Cash’s cover of the song, considered by many to be his epitaph, showed up at #96 on the German singles chart this month…
I’ve always been moved by the video, shot in his Hendersonville, TN, home and featuring footage from the closed House of Cash Museum. Archival footage includes Cash riding a steam train in Zebulon, Georgia (not too far from where I now live), as Abe Cross in the 1971 movie, Gunfight saying, “You stay the hell away from me, you hear,” performing at Folsom Prison, and visiting his abandoned childhood home. June Carter Cash appears in the video looking lovingly over his shoulder.
I knew none of these details when the song was released in 2003 or when the video won the 2004 Grammy Award and Country Music Award for Best Short Form Music Video. I went back to it after hearing its director, Mark Romanek, discussing the video on Fresh Air:
Johnny was in poor health and so I said to myself, well, we either try to prettify it and try to hide that or we just show the way he is. And I was inspired, I guess, by the candor of Johnny Cash’s whole career and the way that he handled himself.
I just decided, I just – it doesn’t feel right to do Johnny Cash and try to fake something or cheat something. So I said if he’s not in good health, then that’s what we’re going to show. And if the museum is in a state of disrepair, then that’s what we’re going to show. And then those two ideas started to kind of harmonize with each other, resonate with each other.
And then when we were touring around the House of Cash Museum, the women said, oh, and here’s Johnny’s archive. And she opened this door and there was this vault, just filled floor to ceiling with tapes and film canisters and we went, wow, what is this stuff?
So we took some of that stuff back to L.A. and without even really knowing a lot of what it was. And then when we caught some of that stuff of Johnny as a young, vibrant man up against Johnny coming towards the -what we didn’t know, but it was coming towards the end of his life, we really got chills up and down our spine. And that’s when we realized that there was a chance to so something much more powerful and emotionally strong than you usually see in your average music video. It became rapidly apparent that we were making a short film about a great, great man and mortality and it all fell together in this very kind of intuitive way.
The house, Cash’s home for nearly 30 years, was destroyed by fire in 2007. The closed museum was derelict and decrepit more from a flood than neglect.
We talked about it and he connected very deeply with the message of the song. I mean, he felt he had caused a lot of wreckage from his own drug and alcohol use, that he had lost a lot of beloved friends because of drugs and alcohol. And, you know, I think that infused his performance with a lot of sadness and regret that was not feigned…
I didn’t talk to him after that. I know that Rick spoke to him and his family. They were very, very moved by the video and they were very shocked by its candor. And there was some discussion about whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. And I was told that it was John who said, no, it’s really good. Let’s put this out. It’s okay. Its the truth. And, you know, there’s Johnny Cash for you.
June Carter Cash died on May 15, 2003. Johnny died on September 12, 2003.
More from MTV on the occasion of the video winning a 2003 VMA, a 2006 appreciation by Duncan at The Inspiration Room and the Wikipedia entry for Hurt. Also worth another viewing, Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon as Johnny and June in Walk The Line. Romanek, btw, was on Fresh Air for his latest film, Never Let Me Go, reviewed here.