Conscience

I'm not sure if I did well or ill by playing to the kids some of Johnny Cash's songs tonight. DoDo was moved to tears by his cover of 'Hurt'. I explained it was a tribute to his dead wife, June Carter, and tears started to streak his cheeks. I tried to cheer him up with Cash's other covers of 'Rusty Cage' and 'Tear-Stained Letter', and Richard & Linda Thompson's 'Bright Lights', but Johnny's 'Hurt' stuck with him. He's sensitive, a role routinely, structurally characterised and assigned to vulnerable family members (often the repositories/ scapegoat), a boy after my own heart.

I must have been 13, like DoDo, when my dad told me that I wouldn't truly understand folk/ C&W music till I'd had my heart broken. He meant in a romantic sense, and forgot that divorce and migration can do that equally efficiently. Plus I'd been steeped in that music. Bob Dylan, Ewan McColl. Peggy Seeger, Johnny Cash, Carter Family and antecedents in Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Folkways records, cognates in Bessie Smith, Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Mahalia Jackson and Aretha Franklin. He forgets he passed it on, because it's the same music I played for my kids.

My dear DoDo might be sensitive, but I don't have to worry how Nini will cope with exposure to drama- after all, it's her metier. She enjoyed 'Hurt, in a detached way, and wanted to know about Johnny's life. "Walk the Line' is rated 12A, so I can chum them when it's released next week. Part of my abiding regard for Cash is because he played at Folsom prison (near Sacramento, CA), home of my Grandma Mag. She didn't live in the prison, but in a fixed trailer in mobile home park, with plastic flamingos outside and fake plants inside.

Before her stroke, Grandma Mag enjoyed in her 50s and 60s a cowgirl frontier lifestyle, living between her trailer home and the bar on the faux-Western main street of Folsom. She drank margueritas, or vodka martinis, and adored the Man in Black. Mag enjoyed a serendipitous inheritance in later life, but her preference was to stay in that trailer with her mean cat and make occasional gambling trips to Reno or Vegas to (quite rightly) waste her money.