When sincere enthusiasm leads to profound knowledge and the ability to bundle this knowledge in a rousing narrative, then a 400-page standard work like Franz Dobler’s comes about The Beast in Me: … Johnny Cash and the strange and beautiful world of country music from heaven. Already published in 2002, for the 70th birthday of Johnny Cash, the journalist, writer and DJ mixed up the music world. In the German-speaking world, nobody had turned away from any kind of folklore – based on the biography of a key figure – or explored the real dimensions of a musical genre. Another genre, too, that was so littered with clichés, misunderstandings and marketing interests and hijacked by right-wing reactionary forces that the real core, its real art, was barely visible.
It took Franz Dobler’s incorruptible gaze, with his inimitable linguistic sound, to bring the beauty, depth and depth of country music unfiltered to a German-speaking audience. Suddenly country music was no longer the music of backwoodsmen rednecks, who sang in glittering costumes about a home that never existed. Now the genre was populated by torn, lonely characters who expressed their pain, their longing and their joys just as truthfully as in blues or soul. And Johnny Cash’s life in particular stood for this struggle for real recognition beyond the interests of a music industry that would have liked to turn him into a harmless patriotic cowboy. The now iconic photo in which he throws his finger at this industry is just as much evidence of this as the legendary American Recordings at the end of his life, on which, with the help of hip-hop and heavy metal producer Rick Rubin, he draws once more from the fullness of his expressiveness. Moving and exhilarating at the same time. This last great work occupies a large place at the end of the book, and it is simply thrilling how Dobler takes the readership into the backstage area of a legend, so to speak.
Now the book has been reissued with a new foreword by the author and, in contrast to then, the music described can be called up in seconds thanks to the small devices that we now all carry with us. So you can hardly read a page without streaming another obscure recommendation and then stuck there enthusiastically. For example with the black country singer Miko Marks and the Resurrectors.
In fact, the world is now a different one, and it is precisely this that makes it clear what validity and scope lies in country music. The songs not only age well, they even acquire new explosiveness and weight in view of the systemic crises in our present day. Even the gallows humor peculiar to the country seems anything but out of place in view of the ongoing social disintegration. Individual outlaw narratives transcend into metaphors of a world that is slowly falling to its knees, in which it is hardly possible to distinguish between truth and lies and unleashed greed for profit will lead directly into chaos. Then the voices of some upright and honest people sound all the clearer and more haunted. It is really true that with three chords and the truth one can reach and comfort every heart.
So if you really want to deal with country music seriously, you can’t avoid this great book. After that you are just as big a fan as Franz Dobler.
The Beast in Me. Johnny Cash: … and the strange and beautiful world of country music Franz Dobler Heyne 2021, 421 S., 15 €
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