The Man In Black is a convincing Cash
By Michael Witthaus
Shawn Barker walked into auditions for the rock ’n’ roll origin musical Million Dollar Quartet sporting a rockabilly haircut with his eyes on the Elvis Presley role. The show’s director had a different idea, however, and his decision pointed Barker down a new path, and a multi-decade career starring in his tribute act, The Man In Black.
“There’s a million guys that audition for doing Elvis for this play, and we can pick any of them,” Barker, in a recent phone interview, recalled being told. “There’s nobody that we can pick that would do Johnny Cash except for you. You’re the one guy that we found that was like, this is the guy.”
Once that was settled, the musical’s producers encouraged Barker to take an immersive approach for his role.
“I went to where he was buried, to his house — anything I could do to associate myself with Cash,” he said. His efforts ultimately benefited The Man In Black. “It ended up getting so popular that I never took stage with the Million Dollar Quartet; I got too busy and I had to drop out of the Broadway production.”
Barker’s show begins in the Sun Records studio where Cash cut his first songs, and continues chronologically through the ups and downs of a career that found him at one point banned from the Grand Ole Opry for kicking out stage lights in an intoxicated rage, and welcomed back a few years later to host a weekly television show from the Ryman Auditorium stage.
The Johnny Cash Show, which ran for two seasons from 1969 to 1971, was an incubator for the crossover genre of music now called Americana, and Barker takes time to focus on it during his show.
“We talk about how groundbreaking it was,” he said. “He had people like Bob Dylan, Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Linda Ronstadt … it was a very eclectic group he brought to his show. And he was doing the folk festivals and stuff like that at the time when the whole hippie movement was going on. He was a pretty diverse cat, man.”
It concludes with the series of American Recordings albums that Rick Rubin began producing in 1994. Covers of songs like Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” and “Rusty Cage” from Soundgarden helped bring Cash to a new, younger audience, driven by his music and stark, moving videos played on MTV and VH1.
“He’s one of the only stars that I can think of that had that far-reaching of a fan base,” Barker said, adding he sees evidence of this whenever he performs. “We get little kids at the show sometimes and then we’ll get the people that were there when he was at Sun Records. Eight to 80 years old is our crowd age;it’s pretty wild.”
Barker took a winding road to becoming a convincing doppelgänger for the country legend. Growing up in Missouri, he sang in the church choir and joined school band in fifth grade. When he started playing with friends in the basement, it was lots of rock music, from Skid Row and other popular groups.
After high school, he was in a working band called Nothing Yet, doing everything from early Stones to Rage Against the Machine — not exactly Pentecostal fare.
“Oh, yeah, it was a total departure,” he said. “Church was one of the things I grew up in as a kid, and probably went about as far from as you can, and then came back to as an adult.”
To hear Barker tell it, becoming Johnny Cash was bound to happen.
“My dad and his family are all from Arkansas like Cash, and grew up doing the same things,” he said. “Even as a kid, my dad worked on a cotton farm and pulled the big sacks. He’d talk about how his hands would be cut up from reaching in and popping the cotton off the plants.”
The Cash look was a gift from above, but the rest came naturally, and since launching the act in 2003, Barker’s come to see it as his destiny. Fans clearly love it. “The accent was something I already had in genetic makeup,” he said. “I didn’t really think it was going to be that long-lasting … but it turns out that this is probably what I’m going to do until I die.”
The Man In Black: A Tribute to Johnny Cash
When: Sunday, Feb. 23, 7 p.m.
Where: Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua
Tickets: $29 and up at etix.com
Featured Photo: Shawn Barker. Courtesy photo.