Last night, I watched a documentary of Johnny Cash called “Johnny Cash’s  America.” (Oh, the power of DVR.)  Johnny Cash is one of those lifetime influences for me, and he continues to inspire me even after his death.

One thing that’s interesting about Johnny Cash is that when he and his band first started, they could hardly play; they didn’t start out as iconic or anything.  But Cash became known as a symbol of stark honesty in his music, a symbol of counter-culture. Years after country music stopped paying attention to him, punks and Goths started celebrating him. To this day, Cash defies categorization musically–his sound is instantly identifiable, even before he starts to sing. We remember him as a sort of dark horse, a man who stood up for the downtrodden even as he battled his own demons.