‘Wall Street Journal’ Causes Stir By Initially Calling Johnny Cash “Uncool”

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The Wall Street Journal stepped in it pretty good late last week while strangely deciding to step into the realm of country music.

No, this was not tied to their coverage of the Zach Bryan song snippet issue, which was the story du jour for many country fans. The Journal addressed Zach Bryan as well, but in a rather dispassionate and non-partisan way. In fact, the writer Elias Leight made a call to Saving Country Music to help contextualize and get some background on the Zach Bryan matter before going to print.

Back when journalism was journalism, journalists consulting with other journalists and experts in a field was much more common as opposed to simply going online to pontificate. Not everyone can be an expert on every topic. But you can consult experts, attempt to get a greater context and perspective, and to address or represent dissenting viewpoints from your own to help better inform the public.

It was The Wall Street Journal article titled “It’s Finally Time to Give Johnny Cash His Due” that drew the ire of many country music and Johnny Cash fans on October 9th, even if they couldn’t get an eye on the full version of the article itself due to a paywall. In large part, it was the subheading or the ‘dek’ of the article that drew the most ire, stating “Compared to Dylan and Springsteen, the country-music legend can seem deeply uncool.” Those were fighting works for many country and Johnny Cash fans.


Unlike The Wall Street Journal piece on the Zach Bryan song snippet, this wasn’t a dry news report. The Johnny Cash piece was a personal column by the senior culture correspondent for the Economist named Jon Fasman, speaking about his experience of coming to the realization of the coolness of Johnny Cash. Along with the subheading, it was some quotes from the article that also drew the ire of the public.

“Cash never got the same respect for his writing that Dylan (or Paul Simon or Bruce Springsteen) did,” Jon Fasman asserts.

That’s debatable at best. Sure, Dylan is probably seen as a superior writer to many. But as the column itself points out, Dylan looked up to Cash, both when Dylan first arrived on the songwriter scene, and probably still to this day.

“He was never counterculturally cool, and he could seem a little square,” the column also contends about Cash while comparing him with Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, and also points out that he was “a Christian and a patriot.”

These statements in many respects insult the complexity of the Johnny Cash character. In fact, to a certain segment of buttoned up country music fans, Cash is considered a pill-popping hippie-cavorting turncoat liberal for entertaining convicted felons and collaborating with long hairs.

Johnny Cash could be criticized for many things. Being a “square” is probably not one of them, if for no other reason than his multiple arrests, including on October 4th, 1965 when Cash was caught trying to smuggle 688 amphetamine pills and 475 tranquilizers in his guitar case across the Mexican border.

The outlet Defector and writer Albert Burneko wrote a spirited rebuttal to The Wall Street Journal column, saying, “Johnny Cash … was cooler than Bruce Springsteen cubed. Next to that apple-polishing dorkwad, Johnny Cash is Thelonious Monk. Johnny Cash made his bones getting Beatlemania treatment from guys doing hard time. He tossed Nixon’s requested setlist and played protest songs at him. He wrote ‘I Walk the Line,’ for chrissakes. He isn’t just cool compared to Springsteen. He makes Bob Dylan look like Carrot Top.”

Let’s not get hyperbolic here, or reduce Dylan and Springsteen just because we want to show our respects to Johnny Cash. After all, the point of the whole Wall Street Journal column is writer Jon Fasman coming to the conclusion that Johnny Cash is cool, and realizing how he misunderstood the Cash legacy previously.

“I’ll admit that I’m a late arrival to the Church of Cash,” Fasman says. “I grew up in the blandest possible northeastern suburb, listening to classical music at home and ’90s punk at school. Country music was as foreign as qawwali, and a lot less cool.”

Yes, The Wall Street Journal column does come across as lacking in self-awareness. It does make debatable and outright refutable assertions about Johnny Cash. But it’s also uncharacteristically honest, and when taken as a whole, is not entirely offensive. The whole point of the column is to draw the arc of someone who started off unaware of how “cool” Johnny Cash was, and then coming to that realization through things like the recent Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown.

Not only is this illustration of an evolution in thinking important and emblematic of other people’s thinking, it probably is something that should be applauded, including applauding the frankness with which the author addressed the issue, speaking about his blind spots and misunderstanding. This wasn’t a column in Rolling Stone or Saving Country Music. This is The Wall Street Journal—a New York-based business publication where many readers are going to be uninitiated on country music, or the complexity of the Johnny Cash legacy.

Just like a journalist unfamiliar with country music or a specific music fan that reaches out to someone for guidance and insight, country music fans shouldn’t look down their nose at the uninitiated. Doing so only increases the chances of them misunderstanding the music. Instead, they should be patient, be willing to explain the complexity and nuance in the Johnny Cash character, for example, and why for many he symbolizes the seat of “cool” in country music, and in the greater American culture.

If anything, Johnny Cash became too “cool” during his American Recordings era in the late ’90 up to his death in 2003, with Cash T-shirts at Hot Topic outlets in the mall, and interlopers exploiting his coolness to try and be cool themselves, misunderstanding the Man in Black’s legacy.

But part of the reason for all the anger at The Wall Street Journal column is the same reason so many got angry at the Zach Bryan song snippet. Due to The Wall Street Journal‘s paywall, many got an incomplete picture, primarily seizing on the subheading of the column as opposed to reading the column itself, and seeing the evolution of thinking in the author. The public saw the headline and subheading on social media, and had an emotional reaction.

Often, it’s not even the author who decides the title and subheading. It’s an editor who is looking to create a buzz and entice people to click on an article. The rebuttal to the Johnny Cash article in Defector even points this out. And often, it’s the title, the subheading, or a pull quote from an article that gets posted to social media, creating the maelstrom that ensues.

Somewhat ironically, this same thing happened with an article written by Elias Leight—the other Wall Street Journal writer who wrote about the Zach Bryan situation. Elias Leight also happened to be the author of another article that might have been one of the most consequential in country music in the last decade.

On March 26th, 2019, Rolling Stone published an article authored by Elias Leight titled, “Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ Was a Country Hit. Then Country Changed Its Mind.” Published after “Old Town Road” had been removed from the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart with little or no outrage or even attention paid to it, it was the title of this article specifically that lit the spark behind the eventual international outrage that had many accusing country music of racism.

The Rolling Stone article itself—just like The Wall Street Journal article on Johnny Cash, included much more nuance. Elias Leight explained how Lil Nas X’s manager Danny Kang came clean to Billboard on how Lil Nas X had taken advantage of Billboard‘s lax chart rules to chart in country where he could get a higher placement than in hip-hop. After Billboard determined the song did not belong in country, they removed it.

But similar to the snippet of the recent Zach Bryan song that has caused such a stir—and the subheading of the Wall Street Journal article—the public lacked proper context to make a full judgement about the Lil Nas X situation. They simply took the premise of the title and ran with it.

Paywalls often exacerbate this issue when it comes to media reports. As you can see by the nested responses to The Wall Street Journal‘s Johnn Cash article (above), the reactions are from people to the title and subhead since they’re not subscribers and can’t see the full post.

It’s not that The Wall Street Journal feature on Johnny Cash was good, or useful, or even particularly informative. It probably didn’t need to be written or published in a major publication. It was more fodder for a personal blog or Substack post.

But The Wall Street Journal article does speak to an evolution of thinking in folks who are not country music fans or Johnny Cash fans about how country music isn’t inherently “uncool” or hayseed racket, but that it has value, substance, meaning, and can even convey erudite and important things in life. This is something all fans and advocates of country music should commend and encourage, not condemn due to someone’s previous ignorance or misunderstanding.

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