My Favorite Song Analysis

When thinking of my favorite song many things come to mind, things like how it makes me feel and the ways it connects with my own experiences and opinions. A favorite song is something very personal and is usually very important to the individual and can do many things from bring a tear to your eye to making you want to dance. When I think of these things I have one particular song that comes to mind, the song that I am of course referring to is Country Trash by Johnny Cash (1973) from his album Any Old Wind That Blows.
I first heard this song a few Hanukkahs ago when my dad as a present bought me a record player and a few vinyl albums, my favorite of these being Any Old Wind That Blows. I sat listing to the record for a time until I got to this song, after hearing this song the first time I proceeded to play it repeatedly for longer than I care to admit. There was just something about this song that immediately connected with me and my upbringing.

There are a number of things that make this song so special to me, partly because I had grown up surrounded by music, specifically country and bluegrass.

The most meaningful thing for me in this are the lyrics, they are a reflection of the hardworking way of life that I had been brought up in. In the song Johnny Cash sings about the pleasures to be found in the seemingly tedious hard work, even at the end when it becomes apparent that he is no longer being rewarded with the fruits of his labor he still continues to have an overall positive tone. This reflects the attitude of country life by showing that while it can be going well you are never truly free from

hardship.
Hearing this song brings back many memories of my life back home with my friends and family, whether that be spending my summer afternoons splitting wood or working the garden with my grandparents. I can still picture my dad and I sitting on our porch as he would laugh with a beer in one hand and a Marlboro red in the other, as I sat listening to the stories he would tell. He would sit and tell me about many things, ranging anywhere from the hell he would raise before he became a law enforcement officer to his own upbringing, all the while country songs would play in the background. Funny enough when he heard this song and told me of how it was about us and our way of life. “You know that’s ‘bout us right? Were country trash think bout it, we live in the sticks, we work for what we got, compared to folk everywhere else were country trash.”
Hearing this song brings back so many feelings and memories that had felt far away and forgotten, my hope for others who hear this song is that they will be able to understand a different way of life. Whether or not it has any kind of effect on others who hear it is unknown, but I am sure that it will at least give them exposure to my own upbringing and hopefully in some way allow them to make a connection to its lyrics and theme with their own life.