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How did the coolest man in the music industry become that way while singing about Jesus and the Cross?

The most obvious answer is that Cash was nothing if not authentic. "I believe what I say, but that don't necessarily make me right," he told Rolling Stone in 2000. "There's nothing hypocritical about it. There is a spiritual side to me that goes real deep, but I confess right up front that I'm the biggest sinner of them all." (This "chief among sinners" attitude is what drew him to the Apostle Paul, about whom he wrote the novel The Man in White in 1986.)

The attitude was encouraged by one of his best friends, Billy Graham, who advised him to keep singing "Folsom Prison Blues" and his other outlaw tunes along with the gospel songs. "Don't apologize for who you are and what you've done in the past," he told Cash, who was then considering becoming a full-time evangelist. "Be who you are and do what you do."

Cash was so authentic, in fact, that many people refused to believe that he never spent hard time in prison. (He had only been jailed overnight seven times for his various drug-related behaviors.)

But Cash's resilient repute was about more than authenticity. Many musicians are authentic, including authentic thugs, authentic boors, authentic sex addicts, or authentic frauds. Cash's true strength was authenticity's elder brother, integrity.

Cash had integrity in the moral sense, certainly. Once sober, he made up concerts that he'd skipped or fudged during his amphetamine binges, for example. But Cash had integrity in the sense of being a whole. In his liner notes for American Recordings, Cash lists 32 subjects he loves in songs, from railroads and whiskey to Mother and larceny. But in all these songs he was really singing about one thing: the connection between sin and redemption. He saw that on either side of sin was enjoyment and death, and that on either side of redemption was Death and Enjoyment.

Cash never denied the pleasure of sin, and many songs reflect that pleasure honestly—but unlike those in other outlaw tunes, the subjects of Cash's songs rarely sin without consequences. "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die," regretfully sings the blue man in Folsom Prison. "I took a shot of cocaine and I shot my woman down," sings the prisoner of "Cocaine Blues."

Even Cash's love songs carry the theme: In "I Walk the Line," he worries about his own infidelity. In "Jackson," he tries to cover it up. "Ring of Fire," written by June Carter Cash and sung by Johnny while the two were flirting but married to others, carries unsubtle references to damnation.

But for Cash, the worst consequence of sin wasn't what happened to the sinner. Nowhere is this clearer than in the final moments of the MTV award-nominated "Hurt" video, where the lyrics "I will let you down / I will make you hurt" are illustrated with Christ's crucifixion.

In a 2000 interview with Rolling Stone, Cash compared drugs' spiritual consequences with their physical and emotional devastation: "To put myself in such a low state that I couldn't communicate with God, there's no lonelier place to be. I was separated from God, and I wasn't even trying to call on him. I knew that there was no line of communication."

Though he'd professed Christ at age 12, Cash wrote that by 1967, "there was nothing left of me… I had drifted so far away from God and every stabilizing force in my life that I felt there was no hope." He decided to crawl into Nickajack Cave on the Tennessee River, get lost, and die. "The absolute lack of light was appropriate," he wrote. "My separation from Him, the deepest and most ravaging of the various kinds of loneliness I'd felt over the years, seemed finally complete.

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November 2003, Vol. 47, No. 11