For once, I know the exact reason I bought this record, and it was a practical one. I decided to learn guitar around Easter 2001. I figured that I wished, at 35, that I'd bothered to learn when I was 15; so it would be folly to reach 55 and wish I'd bothered at 35. So I did. Kind of. Bought myself a £100 Yamaha acoustic, and paid maybe twice that much on lessons over the next two years. Decent bloke, my teacher, though with his own idiosyncrasies. He loved The Band, and his taste for Dylan was almost the exact inverse of mine (he didn't like anything with too many words). He focused on finding music that I liked — and for which he had some empathy, which sadly ruled out 69 Love Songs — so we started with Knocking on Heaven's Door, It's All Over Now, Baby Blue and After the Goldrush.
Walk the Line was his suggestion, I think. He figured it was pretty simple. Let's face it, it is. And he wanted me to play with more rhythm. (Stop laughing!) That boom-chicka template of the Tennessee Three, that's what he wanted me to emulate.
Three of four years later, during my three month free trial with a well-known DVD rental service, I got a documentary on Johnny Cash. One of the interviewees was talking about Luther Perkins role in the Tennessee Three, and how someone had once asked him why he played the same thing over and over, when the fashion was increasingly to play more elaborately, with the left hand jumping up and down all over the frets. "They're searching for it," he replied — I kind of want to preface that response with an "Aye," because it's the kind of response that goes well with a Scots accent, but I guess Luther didn't have one of those… "They're searching for it — I found it!"
Anyway, I didn't have a copy of I Walk the Line back then. People under a certain age may find this hard to comprehend, but in 2001 you couldn't buy just the song I Walk the Line — not digitally, not on CD, not anyhow (unless you paid top dollar for a 45-year-old 45 rpm single). So I paid the princely sum of £2.99 (at The Polar Bar, Ecclesall Road) for this CD, which had 24 other songs thrown in.
Many of those songs are pretty damn good, and they cover a period untouched by my other Cash records and compilation. It's hard to find details of this release on the web, but my copy is on Charly, the reissue label we came across once before, and appears to be the first half of a 50-track Best Of.
"I find it very, very easy to be true," sings Johnny in I Walk the Line. History suggests that at the time he was singing this (the mid- to late-fifties), he actually found it a little tricky. The character at the centre of There You Go was closer to the autobiographical mark, cleverly disguised by being transposed to the second person and female gender.
Even though the chords and method of I Walk the Line are straightforward, I never quite got the vibe of that song down. I developed a rather mannered and 'interesting' version of It's All Over Now, Baby Blue, though. I stumbled across some old mini-disc recordings of my playing a few weeks back: the guitar was not all that bad, not exactly funky, but you didn't expect that; the singing was painful.
I stopped playing around three years after I started. Though at the start of this year, I decided to start again, and hunted down my plectrums and chord charts. Liberated from its cupboard, the guitar sits expectantly behind me now, but all it gathers is dust.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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