CountryPhile

This week’s Redneck Music programme has a whole set on Johnny Cash. It’s making me uncomfortable. I’m experiencing what we psychologists call cognitive dissonance.

See, when I was growing up, I didn’t know he existed. I probably blocked him out of my head; he was too country – very drawly, masculine, working class. Even with my time in the South, I associated it with sexist intolerance and racism. It wasn’t something I understood, and as I moved away from Louisiana to the West and later to the North, it was something I associated intrinsically with the South. Particularly after I left, these stereotypes persisted, probably based on the ignorance of the Americans surrounding me who’d never experienced it first-hand.

So I was pretty ignorant of Johnny Cash growing up.

When I moved to Scotland at the age of 21, I discovered an incredibly thriving country music scene – I was astounded. I probably heard about Johnny Cash for the first time in Glasgow: a place so far north it has the same latitude as Copenhagen. Incredible. But even at that point he didn’t make much of an impact; he typified my ‘country’ schema and so I only came to know his name. And maybe the title of ‘ring of fire’ because of the sniggers it brought to a particularly immature boy I was dating at the time.

Then i was on The Weakest Link. This should have been the nail in the coffin for me and JC. I was forced to answer a question about Johnny Cash – presumably because I have an American accent – and, unsurprisingly, I was utterly stumped. I’ve held a grudge ever since.

So it is with much humility that I admit that I have developed a taste for Johnny Cash. Not a love, there’s no signs of his music in my house, but my palate has become accustomed to the music, and this familiarity is breeding appreciation.

It’s awkward, that.