Walk the Line
It sings a person's spirit rather than imitating them note for note. A film that rebuilds Johnny Cash's songs in the actors' own voices.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
The people behind it ⏳🌊
- ComposerJohnny Cash
The original artist who wrote and sang most of the songs in the film, he personally asked for it to be made during his lifetime.
- ProductionT Bone Burnett
As music director and soundtrack producer, he led the approach of having the actors sing for themselves and won a Grammy for it.
- DirectorJames Mangold
He co-wrote the screenplay with Gill Dennis and directed the film, weaving the story within the frame of the Folsom concert.
- ScreenplayGill Dennis
Wrote the screenplay with Mangold, drawing on Cash's two autobiographies.
- StarringJoaquin Phoenix
As Johnny Cash, he sang every Cash song in the film and on the soundtrack himself.
- StarringReese Witherspoon
As June Carter, she learned to sing and play the autoharp, and won the Academy Award for Best Actress.
I. The principle of singing for themselves
(Origins) “Walk the Line” draws on Johnny Cash's two autobiographies, “Man in Black” and “Cash: The Autobiography.” James Mangold directed and wrote the screenplay with Gill Dennis. It began in the mid-1990s, when Cash asked the producer James Keach to make a film of his life. In 1999 Mangold and the producer Cathy Konrad visited Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash to talk it over. In 2003, before they died, the couple agreed to the casting of Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon. (Music director) The music director, responsible for all of the film's music, was T Bone Burnett. In the 1970s he played guitar on Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue tour. He later made his name as a producer who brings old American songs back to life in a present-day sound. The music of “Inside Llewyn Davis,” covered earlier in this series, also passed through his hands. The principle he set for this film was simple: the actors would sing for themselves. (Training) Phoenix had reportedly never sung seriously before this film. He worked with a vocal coach to lower his voice and learned Cash's guitar playing from scratch. Witherspoon studied June Carter's footage and records. She recalled that the autoharp June loved to play was harder than the singing. (Recording) The songs were recorded in the studio before shooting began. On set the actors performed to those recordings, using the prerecording (playback) method. The accompaniment came from players such as the drummer Jim Keltner and the guitarists Bill Frisell and Marc Ribot. The filmmakers are said to have worked to capture the spirit of the originals rather than copy them note for note. (Structure) So in this film, rather than a separately composed score, the center is held by songs that the characters actually sing and play on screen. Such songs are called music within the frame (diegetic music). The song becomes the scene.
II. The radio in the cotton fields
(Frame) The film opens in 1968 at Folsom State Prison in California. Beyond the wall the band repeats the same rhythm as it waits for its star, while the inmates in the audience stamp their feet in time. Backstage, Cash stares long at a saw blade in the prison workshop. Following his gaze, the film travels back into the past. It is a frame structure, a border drawn around the outside of the story. That frame closes again late in the film. (Childhood) In the 1940s, on a cotton farm in Dyess, Arkansas, the boy J. R. grows up alongside his older brother Jack. What holds the brothers at the end of a grueling day is the radio. Mingled in the Carter Family songs that pour from it is the voice of the young June Carter. The boy memorizes the songs and sings along. This is how he first meets, through sound, the person who will one day change his life. (Loss) When Jack dies in an accident at work, a deep shadow falls over the household. Their father, Ray, turns cold toward the son who survived. The wound lingers throughout the film like a low drone beneath Cash's songs. Here the film does not put a song in front. The hymns the brothers sang together, the sound of the radio, and the silence after they are cut off speak the grief instead. It is here, too, that we learn why the saw blade he stared at in the opening weighs on him. (West Germany) As a young man, Cash joins the Air Force and is posted to West Germany. In a barracks in a foreign country he gets hold of a guitar, finds chords on his own, and starts writing songs. The scene is brief, but it lets us guess the loneliness the later songs came from. His way of telling dark stories calmly in a low voice begins to take shape around this time.
A song that stands for the Carter Family world the boy Cash heard on the radio. On the soundtrack Witherspoon sings it as June Carter.
- An old folk song that the Carter Family recorded in 1928 and made widely known. It is famous for the guitar playing of June Carter's mother, Maybelle Carter.
- Maybelle picked out the melody on the low strings with her thumb while brushing chords with her other fingers, playing the accompaniment at the same time. This technique, known as the Carter scratch, became a foundation of country guitar.
- To play June, Witherspoon learned the autoharp that June loved to play. This song shows the musical family June grew up in.
- It brings back the sound the young Cash longed for in the grown June's voice, so it plays like an omen of the bond between them.
III. The door of Sun Records
(Memphis) Discharged from the service, Cash marries Vivian, settles in Memphis, and scrapes by as a door-to-door salesman. The money is thin and the tension at home grows. He forms a band with two men who work as mechanics and knocks on the door of Sun Records. (Audition) This is the scene people talk about most. Cash sings a hymn, and the producer Sam Phillips cuts him off midway. Then he presses him: not a song everybody sings, but something you have truly lived and felt. Cash hesitates, then brings out “Folsom Prison Blues,” a song he wrote in his Army days. It is the moment a man who sang borrowed songs first finds his own voice. (Rhythm) This is where we first truly hear the backbone of Cash's music, the boom-chicka-boom rhythm. The bass lands a thump on the beat, and the electric guitar answers with a chick, a short sound cut off by the palm pressing the strings. This spare accompaniment, like the clatter of train wheels, was the best a band of limited skill could manage. And yet that very spareness became a signature. (Tour) When his first single, “Cry! Cry! Cry!,” gets onto the radio, Cash sets out on tour. Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis share the bill. Tyler Hilton as Elvis and Waylon Payne as Jerry Lee Lewis also did their own singing. On this tour Cash meets June Carter, the owner of the voice from the radio. (Vow) Around then Cash writes “I Walk the Line,” a song vowing not to cross the line even when he is far from home. The film does not explain the irony that this vow arrives just as his heart begins to waver; it leaves that to the song. The original's modulation (key change), shifting key with every verse, sounds like a man renewing his promise again and again.
The song Cash brought out when Sam Phillips pressed him, at the Sun Records audition, to sing a song that was truly his. Folsom Prison, which links the film's beginning and end, is first named here.
- A first-person song in which a man locked in prison hears a distant train and longs for the world outside. Cash wrote it during his military service.
- Listen closely for the boom-chicka-boom rhythm, the bass's thump alternating with the guitar's short chick. This accompaniment, like rolling train wheels, overlaps with the train in the song.
- The audition scene, in which a cut-off hymn gives way to this song, is staged as the moment of crossing from another's voice to his own.
- The melody's close resemblance to Gordon Jenkins's 1953 song “Crescent City Blues” later led to a legal dispute. The matter was settled in the early 1970s.
A song in which a man wandering far from home vows to hold the line to the end. That it arrives just as his heart begins to waver is the film's irony.
- The original, released on Sun Records in 1956, gave Cash his first No. 1 on the country chart. The film's title also comes from this song.
- The original modulates again and again, changing key (key change) with every verse. Cash slipped a brief hum between verses to find the new pitch. Thanks to that, he sounds like a man renewing the same vow over and over.
- Unlike the lyrics, which sing of a resolve, the accompaniment rolls ceaselessly forward. It feels like the rhythm of a touring life that never stops.
- Phoenix sang it in a voice pulled lower than his own. It sounds less like an exact imitation of Cash's deep bass than an effort to carry its weight.
IV. Hearts exchanged in song
(Duet) Onstage, June is witty and seasoned. Having performed in a family group since childhood, she knows how to handle a crowd. The more Cash is drawn to her, the more the songs they sing together carry the feelings neither can say aloud. Bob Dylan's “It Ain't Me Babe” is a song that pushes someone away. Yet when the two trade lines, the rejection sounds instead like a signal of attraction. The choice is all the more intriguing when you recall that Burnett once shared a stage with Dylan. (Distance) June does not come easily. She cares for Cash, but she also sees what he leans on to get through a show. The distance between them narrows in the songs onstage and widens again off it. The film draws this push and pull less through dialogue than through the musical scenes and the silences between songs. (Fall) The bigger his success grows, the further he falls apart. Cash, who has been getting through the exhaustion of touring on pills, can no longer control himself even onstage. He is arrested at the border and collapses mid-performance. The moments when the song breaks off tell the depth of the fall. His marriage, too, heads toward its end. (Flames) “Ring of Fire” is a song June Carter wrote with Merle Kilgore. It likens falling in love to falling into a burning ring. Sung in Cash's voice, a song written by June becomes a confession only the two of them understand. The film lays the song over the feelings June cannot bring herself to speak. Because love is drawn here not as comfort but as a searing pain, it is the song that captures most precisely where the two of them stand at this point.
The Bob Dylan song Cash and June sing together onstage. A song of pushing away becomes, between the two of them, a signal of attraction.
- Bob Dylan released the original in 1964. Cash and June Carter soon recorded it as a duet and made it part of their repertoire.
- A song of refusal, saying I am not the one you are looking for. When a man and a woman trade it line by line, the words of rejection turn into playful push and pull.
- One of the two songs Phoenix and Witherspoon sing together on the soundtrack. The other is “Jackson.” Heard back to back, the two songs let you compare how their rapport ripens.
- The music director Burnett played in Dylan's touring band in the 1970s. So in this passage, with a Dylan song in it, his own personal connection is layered in as well.
Cash sings a song June Carter wrote with Merle Kilgore. The film lays it over everything June has been unable to say.
- A song that likens falling in love to tumbling into a ring of fire. Rather than sweet love, it sings of love as a burning pain.
- Cash's original 1963 recording features trumpets that ring out like Mexican mariachi music. Cash recalled that the arrangement came to him in a dream, and the contrast between that bright brass and the heavy lyrics became the song's signature.
- The first to record the song, before Cash, was June's sister Anita Carter. It was first sung within the Carter family itself.
- Knowing that June wrote it, you hear Cash's performance as though he were reading her confession aloud on her behalf.
V. Back to Folsom
(Recovery) When Cash hits bottom, it is June and her family who stay by his side. In a lakeside house outside Nashville he endures the agony of purging the drugs from his body and slowly recovers. The film portrays this period not with dazzling stages but with quiet scenes inside the house. Where the songs fall silent, he faces, for the first time, the man he is off the stage. (Stubbornness) Back on his feet, Cash insists on recording a prison concert. The people at the record label object that it doesn't fit his family-friendly image. Still, he won't back down. To him a prison is not a place to dispense pity but a place where the audience will listen to his songs most honestly. The song Sam Phillips demanded on audition day — one he had truly lived and felt — he now means to sing before the roughest audience of all. (Return) The film comes back to its opening scene: Folsom Prison, 1968. The rhythm that repeated beyond the wall in the opening, like a kind of waiting, this time carries through to the end. As Cash takes the stage and tears into “Cocaine Blues,” the inmates' roar tangles with the song and the guards grow tense. This passage is often named the most powerful musical scene in the film. (Closure) The scene draws its force from the closing of the frame. The rhythm that was waiting at the start becomes, here, the rhythm of return. The same place and the same beat take on different meanings at the film's beginning and its end. The album of the actual concert, At Folsom Prison, endures as the record that revived Cash's career.
The song Cash tears into on the Folsom Prison stage in 1968. The rhythm that was waiting in the opening turns here into a roar of return.
- A rough, breakneck song about a man who, high on drugs, commits a crime and ends up locked in prison. That it is sung before people in that very prison is what charges the scene with tension.
- A song written by T. J. Arnall in the 1940s. Included on Cash's live album At Folsom Prison, it became one of his signature numbers.
- The inmates' shouts and stamping feet blend into the song as if part of the accompaniment. It is a scene that turns even the sound of the audience into music.
- Critics often name it the best musical scene in the film. It is the moment when an actor who had only just learned to sing makes a star's comeback convincing in a single performance.
VI. Jackson, and the song that stopped
(Stage) The last big scene also unfolds on a stage. Cash and June sing “Jackson” together. In this song of a squabbling couple shouting at each other, all the rapport the two have built over long years onstage comes through intact. That they can sing a quarrel with such joy says everything about their relationship. (Question) In the middle of the song, Cash stops playing and asks June something. The audience knows he has asked the same question many times before. This time it is onstage, with thousands watching. What the answer is will not be written here. But what the music does in this scene is clear. The moment the song stops is the climax of the story. In that silence, the crowd in the hall and the audience in the theater both hold their breath. (Afterglow) The film does not linger over what comes after. A single short scene and a few captions stand in for the years that remain. The life the two lead after leaving the stage is left off the screen. (Legacy) The film was a major hit, earning more than any music biopic of its time. That record was surpassed in 2015 by Straight Outta Compton, also covered in this series. Witherspoon won the Academy Award for Best Actress, and the soundtrack won a Grammy. La Vie en rose, from around the same time, chose to have its actor lip-sync to the actual recordings. This film chose instead to summon the spirit of the originals through the actors' own voices. Set the two films side by side and the choice stands out all the more clearly.
The song the two sing together on the last big stage. Where the song stops becomes the climax of the story.
- Written by Billy Edd Wheeler and Jerry Leiber. Cash and June Carter recorded it together in 1967, and it won a Grammy the following year.
- A song in which a quarreling couple each boast they're heading off to a town called Jackson. Its form, with the man and the woman taking turns at bravado, lays the pair's onstage chemistry bare.
- In the film the song does not run to the end but stops partway. Watch what comes after that pause and you'll see why the film placed this song last.
- It is worth hearing alongside the earlier duet “It Ain't Me Babe.” The move from a song of rejection to a song of a bickering married couple traces the change in the two's relationship.
Lesser-known stories
The film's first seed was planted, unexpectedly, by the television western Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. In 1993 Johnny Cash and June Carter appeared in an episode of the series, where they met its star Jane Seymour and producer James Keach. That connection led Keach and Seymour to begin interviewing the Cashes. This starting point remains relatively little known. The melody of “Folsom Prison Blues” closely resembles “Crescent City Blues,” which Gordon Jenkins released in 1953. After Cash's song became widely known again through At Folsom Prison, Jenkins's side raised the issue, and the matter was settled out of court in the early 1970s. The film's audition scene presents the song as a pure personal confession, but the way it came into being was more complicated. Among the musicians who played on the soundtrack were Bill Frisell and Marc Ribot, both guitarists who made their names in jazz and experimental music. Players like these were tasked with re-creating the bare-bones playing of Cash's original guitarist, Luther Perkins. It is a detail preserved more in recording-trade articles than in album liner notes. Only 16 tracks appear on the album, but the film used some 30 more songs, among them Bob Dylan's “Highway 61 Revisited.” The enhanced CD included scenes cut from the release, such as Phoenix singing “Rock 'n' Roll Ruby,” and the DVD offered an extended cut running 17 minutes longer. Viewers who saw only the theatrical version know almost none of these songs.
Glossary 📚🔎
Music director
(In film and musical-theater music) The person responsible for a film's music from start to finish. They choose which songs to use, assemble the musicians, and guide the actors' vocal training and recording. On Walk the Line, T Bone Burnett took on the job of getting the actors to sing for themselves. Think of a class choir at a school festival: the teacher in charge who picks the songs, finds an accompanist, and divides up and rehearses the students' parts is the music director. (Elsewhere) At broadcasters and concert venues, the term can also refer to the post overseeing the music for an entire event.
Music within the frame (diegetic music)
(Meaning) Diegetic comes from the Greek diegesis, meaning 'narrative.' It means sound that actually exists within the world of the story. (In film and musical-theater music) Music the characters themselves can hear. Songs performed on a stage and tunes playing from a radio belong here. Background music that only the audience hears, and the characters do not, is called non-diegetic music. Nearly all the songs in Walk the Line are music within the frame. In video-game terms, the song playing in a shop your character walks into is music within the frame, while the background music that kicks in when a battle starts is music only the player hears.
Advance recording (prerecording)
(In film and musical-theater music) The practice of recording songs in a studio before filming. On set, the recording is played back and the actor moves their lips in time with it while performing. The advantage is that the sound stays identical however many times a scene is reshot. It is much like a school talent-show dance where a preselected music file is played and the dancers move to it. In film, though, the actors record that music themselves.
Boom-chicka-boom rhythm
(Meaning) A name that imitates a sound, transcribing the alternating boom of the bass and chicka of the guitar. (In film and musical-theater music) The accompanying rhythm that underpins Johnny Cash's music. The bass marks the beat heavily, and the electric guitar answers with a short, dry sound made by lightly muting the strings with the palm. Because it resembles the clackety-clack of train wheels crossing the rail joints, it is also called the train rhythm. Picture jumping rope: the slap of the rope on the ground and the thud of your feet alternating at a steady pace.
Modulation (key change)
(Meaning) Jeonjo (轉調) ('turning the key') means to roll, that is, to shift (轉), the key (調). (In film and musical-theater music) Shifting the reference point of pitch — the key — somewhere else partway through a song. Even the same melody can sound fresh or more urgent when the key changes. The original “I Walk the Line” changes key with every verse. At karaoke, if you raise the key a step for just the final chorus, it suddenly sounds more exciting — that, too, is modulation. (Elsewhere) In everyday speech, people more often say 'changing the key' than use the formal term.
Autoharp
(Meaning) The English word autoharp combines auto, meaning 'by itself,' with harp. It means a harp that sounds chords on its own, without your fingers having to stop each note of the chord. (In film and musical-theater music) A string instrument played held on the lap or against the chest. Pressing one of the buttons mounted over the strings mutes every string that doesn't fit that chord, so simply strumming across the strings rings out the chord. The Carter family's fondness for it made it the defining sound of old-time American country music, and Witherspoon learned the instrument from scratch to play June Carter. It works on much the same principle as a keyboard feature that produces an accompaniment at the touch of a single chord button.
Frame narrative
(Meaning) Aekja guseong ('frame composition'): just as a frame surrounds a picture, an outer story encloses an inner one. (In film and musical-theater music) A method in which a film opens on a certain scene, goes back into the past to tell a long story, then returns to the opening scene to close. Walk the Line uses the Folsom Prison concert as its outer frame. The rhythm that sounded like waiting at the start carries through to the end at the finish, and the frame closes. It is like a grandmother who begins by offering to tell an old tale and, when the story ends, returns you to the room in the present.