I wore my black shirt to work today. It seemed like the proper thing to do.

I've mourned more than a few passings in this journal, and as I get older, I'm sure I'll have no reason to stop. But I can't bring myself to mourn for Johnny Cash. If ever a man seemed to have made peace with himself, it was Johnny. His voice was not one I heard often during my childhood--only the occasional strains of "If I Were a Carpenter" or "A Boy Named Sue" on the radio--but as I grew older, I discovered that there was a power in that weary, rumbling baritone, and I learned to listen with a great appreciation to the songs he wrote before I was born.

In recent years his career underwent something of a renaissance, largely on the strength of a remarkable series of albums he released on Rick Rubin's American Recordings label. Accompanied by a cast of young and not-so-young all-stars--Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Fiona Apple, Nick Cave, Merle Haggard, Billy Preston, Marty Stuart, Norman Blake, Sheryl Crow--Johnny laid down a series of songs that traveled all over the musical map. Some he'd written himself years ago, and some he'd written only in the new century. He took on standards from his youth ("That Lucky Old Sun," "Nobody") and songs that became standards during his lifetime ("Bridge Over Troubled Water," "In My Life," "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry").

But what awed me was the bold personal stamp he put on songs Nashville would never touch. Johnny's cover of Nine Inch Nail's "Hurt" has deservedly attracted much attention, but it's far from a stunt--it's a breathtaking performance. In his hands, U2's "One" hums with authority, and Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus" changes from pomo irony into the sincere evangelism of a believer. Nick Cave's condemned-man lament, "The Mercy Seat," may as well have been a Johnny Cash song when he wrote it, and Johnny accepts the gift with becoming grace. Songs by Sting, by Tom Petty, by Neil Diamond, for pete's sake, are claimed as Johnny's own in a set of simple, straightforward, but rich arrangements that circle his voice like the band around his finger.

When June Carter Cash died a few months ago, a friend of mine in Nashville predicted that Johnny wouldn't long outlive her. I've been expecting to hear the news of his death ever since, and I've taken the time to try and appreciate what he wrote and sang, knowing that the Cash catalogue was likely complete. And I think Johnny may have known as well, though he completed it before June's death. The final song on his final album, American IV: The Man Comes Around, is not a Cash song, nor does it have the melancholy tone so many of his recordings have. Instead, it presents a gentle optimism born long ago; it's a song I remember hearing my English friends sing at my own send-off from Manchester nearly twenty years ago, and I still have reason to believe its lyrics are true. I know Johnny believed them, and when he sang them, he somehow made them true for everyone:

We'll meet again,
Don't know where,
Don't know when,
But I know we'll meet again
Some sunny day
5:15 PM

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