Scratching the lower registers of his new voice, enjoying its strange thick texture, he became for a moment unrecognizable to those who thought they knew and loved him, including his adoring mother Carrie. His voice broke into something new, or, to take his own perspective, a different voice broke into him. When he opened his mouth this time, however, a deep, otherworldly sound burst through. This was what life was like for Cash, work and song entwined, just the toilsome rituals of another day.
“When I was 17,” he wrote, “I had been cutting wood all day with my father and I came in and I was singing a gospel song, ‘Everybody’s gonna have a wonderful time up there, Glory hallelujah.’” He had been working when he received it, simply doing his chores, adding his blood and sweat to the family engine, keeping on keeping on.
There was no way he could have prepared himself for its arrival. Cash would always imply that his voice did not come from his own earthly person but from a spectral elsewhere, outside of him, coming on like the Holy Ghost, selecting him and then commencing its ravishing. It was like an ink drawn from some prior place. Its snarl, however full of bombast and sanctimony it might have been, also had a lazy cruelness to it, a sense of malignant power held in reserve. His mother was a simple woman but she referred to his voice as The Gift. It just showed up one day, unannounced, there to be misunderstood and wasted, like any other blessing. As the story goes, Cash’s voice presented itself to him late in his adolescence. Cash built his mythic self to fit his actual voice, behaving as if it had arrived from somewhere else, as if the voice (like a flame) had traveled a great distance to get here.