I listen to this song a lot of late. As I've gotten older, I've developed a deeper appreciation of Johnny Cash's music and of Johnny Cash the man, who cared a great deal for the poor and the imprisoned and for civil protest.
(Although the only forest fire I ever accidentally started was put out before doing any damage by the timely arrival of a torrential thunderstorm, I do have a tendency to dress in black, which is about the only thing I have in common with Johnny Cash.)
In 1971, Cash wrote the song "Man in Black" to help explain his dress code: "I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down, / Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town, / I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime, / But is there because he's a victim of the times."
My daughters are growing up on Cash's early music. The three-year-old gets in her car seat and tells us to "put Johnny on." They're growing up on Cash's tales of dirt-poor farmers and locomotive engineers and auto factory workers. The music is often upbeat while the lyrics are dark and of the desperate Every Man hanging on with hands slick with sweat from hard work and fear.
But it is his cover of Trent Reznor's Hurt -- the last hit Cash had while living -- that is the one that I turn to often.
It too is dark and sounds like the tale of someone just barely hanging on. (Also drug addiction is involved, something Cash also could understand.)
Cash's version turns pain into poetry and it is not surprising that it was turned into a YouTube montage of images from Virginia Tech. (See also this montage with Cash's When The Man Comes Around.)
With so many deaths from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the failure by the administration to take action that might have prevented the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, this has been a grief-filled decade.
Johnny Cash gave us a powerful expression of pain and regret. Even from the grave, the Man in Black speaks for us.