You should see the keening and wailing in the Nashville news media. Beginning Friday and continuing pretty much non-stop, the local TV's have made it almost impossible to get ANY news by their non-stop parading of just about anyone Cash ever knew or worked with thru the newscasts. They softened it up a bit Sunday, but it'll be good for about 15 minutes again tonight since today's the funeral. It's not that there's much real news in his passing - he's been dead-man-walking for the last 2 years - but the need to have pandered to that segment of the public for which Country Music is all they care about. They are afraid of losing the PR battle to their competitors, so they play Cash Chicken on their newscasts. The way this works is, they line up enough Cash fluff pieces to fill the whole newscast. And, monitoring the other stations, they run them until their rivals bail and move on to another topic. Only then do they move on to other news.
They also play Weather Chicken, too. When severe weather hits, they monitor each other while going wall-to-wall radar. The local NBC here will NOT go back to regular programming until the ABC and CBS already have. It doesn't matter how many times they have to repeat themselves, if ABC or CBS are still in radar, they'll stick it out until both of the others have left it.
Back to Cash - the newsies will cover the funeral today, then tomorrow they'll cover "yesterday's funeral." Then, there is going to be a Keening And Wailing Public Memorial, so they'll devote a big part of three or four days to cover that. If someone of note in music dies around Nashville, you can count on a good 8 or 9 days of solid Mourning News. It's obligatory in the South. They stop JUST SHORT of draping the TV studio sets in black.
Michael
You're spot-on right. The same happened here in Chicago when (insert name of any local celeb) died. The real reason is less about any care for the dead person: it's easy, it's free and they can't get sued for it.
I like Cash's music, and I think "When The Man Comes Around" is positively haunting.
U2 is mentioned above, and Cash's "The Wanderer" that he did with them is excellent too.