A heartbeat and a guitar

I just found out this existed: A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears.

Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian is a little-remembered 1964 album of protest songs about American Indian issues. It’s been one of my favorite Cash albums since I started listening to Cash and dug it out of a Walmart bargain bin. I, for one, maintain that everything you need to know about George Armstrong Custer can be gleaned from the song  “Custer” (performed here with Buffy Sainte-Marie):

What I always thought was best about the album, though, was that many of the songs focused on contemporary land rights issues, which is something non-Indians in America seem pathologically resistant to. This is “As Long as the Grass shall Grow” about the illegal construction of Kinzua Dam that displaced the Seneca from their land in the 1960s.

There’s a website for A Heartbeat and a Guitar that gives the gist of the book:

In this remarkable new work, writer and filmmaker Antonino D’Ambrosio tells the astonishing and dramatic story behind Johnny Cash’s virtually unknown folk protest record Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian.  Recorded four years before his live performance at Folsom Prison and six years before he recorded “Man in Black,” Cash, by making Bitter Tears, placed himself in the middle of the fervent social upheavals gripping the nation at the time Cash faced censorship and an angry backlash from radio stations, DJs, and fans, for speaking out on behalf of Native people on Bitter Tears. Cash decided to fight back.

At once grand and intimate, A Heartbeat and a Guitar presents another side of Johnny Cash by illuminating the music’s legend’s collaboration with little known folk artist Peter La Farge on the album. It also tells of the unique personal, political, and cultural struggles that informed this album—especially the fight for Native people’s rights—one that has influenced scores of musicians and activists from Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan to American Indian Movement co-founder Dennis Banks and Native activist-artist John Trudell, the latter was instrumental in the 1968 takeover of Alcatraz.

Weaving multiple narrative threads and bringing in the stories of the long forgotten Native war hero Ira Hayes (immortalized in the Iwo Jima flag-raising photo), legendary musicians and producers, courageous Native activists, polarizing political leaders, and outspoken citizen-artists, D’Ambrosio’s A Heartbeat and a Guitar tells a sweeping story of an untold moment in Cash’s career. This inimitable account—which includes original cover art from Shepard Fairey and 34 never before seen photos by photographs by Jim Marshall and Diana Davies. — creates a dramatic picture of an era of cultural transformation from alternating perspectives—from the studio and the street— presenting Cash as a musician who believed in the power of music to help rouse a new social movement.

Needless to say, I just put my order in at the local library.