A White Man’s Review of a White Man’s Book on a White Man’s Album about American Indians: TFT Review of A Heartbeat and a Guitar

A few moments of unscripted flesh and blood always stand out to me when I listen to Johnny Cash’s 1964 album Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian. There’s his gloating chuckle as he sings the lines “Now Custer split his men/ Well, he won’t do that again,” which captures the tone of the song “Custer” precisely: a black-humor celebration of the underdogs’ lone triumph in what we all know was a long, brutal extermination and displacement. There’s the Dixie resentment in Cash’s telling of the story of Ira Hayes, a Pima who was among the flag-raisers in the famous photo from Iwo Jima and who died drunk in a ditch ten years later after a brief star turn: “They let him raise the flag and lower it/ Like you’d throw a dog a bone.” I can’t help but hear Cash’s fury at the indignities, and substance abuse, his own fame brought him as he spits that line. And there’s the calm recrimination as he speaks the verses of “As Long As the Grass Shall Grow”: “Congress turned the Indians down/ Brushed off the Indians’ plea/ So the Senecas have renamed the dam/ They call it Lake Perfidy.” Cash delivers that last, Latinate word with the gravity of a small-town preacher.

These moments sit alongside misty portraits of noble savages, hokey tom-tom percussion, and airy Carter Family ooohs. I don’t mention these latter features to denigrate the album. These clichés for the “Vanishing Race” make the album better in my opinion. If Bitter Tears were a simple, enlightened protest record it would be less moving, less of an apt document of modern white America’s by turns guilty, angry, and sentimental feelings toward American Indians.

Antonino D’Ambrosio’s new history, A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears (Nation Books), is less a celebration or exegesis of Cash’s rather forgotten record than a genealogy of it, particularly as it descended from the Greenwich Village folk scene and the civil rights movement. These are important threads to follow. Peter La Farge, who wrote five of Bitter Tears’s eight songs, was part of the folk scene from 1959 until his mysterious death in 1965, possibly from psychopharmacological cobra venom. D’Ambrosio assembles a compelling biography of La Farge: scarred physically and mentally by an explosion when he was in the Navy in Korea, the singer rode rodeo broncs and performed as an actor and a poet before taking up music. He presented himself as an Indian in New York, though he was more accurately the son of a white anthropologist and early Indian-rights advocate, Oliver La Farge. Peter may or may not have had a trace of Narragansett blood. (He was certainly a member of the Wannabe tribe.) He cut a striking figure, wearing a cape and carrying Colt pistols or a bullwhip.

D’Ambrosio combines La Farge’s and Cash’s biographies with the historical context behind “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” and “As Long As the River Flows.” Hayes’s sad story is of a fluke fame that followed the publication of the Iwo Jima photograph, which actually depicted a second flag-raising completed so that a colonel could take home the original flag as a souvenir. “As Long As the Grass Shall Grow” uses the metaphors for eternity from old treaties (as long as the moon shall rise, as long as the rivers flow, as long as the sun will shine…) to counterpoint the story of the Kinzua Dam—completed not long after Bitter Tears was released—which flooded land guaranteed to the Seneca nation in a treaty signed by George Washington.

But there is also a great deal of material in A Heartbeat and a Guitar that is so far out of the orbit of Cash, La Farge, and Bitter Tears that reading it feels like going on a Wikipedia binge starting with the album and following a chain of tangential links to short entries on Pete Seeger’s appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee, James Meredith’s integration of the University of Mississippi, Marlon Brando’s relationship to the growing Indian movement, Richard Nixon’s victory over “George McGovern” in 1968 (actually, it was Hubert Humphrey, but you know how Wikipedia can be). These sections of the book leave you feeling exhausted and only superficially better informed about sixties history.

At times I also struggled with the book’s People’s History–style dualism, its good-guys-and-bad-guys worldview. D’Ambrosio rehashes Nixon’s “enemies list” (another non sequitur), but there’s no room for the fact that, as far as Indian issues were concerned, Nixon was perhaps the most progressive president of the twentieth century; he ended the government’s previous policy of trying to terminate and assimilate tribes, and gave tribal governments much more autonomy. D’Ambrosio writes ominously of a “storm” around Bitter Tears and a “campaign” to “censor” this brave protest album, without providing any evidence. Certainly the record didn’t do as well as I Walk the Line, also released in 1964, but several earlier concept albums Cash recorded were also commercial flops. According to Wikipedia (natch), Bitter Tears actually reached number 2 on the country charts, and “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” was the number 3 country single, despite being over four minutes long. This success was due in part to an extra PR push from Cash himself, D’Ambrosio notes.

It’s a shame to look at Bitter Tears from such a cramped perspective, because it’s really a richly weird and slippery disc. Most of D’Ambrosio’s points about it as a protest record and a folk record are well taken, but it has more than two sides. There’s Cash’s identification with the Indian as the ultimate American outsider, his corny 1950s Indian hobbyist dress-up (note the eyeliner in his cover photo), the warning of impending apocalypse to cleanse America’s sins. In part it’s the proto-punk masterpiece D’Ambrosio wants it to be, but it’s not only that.