Cash silver jubilee spotty

by Steve Webb, The Knickerbocker News, August 18, 1980

For many, Johnny Cash basically sums up country music. His concert at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center Sunday night drew 5,632, the largest crowd for a country event at the center since Kenny Rogers played there in 1978.

The show offers many of country’s diverse genres, from the string band music of the Carter family to country gospel harmonies to rockabilly. And when the Cash voice sings the old “cowboy songs” such as “Ghost Riders in the Sky” from his latest album “Silver” or “Streets of Laredo,” there’s nothing campy or affected about the performance. He sings with authenticity and credibility, and that is probably why he reaches so many people.

The current shows are part of his 25th anniversary in the music business, combining with a fine television special last spring and his best album in years, “Silver.” The portions of the concert that came out of the “Silver” sessions, songs such as “Ghost Riders” and “Bull Rider,” went quite nicely. Cash’s eight-piece group, The ’80s Eight, was guided by strong arrangements from the album, displaying evenly textured rhythms and a strong counterpoint between the two horn players and Marty Stuart’s violin.

Frequently, however, the show didn’t hit that mark. Things didn’t always fit together, and Cash’s admirable sense of self-deprecation manifested itself in a pair of amateur moves that took every bit of publicity away from his songs.

Cash’s most well-known numbers were generally crowd-pleasers, tunes such as “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Ring of Fire” and “I Walk the Line.” The last of these was among a series of pieces Cash performed in the manner as they were recorded for Sun Records back in the mid-’50s, with stand-up bass, snare drum and two guitars. “I Still Miss Someone” and “Big River” rank as the show’s other most successful area, along with the most recent material.

June Carter Cash, Johnny’s wife for 13 years, did a number of songs with her husband and band, including three Carter family songs. The problem was they rarely worked, and the couple gelled but once in three vocal duets, on the ballad “Don’t You Ever Get Lonely.”

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