Johnny Cash's Personal Items Go Up on the Auction Block

There is a category of auction that is not about money, or not primarily. When personal possessions from the estate of a significant musician come up for sale, the transaction carries meaning beyond the winning bid. Someone is paying to own an object that was in the hands of a person who made a lasting record.

Whether that is admirable or troubling depends on your relationship to the idea of relics.

The auction

In 2010, a collection of personal items from the Johnny Cash estate came up at auction. The specific items varied by source and reporting, but the category was consistent: personal objects, stage wear, instruments, notes, ephemera from a life in music that ran from the early 1950s until Cash's death in September 2003, four months after June Carter Cash died.

Cash was seventy-one when he died. He had been recording almost continuously for fifty years. The American Recordings series, which he made with Rick Rubin beginning in 1993, had given him a second critical life and an audience that extended well beyond traditional country music. The last of those records, Unearthed, was released posthumously.

What gets auctioned

The materials that come up in estate auctions for musicians typically divide into a few categories. Instruments are at the top by value. Handwritten lyrics and notes are close behind. Stage wear — the things worn in performance, carrying the implicit authentication of being present at particular concerts — occupies its own value register.

Cash's black clothing had a particularly strong symbolic valence. The decision to perform primarily in black was deliberate and maintained across decades. The 1971 song Man in Black was a partial explanation, but the practice predated the song. The clothing in auction contexts carries the weight of that sustained choice.

Personal objects are harder to value. A letter, a journal entry, a photograph album, a domestic object from the house in Hendersonville, Tennessee: these have a different kind of meaning from an instrument. They are closer to private life, which makes them more intimate and, for some buyers, more desirable on those grounds.

The questions auctions raise

The dispersal of a musician's possessions through a sale room is a routine event and also a complicated one. The estate has typically decided that the items should move into private or institutional hands. The bidders have decided that possession of the object gives them something.

What that something is remains a matter of interpretation. Ownership of the guitar Cash played at Folsom Prison does not give the owner the experience of having been at Folsom Prison in 1968. It gives the owner the guitar. Whether that is a meaningful distinction depends on how you think about objects and their histories.

Museum acquisition is the alternative most easily theorized: the object goes into a public collection, is preserved and contextualised, and is accessible to researchers and visitors. Private acquisition is less theorizable. The object goes into a home or a storage facility. Its accessibility ends.

Cash's material legacy

Cash left behind a large and documented musical legacy: recordings, films, television appearances, a substantial body of written material. The objects from his personal life are a supplement to that record, not a substitute for it.

The most significant part of Cash's estate is the recordings. The American Recordings series is available and documented. The Sun Records era is documented and extensively analyzed. The Columbia period is documented. There is no shortage of primary material from which to understand what Cash was doing and why it continues to matter.

The auction objects are interesting as material culture. The music is interesting as music.

For more on the artists covered at this site: Artists index. For related country and roots coverage: Bruce Springsteen Goes Twang and the Guides section.