I’d never really paid attention to folk music or traditional music.

There’s this prophetic, timeless quality to Cash. It was a transformative experience for me and underscored how important music is. Certainly in punk, but also Johnny Cash, who I came to later when he was doing his American Recordings. Music is fun and exciting, and it helped me realize that some of the most important issues of the day are in the music that you’re listening to.

It’s something that I’ve seriously held on to throughout the rest of my life, something that inspired and motivated me to engage in a way that is not sometimes so heavy and hard. It really challenged my narrow view of things, when I was only 12 years old. Music early on, particularly the Clash, showed me that the world was this wonderful place and we were all interconnected, interdependent. Sarah Jaffe: Can you tell us how you started to think about writing about music and politics together?Īntonino D’Ambrosio: For me, music was the point of entry to seeing the world in a much broader way. He spoke to Sarah Jaffe about the book, Cash, and the impact of music on American political consciousness. Music has always been a way to keep alive the stories of people and places, creating a rich, living history that textbooks can never match.Īntonino D’Ambrosio, like me, discovered Johnny Cash after a lifetime of punk rock, and in his new book, A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears, he weaves together the threads of American folk music and popular song, street protest and social justice movements, and the painful history of American colonialism into one compelling tale: a story of one man’s journey but also of all the people who literally or by taking part in that history contributed to the making of an amazing protest record.īitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian wasn’t one of Johnny Cash’s best-known records, but D’Ambrosio chose to tell its story because it showed a side of Cash that most people don’t know. I discovered punk rock, and it led me to different ways of thinking about the world. Like many people, I came to politics-and writing about politics–through music.

In the house in a heartbeat guitar