Johnny Cash – Chicken in Black Review

Writing up a falsified autobiographical piece that both reflects on a well-marked career and sees Johnny Cash’s brain replaced with that of a bank robber and a chicken, is fascinating. Chicken in Black should not work. It comes from a period when Cash’s music was getting fewer and fewer plays. This novelty track that concedes Cash’s brain may as well be better suited to sticking a chicken on at The Osprey is not going to storm through and rekindle his career, it is going to make him likeable, though. There is a fundamental charm to Chicken in Black that possesses the tongue-in-cheek style Cash’s music could bring forward.

It is a shame it was buried, then, because Chicken in Black is sincerely very good. Articulations of that come in stuttered shock, but Cash manages to make a track where his brain is swapped into that of a chicken, interesting. Much of that is down to the wordplay, how his narrative arc fits not just into the song structure, but how much of that story is reliant on its chorus. An infectious earworm of a track that gives Cash a chance to do the voice of an old lady, reflecting the afterglow of his career as he begins to realise that the only people listening to his music at the time were infatuated older ladies. What a place to have a career, and while this is not a fight back against audience perspective, Chicken in Black is one of many knocks at his record label at the time, Columbia.

Even then, the track Cash described as “intentionally atrocious” is quite good. It just goes to show the quality Cash held as a musician that, when trying to write a track that would damage his image, he became all the better for it. Gary Gentry’s writing cannot go unsung, making the case of a man outliving his brain a viable styling for a track that just missed out on a Top 40 spot. B-Side Battle of Nashville is an equally good track for vastly different reasons. Its ballads of war are quite the change of pace to a superhero bank robber singing about “what you see ain’t necessarily me,” either a complete breakdown from his image or a realisation that his change of pace was a chance to carve out a new style to that of the Man in Black, which is referenced within.

Chicken in Black is hard to dislike, perhaps because of its novelty more than anything else. It feels such a left-of-field song for an artist with great tracks that Cash manages to come full circle, he embeds some quality into a piece that should have been a forgotten track of nondescript brainless fun that poked a lot of hate toward his record label. Even when trying to write a bad song, Cash fails and gives a fundamentally well-worked piece that holds within it those gifted, unique playing styles. That acoustic guitar underlining all of this throughout is the very foundation that gives Cash the chance to portray bank robber The Manhattan Flash, wandering the streets in a 1960s vignette-style story. “You don’t pay tax on money you steal,” you don’t get rent from Chicken in Black being free in the mind, either.