Crying in the Johnny Cash Museum: An Author Discovers Nashville One Note at a Time
A couple of years ago, I sold my second book The Last Verse, a novel set in the Nashville country music scene in 1977. The premise came to me all at once, fiery and alive: An aspiring songwriter pens a ballad that implicates her in a gruesome crime. When she hears her song on the radio—clearly stolen by someone—she must decide whether to claim it and risk prosecution, or let another artist get famous on her work.
(Can I Use Song Lyrics in My Manuscript?)
I was so passionate about the idea of a stolen murder ballad and the setting, this gritty hub of country music in a post-Elvis landscape, I didn’t stop to wonder if I could actually pull it off. That I had signed myself up to write about an industry unknown to me in a city I’d barely spent any time in dawned upon me like a boot to the gut the moment my advance check cleared. Even wilder, I’d set myself up to write about a chart-topping song when my musical background is limited to a few piano lessons and elementary school choir. What on Earth had I done?
A research trip was in order. Like my main character, Twyla, I packed up a suitcase and headed for Nashville without knowing whether I would ‘make it’ at all. It’s a strange thing to be studying a city and an industry as your subject. And to imagine what it must have been like 45 years earlier, before cell phones and bachelorette parties and pedal-taverns. I wandered into Music City unsure of where to begin. All my usual distractions and preoccupations—my family, my elderly house, the time-hungry minutiae of parenthood—were a couple thousand miles away. It was me, my notepad, and the streets of downtown Nashville.
I started with the Cumberland River, that great waterway at the heart of the city, and strolled down Broadway, making note of businesses like Tubbs and Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, that would figure prominently in my story. I sketched architectural details, tall arched double hung windows and fish scale shingles, ornately carved columns on storefronts. I made little maps, paths my characters would take from here to there. I walked Printers Alley a dozen times or more, had fish n chips in a basement pub and poked my head in the Rainbow Room.
And I had the good fortune of knowing two insiders with plenty of local friends who lived, worked, and played music in the 1970s. Through them, I listened to live music at the Bluebird, went to an industry cocktail party at a publishing house, spent the day exploring the archives at the Country Music Hall of Fame.
I was getting to know the city, but I couldn’t help but worry I would get it terribly wrong. My debut novel, Shadows of Pecan Hollow, was set in the countryside around Houston, Texas, a landscape I knew intimately, and the story arose from the setting, from my complicated love of that place. Here, all my impressions seemed new and superficial. How could I possibly do the city justice?
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I stayed with the method of wandering, poking around, seizing opportunities that presented themselves. One afternoon, I was invited to the home of two legendary music publishers. They were kind enough to let me dig through a shoebox of mementos and showed me their exquisite collection of photographs, one of which I hope I never forget: a portrait of Johnny Cash just days before he died. The photo was taken by Marty Stuart during what would become Cash’s final recording sessions. As I remember it told, everyone there could feel Johnny had one foot in this world, and the other in the grave. In the photograph, he is solemn and tired. He looks beyond the frame, knowing and ready for whatever awaits him on the other side.
I adore Johnny Cash. It’s difficult to explain, but I’ve always felt there was a grizzled, but tender, old man in my soul and when Johnny sings he comes to life. But here I felt I was being let in on something deeper. Which is why I wasn’t completely shocked to find myself, a day or two later, crying alone at the Johnny Cash museum.
The museum features a small but rich collection of childhood photos, report cards, scenes from his early career, outfits, letters between friends, and of course a lovely history of his romance with June Carter Cash. At the very end, right before the exit, there is a small display. A funeral program with a picture of June and beside it, two pages of lyrics written in Johnny’s hand.
On the day he buried his longtime sweetheart, Johnny sat down and scratched out a song. He faced his grief head on and made it beautiful. He was monk-like in his duties to this calling, even as the pain devoured him. A few months after he buried his wife and wrote this song, that haunting portrait was taken. Four days later, he died.
As I stood there, studying the old-man cursive of his lyrics, a feeling came over me. A sense of awe. Of heartbreak and joy and a gust of creative energy. I don’t believe in ghosts, not in the visible phantasm sort of way. But Lord, as I walked back to my hotel, listening to Johnny sing “God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” then “Sam Stone,” by John Prine, and “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” by Kris Kristofferson, I felt the ghosts of Nashville walking with me. When country music is real, it captures something tangible about being alive—and brings us into contact with the divine.
Now I had a direction for my story, a connection to my setting, and a purpose for my main character. I would carry this feeling, this brilliant anxiety about how little time we have on Earth to make something beautiful, to love with abandon and put it into words, and I would pour it into The Last Verse. Johnny, and all the tenderhearted songwriters I admired, were the way into my character, whose talents and hardships I would never know, and my way into the city itself. It is host and home to artists who can make me feel like that. Haunted, inspired, a chill rolling up the length of my spine, crying like I was the one burying my love.
Check out Caroline Frost’s The Last Verse here:
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