When the old-time religion seem new

townhall.com ^ | 9/18/03 | Suzanne Fields

[kattracks]

Johnny Cash was plenty good enough to fool his fans. They believed he felt it in his soul when he sang the Gospel while stoned on drugs. He had listened to those hymns with taking his mother's milk, in brush-arbor Pentecostal revival meetings in the Arkansas backwoods, but it was the drugs that took the message public.

When he straightened up and kicked amphetamines, he confessed to the earlier hypocrisy in praising the Lord. He hated it that he sang of the serenity of peace with God when he didn't feel a word of it. But perhaps it was the gap between public performance and personal shortcoming that gave his amphetamine-charged voice the power to express his buried pain.