensitivity to his topic. He begins by juxtaposing the secular and religious sides of Cash. Cash's image relied on his anti-authoritarianism and hedonism (at least regarding drugs), but throughout his career he sang gospel and in the 1970s produced a film about Jesus. A self-described outsider to evangelicalism, Silverman deftly navigates his way through Christianity's complicated relationship to country music, authenticity, and region. He believes, rightly, that "somehow our perception of [Cash] has not fully acknowledged (he depth of his faith" (p. 173). As with other aspects of Cash's persona, analyzing his faith proves to be a thorny but rewarding endeavor.

The main difficulty for the reader is placing the book in terms of discipline or theoretical perspective. Silverman's training is in American studies, but his work is not primarily grounded in cultural theory. It is clear that the project relies on several concepts that the author briefly explains in the introduction ("informed simplicity," the "determined indeterminam," and the author's own distinction between authenlikos and authenticants). These terms appear throughout the text and help to trace significant themes in the musician's life. Otherwise the book, especially the introductory chapter, feels ideologically unmoored. Still, the interdisciplinary nature of this subject and the author's examination provide a rich source for any reader interested in Cash, country music studies, Southern studies, and popular music. Its implicit argument for a balance between human agency and cultural context make it important for any study of celebrities and they choices they make. Mm Choices rejects the notion that popular figures are simply containers of meaning in favor of a presumption that they interact meaningfully, if at times enigmatically, with their environment.

OLIVIA CARTER MATHER

Long Beach, CA