Leigh H. Edwards's Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity offers a wide-ranging study of a compelling figure in American popular culture, and will be of interest to both fans of Johnny Cash and scholars in the fields of popular music studies, gender studies, and American studies. Edwards applies the methods of cultural studies and literary criticism to Cash's multimedia output and addresses the various cultural meanings that have accrued to his star persona, particularly as relates to gender, class, race, and religion. As indicated by the book's title, Edwards is centrally concerned with Cash as an embodiment of “paradoxical or contradictory images” (1). There was “no single Cash,” she asserts from the outset, and states that her intention is to investigate Cash's enduring allure as a “walking contradiction” (2). Although he is never cited in the book, Edwards's thesis resembles Richard Dyer's influential claim that film stars “function crucially in relation to contradictions within and between ideologies, which they seek variously to ‘manage’ or resolve.”Footnote ¹ Similarly, Edwards aims to show that Cash's long and multifaceted career exists along the fault line of “key foundational contradictions in American thought” (2). It says much of both Cash's career and Edwards's skill as a writer that Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity manages to deliver on that ambitious premise.

Two early chapters of the book consider Cash's relationship to white, working-class southern masculinity. Edwards's literary method can provide some confusion here, since she sometimes writes about masculinity in terms of the characters depicted in Cash's lyrics, sometimes in terms of his celebrity persona, and sometimes in terms of his musical performance style. It might have been productive to tease out these various strands of evidence and perhaps draw some larger conclusions about the structural contradictions inherent in the work of popular singers. Other chapters develop variations on the theme of paradox, as Edwards rings changes on her central message of Cash's persona: we read of Cash's simultaneous support for Vietnam antiwar protesters and his performance at Nixon's White House; his tendency to perform songs that identify with both cowboys and Native Americans, “ramblers” and family men; and his renown as both God-fearing Christian and womanizing drug addict.

Edwards diligently untangles the knot of Cash's many contradictions, but the book is not always clear about what is most distinctive about Cash's particular star persona, or what might be the cultural implications of a celebrity built so consistently on hedging all bets. At one point, Edwards concludes that “throughout his corpus Johnny Cash generates strong contradictory currents” such that “his work challenges and yet reinforces nationalism” (185). One is left wondering how Cash compares to other pop stars known for generating “strong contradictory currents” (Bob Dylan, Madonna, David Bowie, Elvis Presley, Judy Garland, to name a few). If it is a common feature of modern media stardom to “manage ideological contradictions,” then what are the specific stakes for popular music, for country singers, for southern men? The clearest statement that the balance with Cash falls on the side of “challenging” prevailing national ideologies rather than “reinforcing” them is Edwards's discussion of his class-based identification with prison inmates, as heard on prison recordings like “At Folsom Prison” (1968). Edwards's focus on lyrics is perhaps most productive here, as well as in a discussion of songs in which “train workers are celebrated as symbols of authentic working-class labor” (77). Edwards writes that, over the course of his career, Cash consistently “links sympathy with working-class men to structural critiques” (14), and his songs have frequently given voice to “the masculine frustrations of men who cannot afford to buy the goods they labor to produce” (95). In the end, Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity is not concerned with settling the issue one way or the other, and Edwards asserts that what is “most distinctive and important” about Cash's “opposing images is that he does not resolve them” (13). Edwards criticizes popular biographies of Cash for trying to “find explanations” for the singer's contradictions, which she feels makes them “ultimately unsatisfying because his ambiguities foil closure” (59). But this book's reveling in ambiguity can also feel a little unsatisfying, just as Cash's waffling over his 1970 White House appearance can read as a refusal to take a stand.

There is certainly an economic imperative for celebrities like Cash to keep their work open to multiple readings. Edwards addresses this when she writes that “there is obvious manipulation involved in the notion that Cash can play to both sides of the aisle. Cash and his record companies have used his conflicted persona to rake in millions” (7). She may be too quick to push this issue aside, stating that “Cash's engagement with contradiction … exceeds the logic of the market, because it resonates beyond its status as a commodity practice” (7). Investigating the “logic of the market” for country music, however, might have been an illuminating way to augment the cultural-studies and literary-studies approach. For example, Keith Negus's examination of the culture of the country music industry offers a model that could facilitate the further investigation of Cash's clashes with the Nashville establishment and Country Music Television (CMT).Footnote ² A cultural-industries approach would also supplement Edwards's discussion of media celebrity. P. David Marshall discusses a “system of celebrity” that encompasses a range of celebrity types constructed in a given industry, as well as the ways in which those types relate to other industrial domains: thus film stars appear to have a certain aura of distance as compared to television celebrities who break down that distance with a sense of casual familiarity; and popular musicians are more often understood to enact a tension between artifice and authenticity.Footnote ³ Such a framework could help to differentiate Cash's various embodiments of popular singer, television host, and film actor. Edwards discusses Cash in terms of authenticity and traditions in the country music genre, but more might have been said about Cash's celebrity status and his performance of country authenticity as opposed to other industries of celebrities. If David Hesmondhalgh is correct that the cultural industries are inherently “complex, ambivalent and contested,” then the question becomes not so much which artists or texts are marked by contradictions (they all are), but when and why certain ideological tensions in a given career become relevant to the industry, critics, or audiences.Footnote ⁴ Edwards begins to move in this direction in her examination of protests over Cash's image as mobilized in the 2004 Republican National Convention. The analysis here suggests that the study of audience reception offers one way to move beyond reasserting Cash's many contradictions.

In order to make the case for her literary approach, Edwards cites Barbara Ching to the effect that country music places particular importance on lyrics (3). The many insights found in the book lend credence to that claim, but also reveal some of its limitations. Country music, after all, has many distinctive sounds and musical techniques above and beyond lyrics: the cry of the slide guitar, the yodel of the singing cowboy, and the use of echo and reverb in studio recordings (the latter are described by Peter Doyle in Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900–1960 (2005)). In fact, a theme gradually emerges in the book that has less to do with Cash's symbiotic relationship with traditions of folk poetry than with his relationship with the modern recording studio. Consider his penchant for releasing concept albums in a genre that historically favored singles (147): the concept album is commonly associated not with country music but with investigations of studio recording technique along the lines of progressive rock artists like the Beatles and Pink Floyd. The technology of the studio also enters the discussion in a fascinating but brief section on Cash's unmistakable voice (44–45). Here Edwards cites producers who describe the uncanny ability for Cash's voice to record well, what Michel Chion has referred to as “phonogenie”: “the rather mysterious propensity of certain voices to sound good when recorded and played over loudspeakers, to inscribe themselves in the record grooves better than other voices.”Footnote ⁵ We should recall, too, that Cash got his start working with the most influential producer of the era: Sam Phillips at Sun Records, who shaped a profoundly modern studio aesthetic for artists like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Cash. His recordings embodied the “boom-chicka-boom” slapback of the Sun Sound and feature the idiosyncratic guitar style of Luther Perkins. What all this suggests is that creative collaboration between Cash and Phillips, Perkins, and June Carter raises important issues about how we might understand Cash's career.

It is, of course, unfair to ask Edwards to have written a different book – one dealing primarily with the music industry, studio recording techniques, or audience reception – especially when the book she has written is so full of valuable insights. Indeed, a clear strength to her method is that it can take account of a remarkably broad range of Cash's texts: music videos like Mark Romanek's epic “Hurt” (2002) and “Delia's Gone” (1994); his “concept albums” about American history; comic books recounting his life story; films like The Gospel Road (1973); and the novel that he wrote about the life of Saint Paul, The Man in White (1986). In the end, the various suggestions stated above only serve to prove Edwards's larger point: that Cash's career is inexhaustibly complex and multifaceted, and will certainly sustain further analysis from a range of scholarly methods. Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity makes great strides in mapping the terrain of that career, shedding light on its well-known landmarks as well as its back roads, and revealing how its contours at times encompass a national culture.