Writing on the 10th anniversary of Johnny Cash’s death, Michael Stewart Foley praises the singer’s “politics of experience and empathy, a politics that transcended political labels and polarization”:
Cash did not shy away from going on record (vinyl or otherwise) with his feelings about the Vietnam War. Like many veterans (and other country-music stars such as Merle Haggard), he continued to respect the authority of the president and, as such, pledged to support Richard Nixon’s efforts to end the war. But he also routinely pleaded for tolerance, most obviously in a song from the Man in Black LP: “Can you blame the voice of youth for asking, ‘What is truth?’”
For Cash, there was nothing inconsistent in these positions because he did not approach the war as a hawk or a dove, but from the perspective of a younger brother to a boy who had died young (Cash’s older brother, Jack, died in a table-saw accident when Cash was 12). The death in Vietnam of Jimmy Howard, son of country singer Jan Howard, hit Cash especially hard and probably prompted him to write the 1970 song, “Route 1, Box 144”—the story of a “good boy” killed in Vietnam, leaving a wife and baby. The focus of the song is not on the wider politics of the war, but on the kind of familial suffering to which Cash could relate. The following year, when he wrote “Man in Black,” he included the line about wearing black in mourning because “each week we lose a hundred fine young men.”
The Dish 