My wife bought Johnny Cash’s black Tag Heuer watch from Southeby’s.
Very little downtrodden or poor about that transaction.
Right! Nudie suits weren’t his style, he wanted something much more understated.
And black clothing can have a wide range of meanings to many different people.
What about nuns? What about Goth chicks? Both wear black for probably very different reasons.
j666 writes:
> Cash grew up during the Depression, in rural Arkansas. I imagine his family felt little connection to politicians or owners of the means of
> production. I don’t mean to say anarchy is the same as communism, only that he probably heard economic and politic systems other
> than capitalism and representative democracy discussed as a child.
Johnny Cash was born in 1932. When the U.S. entered World War II in 1941, he was nine years old. So he certainly didn’t spend his teenage years listening to orators talking about how terrible capitalist society was. According to the Wikipedia entries, he grew up at the Dyess Colony, a New Deal program that gave a group of farmers each their own patches of land. Far from being an anarchist group then, it was a group that owed its existence to a government program. On reaching 18, Cash joined the Air Force, a government program. His early musical influences were gospel music and Irish music:
What occurred to me is that a basic black suit or black jacket with slacks were the good or “church” clothes of the rural poor and that by wearing those to perform rather than the extravagant regalia of other country musicians, Cash was trying to communicate he was just like his fans (i.e., see guys in my best I’m not any different from you).
There’s no reason there is assume he would not know what anarchy is.
There’s a difference between knowing what anarchy and anarchists are and basing your fashions on anarchists’ clothing.
Who said he did?
Someone asserted that wearing black for the underclass was a Johnny Cash specific thing (post 9). Someone else came in and said other groups associate black with disrupting society (presumably for the benefit of the disenfranchised) as well (post 11).
No one said Johnny Cash did because of anarchists.
j666 appeared to claim that I didn’t know that Cash knew what anarchy and anarchists are.
There’s no reason to think that Cash wore black because of what anarchists wear.
I was thinking mostly of the various Black Bloc gatherings you see in protests around the world. They’re generally left-wing anti-capitalist anarchists, and as such support the common working man, at least in theory
It was the sequence of quotes (below) that I was referring to. No big deal though- and while there is no evidence about whether Cash did or did not know about Anarchists, it’s not really relevant to the point about other groups using black.
An ironic bit of trivia is that black used to be ostentatious color because it was very expensive to make black dyes that actually looked black and not grayish.
No. No, that’s not really not accurate. Please refer to your post below.
I pointed out in response to two of your posts that there is no reason to think Cash was not familiar with anarchy, and I stand by that.