Musicians from across the region will be playing a concert in central Iowa next month that pays tribute to the Man in Black.
Growing up in the southwestern Iowa town Atlantic, Randy Burk says he had -heard- Johnny Cash, but when he hit his mid-20s, he realized that’s the kind of music he wanted to write — and play.
“I would go into a country venue, and there’s Johnny Cash. I would go into a rock and roll venue, and you heard Johnny Cash,” Burk says. “You could go into punk-metal, you could go into the theater, he transcends everything and I always thought that was amazing.”
This marks the 20th year Burk has organized and performed in a Cash tribute concert in Iowa, and he says the beginnings of the long-standing tradition were relatively humble back in 2003.
“We heard that he had passed away and the first thing we thought was, ‘I wonder if there’s going to be a tribute to him or something,’ and a couple days went by and there was nothing, so we said, ‘This is wrong.’ So we formed this tribute and threw it together in about two days and it was successful,” Burk says, “And so we did it the next year, and the next year, and here we are, 20 years later.”
In addition to the heart-felt lyrics and catchy, toe-tapping tunes, Cash had incredible memorization skills and performed songs like “I’ve Been Everywhere” that are almost-impossible for any other singer to cover.
“We did that song for the finale and there was I think seven of us, and all seven of us couldn’t really memorize it even splitting the song up,” Burk says. “He’s got a lot of songs like that, you know? ‘Boy Named Sue’ has a billion verses and John never used a cheat sheet either. He was just amazing.”
Burk will be playing with his band, The Prisoners, along with a host of other artists on Sunday, April 7th at xBk Live in Des Moines.