The Spiteful (And Later Viral) Johnny Cash Song Rosanne Cash Called “Painful”

When nothing seems to be going right, some people go left—Johnny Cash went hard left, veering off-course completely with a spiteful song his daughter, Rosanne Cash, called “painful.” Decades before the absurd song would become a popular soundbite on social media, Cash was using the song as a self-effacing middle finger to his record label, Columbia.

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Or at least, that’s the tack Cash took after witnessing his friends and family’s incredulous reactions. They can’t all be winners, of course. But this song seemed like it wasn’t even competing in the same contest.

The 1980s Weren’t Entirely Kind To Johnny Cash

By the time the 1980s rolled around, Johnny Cash was a member of the old, old guard. He was a country legend, most certainly, but a legendary status doesn’t guarantee stellar chart performance. In fact, it seemed to be doing just the opposite for Cash in a decade that prioritized freshness, novelty, and whatever everyone’s square parents weren’t listening to.

With Cash’s sales continuing to drop, his long-time label, Columbia, decided they wouldn’t renew his contract upon its completion, effectively dropping him from their roster. “It hurt him,” his daughter, Rosanne Cash, said in The Resurrection of Johnny Cash: Hurt, Redemption, and American Recordings. “I mean, he helped to build that f***ing company.”

According to Robert Hilburn’s biography of Johnny Cash, the country icon recorded “The Chicken in Black” earnestly, if not with a sense of tongue-in-cheek mischief. The goofy song described a man who first replaced his brain with a bank robber’s, thereby becoming a robber himself, only to ask for his old brain back and find that doctors had put it into a chicken, who had just landed a ten-year recording contract. Certainly not Cash’s most serious or stoic.

The song became what Cash wanted: a charting hit. “The Chicken in Black” peaked at a humble No. 45 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, although the modest performance was hardly worth the backlash Cash faced from his friends, family, and, eventually, his own embarrassment.

His Family Considered The Spiteful Song “Painful”

austere songs like “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” “Ragged Old Flag,” and, of course, “Man in Black.” To be fair to Cash, “The Chicken in Black” was, at the very least, quintessentially 1980s. But his friends and family’s response was a reminder that legacy artists like Cash aren’t supposed to bend to the whims of the time. Doing so inherently jeopardizes the timeless quality of their music. For Cash’s daughter, Rosanne Cash, the song was the “nadir” of her father’s career.

“There was an undercurrent of desperation in [“The Chicken in Black”],” she later recalled. “He was kind of mocking and dismantling his own legacy. It was painful. Everybody [realized it was a big mistake], but that was it. Pretty much the end of [him with] Columbia.”

Years later, Cash would write in his second autobiography that he recorded the song to spite Columbia. He was fulfilling the last of his contractual obligations to the label by releasing “The Chicken in Black” and forcing the company to uphold theirs by releasing the stinker of a track. Interestingly, the stick ‘em up, everybody, I’m robbing the place portion of the song turned into a popular soundbite for social media two decades after Cash’s death.

But fortunately for the country music icon, it’s hardly the most memorable part of his musical legacy.

Photo by David Redfern/Redferns