Nine Choices: Johnny Cash and American Culture

by Jonathan Silverman

For much of his career, Johnny Cash opened his shows with the tagline, "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash." This introduction seemed unnecessary, since everyone in the audience knew who he was―the famous musical artist whose career spanned almost five decades, whose troubled life on and off the stage received wide publicity, and whose cragged face seemed to express a depth and intensity not found in any other artist, living or dead.

For Cash, as for many celebrities, renown was the product of both hard work and luck. Often a visionary and always a tireless performer, he was subject to a whirlwind of social, economic, and cultural countercurrents. Nine Choices explores the tension between Cash's desire for mainstream success, his personal struggles with alcohol and drugs, and an ever-changing cultural landscape that often circumscribed his options.

Drawing on interviews, archival research, and textual analysis, Jonathan Silverman focuses on Cash's personal and artistic choices as a way of understanding his life, his impact on American culture, and the ways in which that culture in turn shaped him. Cash made decisions about where he would live, what he would play, who would produce his albums, whether he would support the Vietnam War, and even if he would flip his famous "bird"―the iconic image of Cash giving the finger which is now plastered on posters and T-shirts everywhere―in the context of cultural forces both visible and opaque. He made other decisions in consultation with a variety of people, many of whom were chiefly concerned with the reaction of his audiences.

Less a conventional biography than a study of the making of an identity, Nine Choices explores how Johnny Cash sought to define who he was, how he was perceived, and what he signified through a series of self-conscious actions. The result, Silverman shows, was a life that was often tumultuous but never uninteresting.

312 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2010

About the author

Jonathan Silverman is a professor of English at UMass Lowell. He is the editor of Astros and Asterisks: The Houston Sign-Stealing Scandal, Explained.

He is the co-author with Michael Hinds of Johnny Cash International: How and Why the World Loves the Man in Black (University of Iowa Press, 2020), which is the winner of the 2023 Peggy O'Brien Book Prize.

He is also author of Nine Choices: Johnny Cash and American Culture (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010); the co-author with Dean Rader of The World Is a Text: Writing, Reading, and Thinking about Culture and Its Contexts (Pearson/Broadview, 2002-2018, five editions); and the co-editor with Meghan Sweeney of Remaking the American College Campus (McFarland, 2016).

He has served as the Fulbright Roving Scholar in Norway (2007-2008) and was a John H. Daniels fellow at the National Sporting Library (2013-2014).
He has published articles on horse racing in The Cambridge Companion to Horseracing, The Journal of Sport History, Poor Yorick, Post, and The End of Austin as part of a larger work on horse racing in progress. He has published work in Prospects, Kugelmass, The Rumpus, The Journal of the American West, and The Journal of Radicalism, and wrote for PBS’s website, Remotely Connected.

Reviews

[Tim Armstrong · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a scholarly work, and I appreciate that there are authors who are doing scholarly studies of Cash. This book explores his life through nine different choices he made. It's an interesting concept for a book, but the execution falls a bit flat. The book also tends to be rather dry, something that can certainly happen in a scholarly work. Glad I read it and got a fresh perspective on a topic I know quite well.

I was also put off by the numerous factual errors. There are things like dates (for example) that are wrong in the book and that is always a cause for concern for me.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating and very thoroughly researched.