"In a country that thinks it's divided by race, where actually it's divided by class, Johnny Cash's songs of hillbilly thug life go right to the heart of the American underclass."
That's the first line of director Quentin Tarantino's short essay for Johnny Cash's 2000 anthology Murder. Supposedly, Tarantino is saying that Cash transcends racial divisions. But he's also saying, obliquely, that when he thinks of Johnny Cash, he thinks about blackness.
That's a bit unusual; most people don't necessarily call to mind the African-American experience when they look at Johnny Cash. In the first place, though he's sung on numerous occasions about his Native American background, Cash appears, and has mostly lived and been seen as, white. More, he is one of the iconic representatives of country music, a genre that has in large part defined itself through whiteness, and the rural white experience. And while contemporaries like Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis drew heavily from black traditions and repertoire, Cash's much less so. When Cash did cover black songwriters, as on his trainwreck version of Ray Charles' "What'd I Say", the results are…well, let's just say most people would not see that song as going to the heart of the American underclass. More like the tonsils.
Perhaps, though, it's Cash's very iconic whiteness that, for Tarantino, links him to blackness, or the black experience. It's not true, as Tarantino says, that America is divided by class instead of race; America is divided by both. But Tarantino, in his films, is fascinated with the idea that those on the margins of the American political economy can get around, or sidestep, America's racial hierarchies. In Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, and Django Unchained, gangsters, and those living on the edge of the law, are able to form close interracial friendships. Similarly, in Death Proof, white women and women of color, threatened by patriarchal violence, are joined in feminist sisterhood (and in beating the crap out of that skeevy patriarch.) "I've often wondered if gangsta rappers know how little separates their tales of ghetto thug life from Johnny Cash's tales of backwoods thug life. I don't know, but what I do know is, Johnny Cash knows," Tarantino muses in his liner notes. In his films, Jules and Vince shoot people together; Jackie Brown and Max Cherry scam people together. Black and white thug life becomes one.
For Tarantino, Johnny Cash is literally the soundtrack for that interracial gangsta ethos. Cash's late-period "Ain't No Grave" was remixed by J2 and Steven Stern, and used as the opening music for Tarantino's trailer to Django Unchained.
Cash's pained warble declares, Ain't no grave/ Can hold my body down, while onscreen manacled slaves trudge drearily. "Ain't No Grave" was originally released on Cash's posthumous 2010 album of the same name, and he sounds exhausted and breathless; you can see him on that chain gang, ready to fall. But at the same time, the lyrics are triumphant and hopeful: When I hear that trumpet sound/ I'm gonna rise right out of the ground. Tarantino turns that, in the spiritual tradition, from a faith in a future life to a hope for freedom in this one, as Django (Jamie Foxx) leaves his chains behind, and heads for vengeance (to the tune of James Brown's "The Big Payback").
The juxtaposition of Cash and James Brown parallels the friendship between Django and King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), the white German bounty hunter who sets Django free, trains him to shoot, and dies to free Django's wife. Cash symbolizes, then, the good white man who understands the wrongs of bondage— a figure ubiquitous in Hollywood slavery films. "Ain't No Grave" becomes white savior music. It is the soundtrack for white people who save black people, and, perhaps, for the fantasy that white people can be saved if only they become black people through some combination of empathy, coolness, and the right mixtape. Thus the director's defensive response to criticisms of Django Unchained in his recent New York Times interview.
For Tarantino, then, Cash is an embodiment of that fantasy—a totem of whiteness so tough and knowing ("Johnny Cash knows") that it transforms into blackness. Jonny Cash functions for Tarantino as, say, Robert Johnson functions for Eric Clapton--a viaduct to black authenticity. This is complicated though—and I think intentionally so—by the fact that Cash, like Tarantino, is white Using Cash to signify blackness can, as Tarantino says in his liner notes, be taken as a way of saying that black and white aren't really divided. But it can also be a way of emphasizing the artificiality, and the awkwardness, of Tarantino's investment in black music, Blaxploitation film, and black cool.
The most revealing and interesting use of Cash by Tarantino, though, is in Jackie Brown. The song is "Tennessee Stud", a wise, wry, convincingly virile ballad from Cash's first American Recordings album in 1994. The track, just Cash and his guitar, starts up as Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) and Max Cherry (Robert Forster) are finishing a conversation, in which it becomes clear that Ordell, Jackie's criminal associate, is planning to kill her. The scene then dissolves to outside their house, where Ordell Robbie (Samuel Jackson) is waiting and smoking. Ordell puts on gloves to avoid prints—and then turns off the music.
Until Ordell switches off the player, there is every reason to believe the Johnny Cash song, with all its dry menace, is background music chosen by Tarantino. The revelation that it's Ordell who picked the song is a multi-level joke. More than the minor push against stereotype of a black city dweller listening to country music, though, Ordell's choice is funny because it suggests he's psyching himself up. He is playing mean, evil music to get into a mean, evil mood. Just as Tarantino arguably uses Johnny Cash to become a black man like Ordell, so Ordell is trying to become Johnny Cash.
And if Tarantino fails in the transformation, so does Ordell. After he turns off that music, he goes into Jackie Brown's house to kill her. Instead, she shoves a pistol into his balls before he can get up the nerve to strangle her. Rather than becoming the manly Johnny Cash, Ordell is completely unmanned. He is not Johnny Cash, bad man; he's just a doofus wannabe gangsta. He was reading Quentin Tarantino's liner notes when he should have read Johnny Cash's: "These songs are just for listening and singing. Don't go out and do it."
Cash, in his inimitable way, is telling Ordell, and Tarantino, and anyone who will listen, not to take the persona for the person. Don't be so enamored of the bad man image that you take your guns to town and get shot. Tarantino's fantasized bad man Johnny Cash is not the real Johnny Cash. Which is perhaps why Tarantino is fascinated with him. A man who isn't there is a perfect symbol for the racial divide which, Tarantino claims, doesn't exist either. But that alluring image of the conduit-to-blackness Cash is also a reminder that even when one imagines race does not exist, it still can shape the aspirations, and the actions, of Tarantino, of Ordell, and of others, black and white.