1991: Beans for Breakfast - Johnny Cash

I’m a hungry nasty lonesome man

What’s your favourite Johnny Cash song? Is it I Walk the Line? Big River? Guess Things Happen That Way? Folsom Prison Blues? I Still Miss Someone? Five Feet High and Rising? Hey Porter? The Man in Black? You're the Nearest Thing to Heaven?

Or is it one of the songs he didn’t write but which belonged to him anyway, like Ring of Fire, Cocaine Blues, I Heard That Lonesome Whistle Blow, A Boy Named Sue, Hurt, Four Strong Winds, I’ve Been Everywhere, If I Were a Carpenter or something else he sang entirely?

Bob Dylan has just shared a clip on Instagram of Cash singing an absolutely haunting version of Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord?), which you should absolutely seek out, and in his The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan also wrote that “Charlie Rich sang ‘Easy Money’, Eddie Money sang ‘Million Dollar Girl’, and Johnny Cash could sing anything”.

And he’s right. Johnny Cash could sing anything, even when people said he couldn’t. He could sing anything, even when people had stopped listening. His 1980s are most fondly remembered for his time with The Highwaymen, but my favourite work of his from that time (outside his appearance on Columbo) is the lost album Out Among the Stars, which contains a couple of career best performances in She Used to Love Me a Lot and The Night I Drove Her Out of My Mind.

Similarly, Cash’s 1990s are only remembered for his American Recordings with Rick Rubin, but, again, my favourite song of his from this era comes from elsewhere.

I first heard Beans for Breakfast long before I really knew who Johnny Cash was. This song was in the soundtrack for the 2006 game Scarface: The World Is Yours, which I played endlessly on the PlayStation 2 way before I was old enough to have had my hands on a copy. In the game, I’d cruise around downtown Miami blasting Johnny Cash from my car radio, or else Waylon Jennings, Iggy Pop or Bobby Valentin while trying to rebuild Tony Montana’s cocaine empire and running down rival gangs by any means necessary.

I don’t think there are many people who didn’t play that game who know Beans for Breakfast. Certainly the album it came from, The Mystery of Life, is not one of his better remembered or regarded releases and the song doesn’t come up in any of those lists of “Best Johnny Cash Songs Ever”.

But it should be in the “honourable mentions” category at least, for sure. Maybe it doesn’t stand up alongside his work from the 1950s, but what does? There is more than an echo here, anyway, of all that made his 50s work great and all that made Cash great in the first place.

The song opens with a swaggering Luther Perkins-esque guitar which immediately takes you back in time and leads into the trademark Johnny Cash boom-chicka-boom rhythm. His voice booms in, as well, into a fantastic story full of ingenuity, wit and audacious word-choices.

This song is a short story, as all his best songs are, and it has multiple threads that are weaving together throughout to make the full scene which you can only fully appreciate once they are all tied up and you can step back and take it all in. In fact, it needs multiple threads to make it work, as it tracks the racing thoughts of someone living in a daze, and drifting from one mundane moment to the next.

In the first lines, Cash sets the scene for all that follows, “I couldn’t hear you for the TV, I didn’t know you said goodbye / I saw your cancelled check for the airfare, didn’t know flyin’ got too high”.

From then on, he’s hungrily rattling around his dirty—and ever dirtier—house, alone, with just the crows cawing outside his window for company. In his lonesome, paranoid state he sings that “I guess it’s me they’re talkin’ about” and then rambles on to a complaint about the dishing piling up before coming back to the murder of animals at his window.

“Caught a cold with the window open”, he sings. “Crow droppings o my window sill / Probably got histoplasmosis, got no gun or I would kill them crows”. I absolutely love the way he drags out the work “kill” to rhyme with “sill” here before finishing the thought but even more than that, I adore his use of the word “histoplasmosis”. That’s not a word you hear in a song very often (the closest I can think of is the Warren Zevon line “the cattle all have brucellosis” from Play It All Night Long), but it sounds as natural as the rain in Johnny Cash’s elemental voice.

And in those two lines—the one with the outlandish word choice and the one with the impressive phrasing—is the evidence of why Johnny Cash was such a genius, and one of the best at what he did. In the middle of a song that no-one would hear, recorded for an album that no-one would care about, he was still demonstrating the effortless talents of a monumental singer and songwriter.

There’s still time for a callback to the opening pun, too, and this time with the admission that if he thought things were bad at the start of this episode, they’ve only gone in one direction since then (and it isn’t ‘up’).

“Finally made it to the mailbox, felt so bad I thought I’d die / All I got was a bill from my doctor, well I guess flyin’ ain’t so high!”

Who else could make all this destruction, chaos, mess and pain sound so much fun? This song is a hoot. It’s a joy and a riot and a wild ride. I love every minute of it. Is Beans for Breakfast my favourite Johnny Cash song? Well, no, probably not, but it’s up there, because in the end, my favourite Johnny Cash song is All of Them.

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Let’s go back to Bob for the final word on Johnny Cash:

“Truly he is what the land and country is all about, the heart and soul of it personified and what it means to be here; and he said it all in plain English. I think we can have recollections of him, but we can’t define him any more than we can define a fountain of truth, light and beauty. If we want to know what it means to be mortal, we need look no further than the Man in Black. Blessed with a profound imagination, he used the gift to express all the various lost causes of the human soul. This is a miraculous and humbling thing. Listen to him, and he always brings you to your senses. He rises high above all, and he’ll never die or be forgotten, even by persons not born yet—especially those persons—and that is forever.”

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When I told my girlfriend that I was writing about this song this week, having recently seen A Complete Unknown together, she quipped that he should have sung “Bugles for Breakfast” instead.

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