The Johnny Folsom Show -- Johnny Cash's 80th Birthday with the Johnny Folsom 4

On the eve of Johnny Cash's 80th birthday, there are several appropriate ways to commemorate the event.  You could dress in black, program playlists on the iPod full of old country and gospel standards, or you could find where the Johnny Folsom 4 are playing.  Those familiar with the Cash tribute band would already know they're in for a treat, but these Raleigh talents aren't just offering up the old Cash covers tonight, not on this special occasion.  No, rather they are offering tribute to The Johnny Cash Show which ran on ABC from 1969-1971.  And there is no better venue for such a spectacle than Saxapahaw's Haw River Ballroom.

Nestled along the banks of the sleepy Haw, the Ballroom sits inside a former cotton mill that also houses The Eddy Pub, Saxapahaw General Store, and a police outpost.  The high ceilings, the three floor layout, the parts salvaged from the old mill (including an old drying vat with underlighting that casts a brilliant effect) all offer a vibe that rests somewhere between a Saturday night at the Ryman and a Sunday picnicking on the town square.  However, no other venue outside of a prison seems suitable for an evening with Johnny Cash.

And would any other act dare attempt to pull it off?  The old Johnny Cash Show featured not just the talents of the "Man in Black" and the Tennessee Three, but showcased guests ranging from Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, the Monkees, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Stevie Wonder, Clapton, Linda Ronstadt, a very young Neil Young... just to name a few.  Over the nearly two year run of the show, Cash had over forty guests appear to perform, making it a true spectacle not only of country talent, but also gospel, folk, rock and blues.  The audience never knew just who would drop in from one episode to the next.

 Quite an ambitious premise for 2012, right?  Not for the Johnny Folsom 4.  Band leader David Burney takes the mantle of the Man in Black, strumming wildly as his basso-baritone voice fills the giant venue.  The boom-chicka-boom comes from David Gresham on lead, Tom Mills slapping the bass fiddle, and Randy Benefield on drums.  Eleanor Jones steps out onto the stage, adopting the sassy June Carter persona and welcomes the audience before Burney whips around to face the masses and says, "Hello.  I'm Johnny Cash." 

The roar of the crowd nearly drowns out the opening chords of "Folsom Prison Blues."  Folks are dancing in no time.  By the time Burney's singing about that "man in Reno," it's obvious that they needed a venue big enough to hold the swagger and bravado of Cash's music and the Haw River Ballroom fits the bill.  Between songs, Burney addresses the crowd as friends, just as Cash would have and did.  We're treated to not only biographical information about Cash, but insight into how he performed, what he believed, what he liked.  "Five Feet High and Rising" tells us of his childhood fears of flood during hard times.  His love for gospel music is explained before launching into a moving spiritual.  For those of us unable to have seen Cash perform during his life, this is more than a treat.  It's a time machine.

And then there's the guests.  The Johnny Folsom 4 trucks out top Triangle talent, just as Cash did during the run of his show.  Cash always loved performing with contemporaries and Burney is no different.  Big Medicine's Joe Newberry joins the act, offering vocals and guitar for some Carter Family, an act that influenced Cash from childhood to death.  Steve Howell of the 90s country act Backsliders steps in and embodies Carl Perkins, replete with the flair, finger work, and fringed jacket of the rockabilly demigod.  Eleanor Jones's saucy twang elicits goose pimples as she joins Burney for such Cash and Carter classics as "Long Legged Guitar Pickin' Man" and "Jackson."  The amazing Kim Newton takes the microphone for a few songs that would have chased Linda Ronstadt out of the room. 

This biography offered via a small microcosm of Cash's life is fitting on his 80th.  We are treated to every facet of the performer: the prison singer, the outlaw, the man influenced by Pentecostal hymns, murder ballads... They do not ignore the cocksure, grand ole bravado balladeer years with "Man In Black" and "Busted."  We see the man who helped birth rockabilly at Sun Studios with "Hey Porter" and "Walk the Line."  We're offered a taste of the later years where his poignant reflections on death and age walked him to the door with "Hurt."  His old buddies Kris, Waylon, and Merle are there in spirit, if not in song.  Burney sings "I've Been Everywhere" and means it, just as Cash did, and whips the crowd into a frenzy as he deftly rattles off local North Carolina towns, including Saxapahaw, for which they explode.

 By the time everyone is invited out to perform "Were You There When They Crucified My Lord" and "Daddy Sang Bass," no one wants this night to end.  The applause is thunderous.  Burney and the band are just as gracious as Cash would have been and have no intention of sending us home empty-handed.  The lights dim and they take the stage again for the encore.  This time, tribute is paid to a man who influenced everyone including Cash: Lead Belly.  Their rendition of "Rock Island Line" is indicative of what Cash would pull out for one of his shows and their boom-chicka-boom goes faster and faster, just as the namesake's train, whipping the audience wild as the train picks up speed and trucks on, possibly never to stop. 

 But the train does "move it on a little further down the line."  The music does stop.  The lights come back up and the show ends, just as the crazy, raucous life of Johnny Cash did nearly nine years ago.  But lucky for us we have musicians like the Johnny Folsom 4 and venues like the Haw River Ballroom and nights like this night, here on what would have been his 80th birthday, to make sure that his music never stops for long, that it merely keeps a-rolling...

SICK MUSIC

Throughout history, mankind has been plagued with sickness and disease.  Often malady has caused great social change or turmoil.  The Seven Plagues delivered the Jews from Egyptian rule.  The Bubonic Plague eased overpopulation woes and changed the world's diet.  Spanish Influenza ended the first World War.  HIV ended the Sexual Revolution.  But those are only the big ones.  Every day we encounter disease face-to-face.  One in every three people we know or meet are infected with some sort of affliction.  As the planet's population reaches seven billion, we are priming ourselves for another epidemic to alleviate overcrowding.  The question is not if, but when. 

This theme is no better traced than through music, and one of the great songs to detail illness is "St. James Infirmary."  This jazz/blues standard is commonly credited to Joe Primrose, but a deeper history actually exists, tracing it back to both England through the ballad "The Unfortunate Rake" and Ireland, where Celts sang "The Bard of Armaugh" for centuries.  The British incarnation of the song detailed a man who contracted venereal disease through prostitutes that "cut him down in his prime."  When the song moved to the States, the cowboy music singers turned it to "Cowboy's Lament" or "Streets of Laredo."  However the Jazz Era brought it to New Orleans with Primrose and Louis Armstrong, popularizing that very song as "St. James Infirmary."  Since then, many artists have taken a crack at it, adding their own touches to it, from The Pine Hill Haints, Doc Watson, Janis Joplin, the White Stripes, the Doors, and many, many more.

No illness has infected the annals of music history more than TB which wracked the great minds of history just as disease wracked their bodies.  TB goes for the lungs, causing coughing spasms, spitting up blood, and severe weight loss.  The disease existed long before it was recognized, having previously been blamed for many other problems, including vampirism.  It's easily considered the most poetic of diseases perhaps because it's taken out more of the creative geniuses than most other maladies.  Some men in history who, with this time bomb in their bodies, performed like a juggernaut, releasing creative works at a fevered clip.  John Keats died at 25 after only four years of publishing and is known as one of Britain's top poets.  Jimmie Rodgers produced an alarming rate of songs, sometimes lying on a cot between takes, up until he died.  Dr. John Holliday lost his dentistry practice due to his coughing fits, but changed careers and cemented his legacy in the lore of the American West.  Others cut down by TB: Chekov, George Orwell, Thomas Wolfe, Simon Bolivar, Vivian Leigh, and Franz Kafka. 

TB Blues by Jimmie Rodgers - TB Woman Blues by Lead Belly - TB Sheets by Van Morrison

Another common affliction in music lore is lovesickness and scores of artists have documented its symptoms.  However the dichotomy of the disease is no more apparent than two classic songs, "Fever" by Peggy Lee and "Lovesick Blues" by Hank Williams.  Lee's soulful, sultry voice discusses the attraction Romeo and Juliet felt for each other, but leaves it to the listener to determine the ending to this star-crossed reference.  Captain Smith and Pocahontas are referenced much to the same effect.  Despite these allusions, the listener is left to believe that Peggy Lee's fever is one we'd wish to contract.  Hank Williams' response tells a different story.  The protagonist in "Lovesick Blues" wails and yodels his lament over being "in love with a beautiful gal" that leaves him "nobody's sugardaddy now."  It should also be noted that the author of this song is Irving Mills, which is a pseudonym for "St James'" Joe Primrose.

The theme of the slow death continues with "Goin' Down Slow," a song that describes the final reflections of a fast-living man.  Although the song was written by "St Louis" Jimmy Oden,  Howlin' Wolf and Willie Dixon immortalized it with Wolf's guttural, gravelly protests against the grave that counteract with Dixon's boastful reminiscences.  The song is also best known for entering the term "Great Googly Moogly" into the American lexicon.

Another affliction prevalent in modern society is drug addiction and Social Distortion's "Sick Boys" deftly handles that theme.  Sickboy is a term that gained popularity in the late 1970s-early 80s for junkies going through withdrawal.  As the effects of the narcotic (cocaine, heroin) wear off, the addict becomes sick, often sweating and vomiting.  One of the compelling characters from Irvine Welsh's novel Trainspotting earned the name Sickboy due to this habit.

Richard Cheese's rendition of the classic "Down Withthe Sickness" (originally by Disturbed) was featured in Zack Snyder's reimagining of Dawn of the Dead (2004), which offers a take on my favorite pandemic of all time: reanimation of the dead.  Zombie infections have been plaguing creative curiosities for centuries, presumably going back as far as Gypsy times in Eastern Europe, pre-Colombian slave trade days in Africa, and of course, Haitian voodoo lore.  But not until George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) and the Dead movies that followed, has zombie culture invaded the zeitgeist.  The zombie holocaust usually involves either a disease that attacks the living or a condition that reanimates the dead, but either way, one bite and the apocalypse is thankfully on its way.  Because as I always say: "I know we all have to die sometime, just why can't it be at the same time."

Colonel JD Wilkes pens a murder ballad with "Somethingin the Water" by Th' Legendary Shack Shakers which details the troubles of his hometown of Paducah, Kentucky, where the Union Carbide's uranium enrichment plant had been leaking chemicals.  Many Union Carbide employees later sued after years of exposure and complaints of symptoms like "baby fingers growin' out of his elbows."  The entire community was affected, but Wilkes draws a line from Union Carbide to another tragedy.  On Dec. 1, 1997 at Heath High School in Paducah, a fourteen-year old student opened fire and killed three of his classmates praying in a group.

Cu'Chulainn is Ireland's great mythological hero, similar to Greece's Achilles.  His "battle frenzy" endeared him to the people and cemented his place in Ulster lore.  Many legends exist about Cu'Chulainn, most notably the myth of his "wasting sickness."  Due to his failure to secure two birds for his wife at a fair, he was cursed for a year with a sickness that caused the mighty warrior to deteriorate.  Irish folk singer Shane MacGowan of the Pogues, who sang "The Sick Bed ofCuchulainn" on the awesome album Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, constructed quite a reputation for himself with self-destructive behavior including drunkenness and hooliganism and this song sets typical antics of such a tough against the legendary site of the legendary warrior's decay.  Does this mirror the decay of Irishmen everywhere, a comment on the old adage: "God invented whiskey so the Irish could not rule the world?"

So what will the next major affliction of mankind be?  What will be the cause of the next pandemic?  In the 1980s, HIV and nuclear holocaust were the major scares.  The 90s exposed the world to the African danger of killer bees and Ebola.  The turn of the century showed us that anthrax was more than a metal band and made terrorism more of a reality.  Swine flu and bird flu never quite measured up to the pandemic we were promised.  But throughout time, as population swells, nature has a way of righting the ship.  Whether it be plague or war or climate change or a cataclysmic event, we could stand to lose a few billion people for the sake of mankind and its future.  As we near seven billion people -- three times as much as it was only sixty years ago -- we have to face the brutal facts: the end is near.  Disease will overcome us all.

Repent now, before it is too late.