Abstract
On September 12, 2003, Johnny Cash, country music’s foremost poet of the working poor, died in Nashville, Tennessee. Lamar Alexander, a senator from Tennessee who served as Secretary of Education under President George H. W. Bush and as president of the University of Tennessee, gave a speech on the Senate floor about the loss. After praising Cash, he asked why the state’s English professors were neither writing criticism of the poetry in country music nor teaching songs in literature courses. Alexander stressed the need for scholars at the university level to consider song lyrics as a genre worthy of literary criticism. This chapter reprints his speech, delivered on September 15, 2003.
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