When Bob Dylan burst onto the New York City folk scene in the early 1960s, the public immediately began painting him in a corner he would spend the rest of his career trying to escape. Folkies saw Dylan as a kindred spirit, thanks to his affinity for reworking the traditional American songbook and writing protest songs that served as a backdrop for the sociopolitical movements of the time.
Once his writing began to diverge from the topical into the personal, these same folkies began denouncing Dylan. Critics attempted and failed to reconcile with Dylan’s evolution throughout the 1960s. Meanwhile, one artist was showing his public support poetically: Johnny Cash.
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Johnny Cash Wrote an Open Letter to Bob Dylan’s Critics in 1964
Bob Dylan’s electric performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival is often considered the moment the folk world turned on the singer-songwriter. But critics had already been sitting on their complaints about Dylan for years by this point. Pushback became stronger with each new introspective song Dylan presented to a public eager for more songs about politics, social events, and historical accounts. Public criticism became so strong, in fact, that in the March 1964 issue of Broadside, Johnny Cash offered his two cents on the matter.
“Hi Broadside,” Cash’s open letter began. “I got hung, but didn’t choke… Bob Dylan slung his rope. I sat down and listened quick… Gravy from that brain is thick.” He continued later, “A lamp is burning in all our dark…but…we must open our eyes to see it…and he listened for the wind…to hear it.” Cash concluded his poetic letter of defense, “Don’t bad-mouth him ‘till you hear him, let him start by continuing / He’s almost brand new, SHUT UP! … AND LET HIM SING!”
The Singer-Songwriter Kept That Magazine Copy for Decades
During his acceptance speech for the 2015 MusiCares Person of the Year Award, Bob Dylan mentioned the letter Johnny Cash wrote to Broadside five decades earlier. Dylan specifically said Cash’s defense was in response to a rather scathing letter to Dylan published in Sing Out! The recorded dates available online would suggest that Cash’s letter was actually published before the Sing Out! condemnation, which could be a documenting error as much as a chronological rearrangement by human memory. In any case, the letter Cash wrote to Broadside deeply moved the “Blowing In The Wind” singer.
“Johnny was an intense character,” Dylan said. “He saw that people were putting me down for playing electric music. He posted letters to magazines scolding people, telling them to shut up and let me sing. In Johnny Cash’s world—hardcore Southern drama—that kind of thing didn’t exist. Nobody told anybody what to sing or do. They just didn’t do that kind of thing where he came from. I’m always going to thank him for that. Johnny Cash was a giant of a man, the man in black.”
Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2003, Dylan revealed that Cash wrote that letter in his defense before the two even met. “The letter meant the world to me,” Dylan said. “I’ve kept the magazine to this day.”
Photo by Gai Terrell/Redferns