So Johnny Cash is dead. Maybe it says something about the relative comfort and lack of drama in my life that this simple fact made me sadder than I’d been for quite a while, maybe a year or so.

But O how pitiful, how paltry, the “C” section of my wall-to-wall CD consumer boast display case. Three goddamn discs by Cash—Live at Folsom, The Sun Years and a budget best-of. I should’ve been a better fan to him. What’s three records in the face of, what, five decades as the giant of a genre, and (its clear descent from the keening of the Celts aside) a very American genre at that? I’ll cop straight off to being underqualified to tackle the task of discussing Cash’s life and work. But that’s never stopped me before, especially when:

Johnny Cash affected my life, or my view of it. From the superficial—hey, I can wear all black without looking like a total pretentious dweeb (can’t I?)—to some deeper stuff.

About mortality. About how doing the right thing often doesn’t come naturally, and doing the wrong thing can be pretty badass, but at the end of the day we want some sort of—what?—redemption. And how in the face of all the bad man has done, that selfsame redemption can seem completely out of reach, a taunt. About the importance of looking oneself in the face, facing the mirror, even (especially) at the very pit of self-designed degradation. About the one good thing a man can do, can be, even when it’s all wrong. About honesty.

I came to that point almost directly: honesty.

Relatively recent events have reminded us of the travails awaiting the country music artist who is vocal in any way opposing an American war. Decades ago, in a brave move that could’ve alienated his audience forever, Cash spoke out against the unfair fate of Vietnam draftees. That’s the kind of flat-out honesty that was at the crux of a better America, which Johnny’s passing seems to put even further behind. Please, don’t tell us he was the last bastion.

This is the same honesty that the weak and people-pleasing such as myself need to strive for.

For an instance in song, a nugget of uncut emotional honesty, there’s the hangover of “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” a soothing tune that’ll make you hate yourself to the core if you listen to it on one of your own woozy Sunday mornings. The raw-boned honesty of it, all that stuff about doing bad things, about wanting to do the right thing, about fleeting, unattainable redemption. And Johnny’s baritone warble, river-deep.

He was a rebel of a wholly traditional milieu. Which is to court contradiction, our age’s approximation of depth. Of course the outlaw thing was a put-on—the sensible obits tell us that for the flinty criminal glamor we’ve associated with “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” his jailings were brief, and with the exception of an arrest for, get this, picking flowers, they were all tied to his love for the illicit chemicals that lit up his brain.

News to no one: every song is a fiction. But by stepping into the skin of imaged outlaws, Cash wasn’t only building-enhancing-reinforcing an image.

(Oh, he was doing that too. And goddamn what a great image it was. Courting the prison crowd, marrying into country music royalty, flipping off the Grand Ole Opry, living the Man in Black thing.

(Rock’n'roll, a post-Cash bastard baby that has to bear a trace of the man’s creative DNA, was just the latest popular artform to teach us to crave some pomp with our circumstance. Pleasurable, natural, not worth the breath exhaled in the action of foolishly decrying.)

Wasn’t it fabulous, simply amazing, the pileup of existential, emotional stuff—by which I mean, the meat and guts of a thing (not a lazy placeholder)—that he played with, dug around, embodied. He was: the original badass with a swig of vulnerability; the unrepentant killer with a moral chaser and some gospel for your trouble; capable of being maudlin as all hell, but somehow without whiny self-pity, and always ready to mine a vein of easy, good-natured humor. Isn’t there some cliché about a man needing great faith to dance with the devil so habitually, exquisitely?

The reality and role on which Johnny Cash had a firm and intuitive grasp, was that a performer working a folk music is obligated to speak for and to the people. There is some pandering built into this, which too much punk rock (again traces of Cash in attitude if not form) has probably taught us to eschew, but there’s a more important, basic dynamic at work.

In song, whether his own compositions or his choices of others’, the imagery connected. The metaphors of lawlessness for alienation, danger and hellfire for love, labor for both pride and stagnation, the click-clacking train—aha, another relic of bygone America—for the momentary rapture of escape (later unmasked as a lie, of course), resonated somewhere on an almost reptile-brain level with those who felt poor, downtrodden, mundane. So Johnny-as-image, Johnny-as-performer equals Johnny the champion for those folks. And there’s no folk music without the folks, right? No country without people to occupy it.

To really put a song across, be it an original or cover, the singer has to find truth within. While Johnny’s outlaw fixation might have been amplified and distorted for effect, it was also true of him on some personal level, as was the almost opera-sized grappling with love, God and murder. It takes a hell of a man to reflect his existence as a no-good speedfreak or pathetic junkie into great, dramatic stories that root around within the mess of the American psyche.

Even the casual fan can see this, simple and plain.