There are hardly any songwriters in the world who even hope to create the kind of magic Bob Dylan did.
Not many artists have the luxury of having the exact right commentary to give at just the right point in history, and even looking back on his time in the spotlight, Dylan himself often wondered if he was even able to create the same kind of magic that he could back in the day if he were to live his life over again. There must have been some magic in the air, but even he had to bow down to those who were among the true legends of music when he first got started strumming his guitar.
It’s not like Dylan started off being one of the greatest songwriters of all time overnight. He had a lot of woodshedding to do before he was even remotely close to the standard of his heroes, and even on his first album, the version of him that we know isn’t quite in view yet. Sure, the husky voice is there, and the strumming style that he would use is there, but it’s not exactly original by any stretch, either.
A lot of the covers and the few originals echoed back to Woody Guthrie, but if he learned anything from his debut, it was about trying to flex his muscles a little bit more. He wanted to be the kind of person who could write tunes that everyone could relate to, and while the folk scene may have been the perfect place for him to work on his craft, the country world wasn’t that far behind in that department by any stretch.
Every single legend in the country industry was about trying to hit on the general truths that everyone is afraid to say, half the time. Hank Williams was able to make the innermost feelings sound like the most natural lyric in the world, and even though Dolly Parton was singing about the facts of life as well, rarely has anyone ever sounded so pleasant when they are talking about everything from young love to being proud of where they come from.
But Johnny Cash was a bit of a different story. If the country artists at the time were talking about everyday life, ‘The Man in Black’ felt like he was ripped directly out of an old Western movie. He may not have done nearly as much hard time in the slammer as his songs would imply that he did, but his voice had the same type of lived-in experience that you would expect out of someone who had spent half their life learning lessons the hard way.
Dylan might have tried to put on that kind of mystique from time to time, but when listening to Cash, he always understood that this was someone fully in control of their own persona, saying at the time of his death, “I thought about writing a piece instead called ‘Cash Is King’ because that is the way I really feel. In plain terms, Johnny was and is the North Star; you could guide your ship by him — the greatest of the greats then and now.”
And while Dylan has his fair share of character portraits on par with any of Cash’s songs, none of them really managed to hit the nail on the head quite like ‘The Man in Black’. There are countless tunes in his arsenal that speak about the struggles people have throughout their life, but when you listen to recordings of ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ or ‘I Walk The Line’, you never doubt for a second that Cash could have easily have lived every single second of those tunes when playing in Folsom Prison.
Dylan had his fair share of great moments of storytelling, but Cash was always working with a different kind of template. His folk friend was about using metaphors at every turn, and even if ‘The Man in Black’ took his fair share of liberties with his own songs, no one seemed to embody their songs better than he did.
