A country star paid for a full-page ad in Billboard to call radio programmers spineless. That star was Johnny Cash, and the fight was over a song about a Native American war hero that stations refused to play. On October 26, 1964, Columbia Records released Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian, Cash's twelfth studio album. The record was a concept piece about the history and struggles of Indigenous peoples in the United States, and it landed like a challenge.
Cherokee ancestry and a risky subject
Cash believed he had Cherokee ancestry, and that partly drove him to make the album. The songs described cruel and unjust treatment of Native Americans by European settlers, with two tracks focused on the Seneca and Pima nations in the twentieth century. This was not a safe subject for a country singer in 1964, and the album blended country and folk to carry its weight.
The first single, The Ballad of Ira Hayes, came out on June 2, 1964, and focused on the twentieth-century struggles of the Pima people. At first the song climbed fast, but after seven weeks it stalled in the middle of the second ten. Some stations and fans rejected the album outright because of its controversial content.
A full-page ad in Billboard
Cash did not let the silence pass. In the Billboard issue of August 22, 1964, he bought a full-page ad and called out certain DJs and program directors as gutless for refusing to play the song about Ira Hayes. He asked what they were afraid of, and left the question hanging. Then he put his money behind the fight, buying and mailing more than 1000 copies of the single to radio stations across America.
The pressure worked. By September 19, 1964, The Ballad of Ira Hayes had climbed to number three on the Billboard country singles chart. The album itself rose to number two on the Country Albums list and reached 47 on the pop chart. A country star had dragged a hard truth into the mainstream, and the industry had been forced to listen.
Most of the songs were written by Peter La Farge, including As Long as the Grass Shall Grow, Custer, Drums and White Girl. Cash wrote Apache Tears himself. The record was released as an LP. The album ran just over half an hour, a compact statement that kept its focus tight.
The album never became an easy classic. For years it sat in the shadow of Cash's prison records and gospel projects. But in 2010, Western Writers of America placed The Ballad of Ira Hayes on its list of the hundred greatest Western songs of all time. The song had outlasted the radio programmers who once refused to touch it. Interest in the album rose again after Antonino D'Ambrosio published his 2011 book A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears. D'Ambrosio later served as executive producer of a tribute record, Look Again to the Wind: Johnny Cash's Bitter Tears Revisited, which appeared on Sony Masterworks in 2014. The project brought in Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, Emmylou Harris, Bill Miller, Kris Kristofferson, Steve Earle, Rhiannon Giddens and others.
Bitter Tears remains one of Cash's americana releases, a country and folk record built around a moral argument. Sixty-two years after its release, the image that stays is not the chart position but the ad: a man in black buying space in a trade magazine to ask an industry what it was afraid of. The tribute album included a song called Look Again to the Wind, performed by Bill Miller, which had not been on the original record. Rhiannon Giddens added her own words to The Vanishing Race for the tribute. A documentary, We're Still Here: Johnny Cash's Bitter Tears Revisited, first aired on PBS on February 1, 2016, and a repeat showing was planned for November of that year.