What most obituaries failed to note after the passing this year of Johnny Cash and June Carter was the huge debt working-class culture owed this country music duo. The fact that there were few, if any, memorials from this side of the political spectrum speaks volumes about how disconnected the left has become from its own roots.

Those roots are often the butt of jokes about redneck hurtin’ music, but a social justice tradition runs deep beneath the mainstream plastic produced by Shania Twain and her ilk. Indeed, in a wonderful illustration of the idea that the circle will be unbroken, country music evolved from the front porch “folk” music of the dirt-poor Appalachians, which had been transplanted from the ballads and tunes of Europe and sometimes Africa. These songs in time influenced folk artists such as Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, who in turn inspired a newer generation of country artists.

Many of us involved in social justice help ourselves to hefty helpings of Phil Ochs and ani defranco, and so tend to forget the albums of singers like Faith Hill or Pam Tillis, who sing very political songs about feminism, dead-end jobs, and the struggles of the working poor. Check out Iris Dement’s “The Way I Am” and you will hear a true country voice singing about an empire “gloating in our greatness in the wasteland of the free,” bemoaning the waste of humanity represented by the Vietnam memorial, and taking on sexual abusers.

The current generation of outspoken singers owes a great deal to Cash and Carter, who trailblazed their way through the 1960s and 1970s, unafraid to take on the issues of the day in a plainly moral fashion. While many teenagers were bopping to the Beatles in 1964, Cash put out an album of songs called “Bitter Tears, Ballads of the American Indian.” When some country stations refused to play tunes from the album, Cash called them “gutless,” putting his own career on the line by taking out a full page ad to challenge them.

Cash owed his life to June Carter, a multi-talented singer, songwriter, musician, and actor who began performing at age 6 with the legendary Carter family, whose tunes about keeping on the sunny side of life during the deepest parts of the Depression inspired a generation first getting used to the idea of radio.

It was Carter who helped Cash kick his drug habit, who inspired Cash to continually go to the roots of the musical tradition he celebrated. Indeed, the centrepiece of a Johnny Cash show was the part when the Carter Family came on, singing a range of gospel, country and pop tunes, and fronting June as comedienne extraordinaire.

Cash and Carter, a singing duo, a married couple for 35 years, and a social phenomenon, were almost larger-than-life figures who nevertheless maintained a humility that allowed them to connect with the beaten down, the prisoners, the drug addicts, the folks on the factory floor – all the people that Cash sung about to explain why he would continue wearing black.

Indeed, The Man in Black celebrated both the people who do the sweat work in our society as well as the resisters who, whatever the odds, will try, like the prisoner in one Cash cellblock song (“The Wall”), to climb a wall no one’s ever scaled before.

Cash’s songs are not only about the folks who get kicked around; they are also about the folks who kick back in whatever way they can against a dehumanizing, vicious economic system. One can think of the guy who built his dream car over a twenty year period by sneaking car parts out of the factory, one piece at a time. Or the family who would get together and sing to help their troubled souls, in “Daddy Sang Bass.” Or the guy who, after 30 years of back-breaking labour on the factory floor, will not go into retirement too quietly, for his final act on his last day of work is to square accounts with the jerk of a foreman who’s busted his behind for years.