13 May 1972
Whenever there’s been a number one here from a visiting act about how much they love Ireland—in which they typically take an unsuspecting woman from Dublin or Limerick and tell her she’s now a “Galway girl”—I hark back to the original of the species: ‘Forty Shades Of Green’ by Johnny Cash. In fairness to Johnny, his bit of native totty is from Tipperary town and not arbitrarily relocated to a then-tourist hotspot like Bundoran or Ballybunion. (I had misremembered one of the lyrics as being about how she had “cheeks as soft as eiderdown”, which always struck me as ungallant to reveal a lady has bum-fluff. In fact, it’s her lips that are feathery, which mightn’t be any more flattering.)
Still, if you’re a child of ’80s or ’90s Ireland your formative experience of maverick, raw, uncompromising Johnny Cash is not a bleak, pain-wracked cover of ‘Hurt’ or a man-of-the-people live recording in a notorious US prison, but of him on some Irish light entertainment show singing cabaret schmaltz more suited to elderly green-trousered Irish Americans who get off the tour coach in your town and ask you if you knew their great-grandfather who emigrated from there a hundred years ago. I have the impression ‘Forty Shades Of Green’ was shown or heard regularly on Irish TV and radio in my youth, probably because we love when visiting celebrities love us.
Ireland’s national psychological need for affection from foreigners isn’t what Johnny has in mind with ‘A Thing Called Love’. He didn’t write it; this is a late-’60s country-pop composition by Jerry Reed, the guy who starred instead of Burt Reynolds in Smokey And The Bandit III, and has been recorded by a range of cabaret-adjacent acts including Jimmy Dean, the guy who plays the reclusive Las Vegas billionaire in Diamonds Are Forever. ‘A Thing Called Love’ was also covered by Elvis in 1972 on his gospel-tinged album He Touched Me, which sounds more like a track from a musical about his future son-in-law Michael Jackson. As for Johnny Cash’s version, his orotund drawl threatens to inject some hard-chaw wisdom and knowingness into the opening verse about a big fella brought to his knees, but not even The Man In Black’s powers of bleakness can drag him clear of the middle section’s saccharine Bible-camp singalong. Forty shades of twee.
