The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Citizen Cash: The Political Life and Times of Johnny Cash by Michael Stewart Foley

Episode Date: January 13, 2022

Citizen Cash: The Political Life and Times of Johnny Cash by Michael Stewart Foley A leading historian argues that Johnny Cash was the most important political artist of his time Johnny Cash was an American icon, known for his level, bass-baritone voice and somber demeanor, and for huge hits like “Ring of Fire” and “I Walk the Line.” But he was also the most prominent political artist in the United States, even if he wasn’t recognized for it in his own lifetime, or since his death in 2003. Then and now, people have misread Cash’s politics, usually accepting the idea of him as a “walking contradiction.” Cash didn’t fit into easy political categories—liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, hawk or dove. Like most people, Cash’s politics were remarkably consistent in that they were based not on ideology or scripts but on empathy—emotion, instinct, and identification. Drawing on untapped archives and new research on social movements and grassroots activism, Citizen Cash offers a major reassessment of a legendary figure.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you oh my gosh be sure to watch the last week's coverage. Oh, my God.

Of CES show 2022. It was a crazy time. It was a lot of fun. It was a great show. And we interviewed a ton of boosts. I think it was about 20 or 30 videos to take and watch. Go over and watch some of that content on youtube.com, Fortress Chris Voss, as well as this video.

And also go to goodreads.com, 4Chess Chris Voss. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there, including my books. All of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all those places the crazy kids are playing these days. And today, as always, it's just amazing. We always have these brilliant authors on the show that have put in tens of hundreds of thousands of hours. I was going to say hundreds of thousands of hours because it seems like that in editing. Hundreds of thousands of hours into the research in their books, and they bring it to us and give it to you in about 30 minutes to an hour.

And then, of course, you go order their books and everything else. So we've got an amazing author on the show. He's written his newest book. December 7th, 2021 just came out. Citizen Cash, The Political Life and Times of Johnny Cash. Michael Stewart Foley is on the show with us today. And he's going to be talking about this amazing book and what he put into it and what he found. He is a historian of American political culture.

He is the author or editor of seven other books, including the prize-winning Confronting the War Machine, Draft Resistance During the Vietnam War, Front Porch Politics, The Forgotten Hay Day of American Activism in the 1970s and 80s, and 33, one-third book on punk band Dead Kennedy's political masterpiece, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. He's also served as a historical advisor on a number of films and television shows, including Mad Men, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, the Boston Sunday Globe, and the Daily Beast, among other news outlets. He is a professor of American civilization. American civilization, is it an oxymoron?

I don't know. At this point. At Université Grenoble Alpes in France. That was my best French impression. Welcome to the show, Michael. How are you? Thanks very much. I'm good.

Thanks. That was a good job on the French pronunciation. Thank you. Thank you. Maybe they'll hate me less once I show up. I hear that. They're not into America too much. So anyway, welcome to the show.

Congratulations on the new book. Give us your plugs, your dot coms. Tell us where people are going to order this baby on the internet. I have a website. It's michaelstuartfoley.com and I'm on Twitter and Instagram at Foley Effect. I'm on Facebook also under my name, Michael Stuart Foley. And you can order the book pretty much everywhere. Any independent bookstore, all the online vendors. We're at basicbooks.com, which is the publisher in New York. There you go. And what motivated you to write this book about Johnny Cash? Who was this guy? Was he the American icon that I know of, or who was he? Yeah, he was the American icon,

but he was also much more than that. And that's what first got me interested in writing about him as a political figure was that years ago, in fact, when he was still alive, they came out with an old archival concert from Madison Square Garden in 1969. And in the middle of that show, he starts talking about the Vietnam War from the stage. This was in December of 1969. And I had been a Johnny Cash fan for a long time. And I thought, I didn't know that he was even interested in talking about those kinds of things to his audience. So that's what started it. Like almost 18 years ago, I think when I first started thinking about it, it was a side project. I thought I'd write an article, which I finally did. And then that kind of got some attention.

And I thought maybe somebody ought to write a book about this guy as a political artist. So that's what I did. Cool. Give us an overall arcing of the book, if you would, please. The basic idea, like I say, is that most Cash fans, most folks who know of Johnny Cash don't think of him as a political artist. They don't think of him like as Pete Seeger or Joan Baez or something. And if they do, a lot of people claim him as they see themselves as Democrats or Republicans or liberals or conservatives. And the point of the book is to show that, in fact, he was a deeply political artist, perhaps the most political artist of his age, and that I did all this research on his life in the context of the

times in which he becomes the icon that he becomes, primarily to show how he evolved over time and how he engaged with all these different political issues, and not through a kind of politics of ideology or political party, but through what I call a politics of empathy through his own personal experiences. Now, how did this shape him? Imagine his life or his interest in politics or speaking out about things were shaped from his life experience. I know he went through a lot of challenges growing up. Do you want to touch on those for those who aren't familiar with Johnny Cash? Sure. If you're only familiar with him from

the Joaquin Phoenix film, Walk the Line or something, you get a kind of snapshot of that image of his upbringing in Depression-era Arkansas. He grew up in pretty severe poverty, but he also grew up as the beneficiary of a government program that was established by the Roosevelt administration that resettled poor landless farmers and loaned them land and equipment and livestock so that they could eventually become independent landowning farmers themselves. So through that experience, which was impoverished on the one hand, but also was not nearly as bad as a lot of people that he saw around him who were sharecroppers, who were really destitute and cast off of the farms on which they worked,

including right in neighboring communities. He witnessed a lot of very difficult circumstances, much more difficult than even his own. And it's clear from his art, from the music that he makes over many years, how deeply that informed him and his adult persona. And I imagine that definitely shaped him in his empathy. Absolutely. He had a sense that, and it wasn't only in terms of working class or poor people, right? It was in terms of all kinds of different people whom he related to primarily through

his own experience. He didn't have a formal political education. He didn't have a formal education beyond high school, but he was a very smart guy. And he was an autodidact who read a lot on his own and who was an intensely passionate researcher. So that by the time we get to the early 60s and he's moved from Sun Records to Columbia Records, he started to do a lot of these concept albums, which were mostly based on his own deep research on particular subjects. And that, as I talk about in the book, was a function of his empathy. It was a way that he related to people. Sometimes they were people who were a lot like himself, who he saw as being a lot like himself, but sometimes there were people who weren't like him, but who he made the effort, an earnest effort to understand and walk in their shoes

before he produced a song or an album about them. And what do you, when you talk about him being one of the most important political artists of his time, can you explain what made him so unique? Yeah, I think the key thing, there's a couple of key things, right? Because obviously in the period of the 1960s, which we associate with political tumult and political polarization over a variety of issues, right? Over the civil rights movement, over the Vietnam War, over law and order, a series of concept albums that are fundamentally political pieces of work. So that's part of it. And it's not as though he was waving a banner, like a We Shall Overcome banner or something like that we associate with the images of marches the way that some folk singers were. But he was earnestly engaged with political issues throughout that period and evolved in his confidence to speak out on them. And then what ends up happening is that he does those two prison albums at the end of the 60s at Folsom Prison and at San Quentin. And that gets him a television show on ABC,

a weekly television show, a variety show, in which he uses the weekly appearance as a kind of platform to engage with political issues. Not every single week, but most weeks. He has something to say about topical issues that are confronting the country. And he does it in a way that's not, as I say, ideological or ham-fisted. He does it in a way where it's relatable and relatable for the audience, both the live audience that was

watching the show and the millions of people watching it. And how important was that show to what he was trying to do? It was enormously important. He used it very, very deliberately to speak to these particular issues about class and poverty, right? To speak about Native American rights, to speak about race, to speak about warfare and the Vietnam War in particular. To speak about his faith, right? And the way that his faith informed his political views. So in each show, he had these different moments, like the show is a variety show, like a lot of variety shows at the time, but he used certain segments, sometimes monologue that he had at the end of the show, where he would talk about something that was on his mind. Frequently, he used this segment that was called Ride This Train, which was named

for an earlier album that he had done, where he took viewers on a train ride to some place in American history or to experience the ways of life of some other Americans. It could have been Native Americans or prisoners or truck drivers or coal miners. And often in those segments, he would have something to say as well about the political importance of this subject. And he would editorialize, not bluntly or not often hitting people over the head with a political message. He didn't have to do any of that. There were lots of variety shows on television, including country music stars like Glen Campbell, and they weren't doing

stuff like that. Cash was the one who was a pioneer. So was he aware that sometimes when you push people too hard or you shove something in their face too hard, it moves them away? Or if you challenge people's belief systems too hard. And sometimes you need to be more subtle and help them come to the realization on their own. Was that what he was trying to do? I think that's a good guess. We don't actually know. He never wrote about it himself.

He didn't talk about it, about thinking of himself as a political artist. He didn't talk about the way that he addressed these kinds of issues on the television show very much. We don't know exactly what he was thinking. And there has been speculation over the years that, well, maybe he was trying not to make one part of his audience too angry and he was trying to have it both ways or something like that. But I also don't think there's any evidence for that. I haven't come across any

evidence on his part or his manager's part that was like, whoa, you should really take it easy on this particular issue. And in fact, the one time that something like that does happen is when producers of the television show get concerned that he's talking about religion too much. And he doesn't stop. He doubled down, in fact, and introduced it and spoke more directly about it on the show, even had a couple of episodes towards the end of the show's run that were just about gospel music and had the Reverend Billy Graham on and spoke more openly about his audience. I think what you get a sense of when you watch all the episodes of the television show, which unfortunately are not readily available, you have to go to archives to watch it. But if you can see them all in a row, as you see this kind of development of this guy thinking his way through the way that most Americans were trying to think through all these complicated issues and talking about it in ways that seemed honest and earnest and were therefore appealing to his

audience. He still, all these years later, has people on both the right and the left who claim him as their own. Yeah. He was frequently associated with Billy Graham and Richard Nixon. So did that make him a typical Christian conservative? No. And that's one of the interesting things that I discovered in the course of doing the research for the book is that he had tremendous admiration for Billy Graham, as lots of evangelical Christians did at the time and still do. And there was a time when he spoke admiringly, or at least in support of President Nixon and his handling of the Vietnam War, which he later backed off of. And in fact, there's a whole episode where he performed at the White House and sang a song

that was basically supporting the right of young people to question their leaders on things like the war. But in terms of his faith, it was what comes through very clearly if you read the stuff that he wrote and the interviews that he gave over many years is that although he never has like a crossword for somebody like Billy Graham, he spoke in a very specific way about the way that he thought that Christians should behave in America and behave in the world. And that was as a witness, right? As witness to the poor, as witness to those who struggle, as those to those who are having a hard time. On his television show, he spoke more than once about lending a hand to a neighbor. And he did not speak in the

ways that we associate, say, Billy Graham and Christian conservatives on the hot button issues. In fact, he didn't really ever talk about those things publicly, about questions like abortion or gay rights or anything like that, where Billy Graham was very concerned with permissiveness and how that was destroying the fabric of the country. Cash has nothing to say about that publicly. And in fact, he's really pushing Graham in some ways to reach out to young people who are thought to be lost at the time by a lot of Christian conservatives, right? And I'm looking at the pictures online of Richard Nixon and that appearance where he performed at the White House.

What did Nixon think of that? If when he's saying one thing about how people, young people should be able to choose their thing, how did that whole thing go over with Tricky Dick? Well, we don't have a lot of evidence from people who were there, except that Dan Rather, who was then still a pretty young reporter for CBS News, was present and gave a report on CBS that night after Cash had performed and noted that Cash had said on his television show that he supported, this was a few months before, had supported the president's plan for peace in Vietnam. And then he comes and he says the same kind of thing from the stage at the White House, in the East Room of the White House. But then he goes on to perform the song, What is Truth, which he had just written for young people in the weeks leading up to the performance at the White House, and finishes the song by saying, Mr. President, we hope you can

end this war sooner than even you think you can, and bring the boys home even sooner than you think is possible. And Dan Rather reported that night that the president seemed a little surprised that here's this guy who he clearly invited to the White House as a political ally is all of a sudden bringing up the Vietnam War. That's very interesting. Did he pull him in thinking he would be on his side and maybe thinking he was a Christian conservative and stuff like that? I know at the same time he's being with Elvis and trying to align himself with everybody to be cool. Yeah, there was definitely a part of Nixon's team was interested in trying to align him with anybody who seemed cool, which was a struggle. But it's pretty clear that what happened was Nixon wasn't much of a country music fan. He was more of a Broadway show tunes kind of guy. And someone on his staff must have seen the Johnny Cash show that began the second season in January 1970, where Cash said that he supported the president in his efforts to find peace in Vietnam. And that triggered a thank you letter from the White House and then the invitation to come perform at the White House.

And it looks like there were a lot of interesting people that were outspoken on a lot of these different subjects on his show. Neil Young, I don't know about Kenny Rogers, James Taylor, I think speaks out on stuff, Leroy Orbison, Bob Dylan, of course, Joni Mitchell. Many of these people appeared on the show. And I don't know, did they exert any influence of what their political things are? I know Bob Dylan, I think, talked a lot about politics, didn't he? Yeah, sure. Early in his career, Dylan was seen as, and on purpose, presented himself as an heir to Woody Guthrie and the Pete Seegers of the world.

But by the time he performed with Cash in 1969, his was not a particularly political performance. But even in the summer of 69, when Cash's show was being run on a trial basis, he invited people on, Buffy St. Marie and the folk singer Odetta, who both of whom were well-known political artists, folk singers, and they performed political songs on that show. Buffy St. Marie especially. And then she did a duet with Cash of a Peter Lafarge song called Custer, which is all about George Armstrong and Custer being wiped out by Crazy Horse and Lakota Sioux in a way that was really provocative. And Cash had to deal with the producers of the show that he would get to invite as many of the people as he wanted onto the show.

In exchange, he had to have the occasional Hollywood people on that the producers wanted to have. So people like Bob Hope made appearances and some of the comedians that they had on you would see on any variety show. Cash eventually brought Pete Seeger on the show, even though there was a kind of a fight over whether or not he should be allowed to appear because of his left wing tendencies. And lots of other people, like some of the people that you named as well. Not all of them performed political songs, but some of them did. Arlo Guthrie, the son of Woody Guthrie, came on and sang a political song. In 1957, he wrote a song called Old Apache Squaw.

And I guess it was an Indian protest song for a while? Yeah. It was his first effort at writing a song on behalf of Native Americans. His first of many. He, for a long time, for much of his life, he believed that he was himself part Cherokee, which is true of a lot of people who grew up in Northeastern Arkansas, because even up until that period in the 1930s, it's still very much the frontier. And there's long been, obviously for thousands and thousands of years, a presence of Native Americans there. He later found out that he wasn't, in fact, part Cherokee, but it was part of

family lore. And he, you know, had a deep affinity and a sense of empathy for Native Americans. And Old Apache Squaws, he wrote that when he was still on Sun Records and was first thinking about Native Americans. And it's not exactly a protest song, but you can see it now as a prequel to what's going to become a series of protest songs on behalf of Native Americans. And ultimately, the Bitter Tears album, which is entirely about the plight of native Americans. Ballads of bitter tears, ballads of the American Indian. Yeah,

exactly. This is pretty amazing. And this is stuff I didn't even know about Johnny Cash. My grandmother loved Johnny Cash. She was West Virginia. She loved country music. I grew up watching him on all the shows because my grandma controlled the TV, but God bless her.

I wouldn't know how great Johnny Carson was and been a fan of Johnny Carson if it hadn't been for her forcing me to watch Johnny Carson every night, which I was never all that into. But now I actually watch him to be a better host. Although I still have not fully embraced the Liberace show that came after Carson.

So maybe there's still time. But those are really interesting. Are there any country music artists who follow in Johnny Cash's footsteps? You mean today? I think, yeah. I think there's a lot of people in country music today who are politically astute and engaged with the pressing issues facing the country and who don't hesitate to talk about it. I think it's a little bit of the landscape because of the media changes and the changes in technology, as obviously it's not the same as it was, you know, when there were three television networks. And I think we've seen people get into trouble for a stray statement they make politically,

because then they can just be crucified, you know, in a matter of minutes on social media. And I think that makes it even more interesting and more challenging for country music artists today. But I think there are people, I think somebody like Jason Isbell, particularly on the question of race is clearly an heir to Johnny Cash. I think Margot Price, somebody asked me if somebody else could have a show like Johnny Cash's show today, who would you like it to be?

I would love it if Margot Price had a variety show. She's practically, she's like part Johnny Cash, part Willie Nelson, part Loretta Lynn in her politics. And it would be pretty entertaining if anybody wanted to have variety shows again. I myself grew up in an era of watching lots of variety shows, and they clearly got tired of them at a certain point, and then they all mostly disappeared. But if you could have one like the Johnny Cash show again, I think that would be pretty fascinating.

You've got me really interested in this. I'm going to go on YouTube and see if there's any on YouTube. Are there any on YouTube at all? You can see a lot of clips from the Johnny Cash show on YouTube. It's hard to find whole episodes. Yeah, I had to go to three different archives, although I think the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville has a complete set of the television show and their archives. So I used some of their archives when I was there. And I also at the Paley Center for Media in New York and Los Angeles,

they have not complete incomplete sets, but I made use of the archives and all those places to be able to watch every episode. Yeah, this is definitely interesting. I grew up in that era. So I still Sunday and share show, like all those shows, even going back to the black and white, Yeah, this is definitely interesting. I grew up in that era. So, Sonny and Cher show. Right, right. All those shows, even going back to the black and white,

even the old Ed Sullivan show is fun to watch every now and then. Right, right. So, there you go. I don't know. That's the Jack Benny show, of course. I grew up with those shows, watched them all. But I think this is really cool. Maybe Johnny Cash basically opened the door to a lot of country artists

and other artists to come out and talk about these things. Is that maybe something he helped get the door opened on or make people feel better about coming out and talking about these things? Yeah, I think he's highly regarded as who came after him, part of his appeal was that he seemed like a straight talker, a guy who was honest, a guy who was struggling in an era of polarization with figuring out what was right and what was wrong. And lots of people admire that. And I think a lot of artists who came after him have tried to follow in those same footsteps. There were not, you know, very the way, right, at the Ryman Auditorium and speaking to middle America in a way that everyone seemed to be able to relate to. Yeah, I think a lot of artists have come along since then and have tried to speak to their audience with a level of respect that they can speak honestly and not to, like I say, ram things down people's throats. And he was such a powerful figure.

So many people saw him or see him as a guy who was a no bullshitter to steal from Sinatra. I did it my way. That's the impression I think we all have. In fact, one of my favorite photos of him is him flipping off the camera just with this, just with this attitude was just with this attitude of i'm johnny cash and i don't give a fuck and i don't know there's just something

really powerful in it and so i love that meme but he just had that whole powerful as a guy who did that and it sounded like he really stood his ground on what he was trying to achieve in everything in life as an artist. Yeah, I think so. The trouble with the outlaw image that he has is that it sometimes gets in the way of how thoughtful he was about other things. Like he was definitely a guy who stood his ground, but he was also able to evolve over time on a political question. And that's very clear on the question of race. It's very clear on the question of the Vietnam War that the position he started out wasn't the position that he maintained for the rest of his career or the rest of his life.

And he didn't try to hide any of it. He just talked about it and talked about his own evolution on these questions as forthrightly as he could. And what gets lost in the outlaw image, of course, the outlaw image is a big part of the marketing behind him. Just like the earlier impoverished image was an important part of the marketing of his brand when he was early in his career, is that you can lose sight of this empathy that I'm talking about, where the way that he evolves over time is because of the way that he relates to people and the way that he experiences things in his own personal life. And like on the Vietnam War, it's the death of young people, of young Americans being killed in that war, people who

were the sons of friends of his, and he's a veteran himself. So he's very supportive of veterans. He respects the authority of the president, but it also tears him to pieces. Jimmy Howard, the son of Jan Howard and Harlan Howard, country music stars themselves, gets killed in Vietnam. And he spoke about that and wrote about, wrote music about it. So I think that's equally important, right? Is that part of the way that he, as you say, makes his stands and he comes across as very authentic is in his ability also to show that it's possible to change over time, you know? Yeah. It's really interesting that whole time, people don't realize how, unless you grew up in there, like me and you both did, I believe, unless you grew up in that era, you didn't understand how hard that was because you had a country that technically had never lost

the war, never given up. And then you had old people who still had this hard old line. And then you had young people who were like, this is an abomination for a war that was going on for way too long, which is funny to compare to the Afghanistan War of 20 years. But it was going on for way too long. And of course, there's so many more loss of life that took place during that war. But it was a real interesting time and pivotal time for America, both with race riots and civil rights and women's rights and just everything was being challenged of the status quo. And it was a really hard time for everyone at that time to try and figure out what side you should be on or what was right. And that way, it's not so different from our own time where the country is polarized.

We're all lamenting how polarized the country is. And the way that cash engaged with political issues is perhaps a model for how to deal with this kind of polarization. Instead of just digging your heels in and sticking to your guns on one issue, whatever it is, or following some script that's laid out for you by experts or elites on this side or that side of the political aisle, it's okay to be human and to change your mind about things and to reflect on a political question. And it can be limiting at times. If you only think about political issues in terms of your own experience, well, your own experience can be pretty limiting. In some ways, I think Cash's political engagement may not have always been what I might have wanted it to be or someone else might have wanted it to be. We might have wanted that he spoke out more strongly on some issues or in a more sophisticated way on some issues. And sometimes that just didn't happen because that's the way that he went about it. So I'm not saying that the politics of empathy is better than a politics of ideology, but they obviously coexist. And perhaps when you have partisanship that's so driven by ideology and by just this constant

bombardment 24 hours a day, that this is what we think and this is what they think, that a politics of empathy can be useful in transcending that divide. And I would agree with you too. More empathy would be good. People just mostly seem to take their marching orders from whatever the political tropes are. And instead of really thinking them out, they just parrot them and don't really give them much thought. And just they don't really give a think. I don't think most, I don't know if most, I don't know, I can't quote most people because I'm not them, but it seems something for me to say so. But it seems like a lot of people don't really think

through what their political ideology is. They're just repeating tropes that they saw from the leaders of whichever party. And certainly having more empathy towards each other might bring us closer as Americans together, maybe. I don't know. Who knows at this point? I don't know what can fix it. But definitely maybe we should read more about Johnny Cash and what he did and everything else. Anything more you want to touch on to tease out on the book before we go? Just on that question, for example, on the question of race, very few people have thought that Cash had taken any particular stand on race or on civil rights. And in fact, he was even criticized at the time because he spoke out so much on behalf of Native Americans and on behalf of prisoners that some journalists back at the time, even when he was at the height of his political influence and cultural influence that he hadn't said enough. But, you know, this is a perfect example of a guy who grows up in a part of the country that has a real problem with race in Arkansas, where

lynchings were still taking place in his part of the state as late as his childhood and where he grows up in a community that's obviously whites only. It's a government built program that didn't challenge the racial hierarchies of the area. And there's clear evidence that even into his 20s, he had racist baggage of his own. But then over time, through a series of his own kind of personal interactions when he's living in Memphis, his admiration for so many African American artists and his deep kind of commitment to like social realism, to doing archival work and documenting the experience of American history and American life. He was almost like Alan Lomax and John Lomax doing all these field recordings. He does an album in 1962 called Blood, Sweat, and Tears

that is basically an album about exploited Black working men that people just took it to time to be a collection of folk songs about working men from the 19th century or the early 20th century. But if you go back and listen to it and look at it more closely, this is an album about race that he produces in the middle of the civil rights movement. And like I say, he doesn't wave a flag about it. He doesn't draw attention to himself as some kind of civil rights artist or anything, but he clearly makes an artistic stand on behalf of black lives in a way that nobody has really appreciated. And that's through a real effort to empathize with other people, people who he had only seen as he was growing up as exploited and marginalized.

And if a guy like that coming from those kinds of origins can evolve in that way, and then later he makes the show a platform for black artists when he's got his television show as well. If he can do that, then anybody can do that. Everybody's capable of a kind of politics of empathy that transcends this kind of division that you're talking about. That's awesome. He could have easily sat back and just wrote on, rest on his laurels and his money and, but he cared. It's been wonderful to have you on the show,

Michael. Thank you for coming on. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. There you go. And give us your plugs. We're going to find you on the interwebs. Sure.

The, my website's my name, michaelstuartfoley.com. And, uh, I'm on Twitter and Instagram at Foley Effect and on Facebook, too. There you go. That's Michael Stewart Foley. Order that up on December 7, 2021. It just came out. It's already a year old. No, I'm just kidding. It's only last month, Citizen Cash, The Political Life and Times of Johnny Cash. Order that baby up.

Be the first one on your block or book club to have read it. Thanks to Michael for being on the show with us here today. And thanks to Monash for tuning in. Go to youtube.com, 4Chess Chris Voss. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there. Refer the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives. Also go to goodreads.com, 4Chess Chris Voss. See all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all those crazy places

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