Johnny Cash and the Myth of the Mississippi

Where images of the American land, history, and way of life are concerned, few can match the power of the Mississippi River. It is able to contain within its banks many of the archetypal themes found throughout the nation’s literature. The river is used over and over to explore issues of geographic space and history, both personal and collective. It can function so well in this capacity because the vast body of the continent finds its match in the immense length and drainage of the great river.

Travel of one kind or another is a persistent theme throughout American literature. Restless wandering is certainly not unique to America; what is, however, is the scope to which such journeys are possible without ever leaving America itself. In European literature, the wandering hero is left to find the object of his quest in either magical lands or exotic foreign locales. The Arthurian tradition is exemplary in this respect. By contrast, the journals of Lewis and Clark, though records of a very literal journey, can be seen as a legitimate contribution to a national literature.

The Mississippi River has been used extensively throughout the history of American letters as a vehicle, both physical and metaphysical, for the wandering American spirit. Most obviously, perhaps, Mark Twain has done so, using it as the literal stage on which he would play out his own adventures in Life on the Mississippi, and even more successfully as the metaphorical Road upon which Huck Finn and Jim would journey into the dark heart of America. Hart Crane employs the river as a means to reach the primitive world of the continent’s first inhabitants, a world in which Pocahontas becomes the very body of the land itself. The contention here is that a similar metamorphosis, on a more immediately intimate scale, occurs in the song Big River by Johnny Cash.

The opening verse firmly situates the narrator: He is alone, deserted by his beloved, in despair, yet intimately connected to his surroundings. Like the medieval English lyric “Western Wind,” the elegance and simplicity of the address effectively dispense with any notions of solipsism or the pathetic fallacy. The river is personified, though the significance of that to the story has yet to be disclosed. In point of fact, every element of the physical landscape will take on an anthropomorphic quality. It is a numinous, interconnected world in which individual lives are lived on a cosmic scale.