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When Marcel Soulodre brings his Johnny Cash
tribute show to Yankton next week, he wants to make sure you
get the biggest bang for your buck.
"We've got a really good, rockin' show,"
he said in a telephone interview recently. "It's rock
'n' roll in the true sense of the word: Sun Records, 1956.
People are just trying to – and I'll quote the M*A*S*H
television show here – unclench their keisters. We don't
know what our grandparents and parents went through –
how strict it was. Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis –
all those guys from Sun Records – they opened it up
a lot."
In order to establish the right tone for
the tribute, Soulodre said he watched a number of tribute
shows to other artists. The most uncomfortable shows he attended
were ones where the performers tried to painstakingly act
like the artists, he said.
"I'll sing the songs of Johnny Cash,
and I'll sell you that," Soulodre said. "But I'm
not going to sell you that I'm Johnny Cash. I'm in touch with
these songs, these poems, that millions of people call their
own. I have to be very respectful about how I do my show.
It's all about respect. There's no tawdriness."
His journey as the Man in Black
began more than three years ago.
"I was needing a break from my career,"
said the 45-year-old Soulodre, a veteran Canadian musician
who has released music with both English and French lyrics.
"I had just come back from a tour in France. I needed
something different to do but still maintain my career."
Someone suggested he do a tribute show.
And while Soulodre initially dismissed the notion as "corny,"
he found that while listening to Cash's I Still Miss Someone,
he had a deep connection with him.
"That's when I found I could share in
the voice of Johnny Cash," Soulodre said. "As an
actor, I could find an opening."
He said that what made Cash so great was
that he took his trademark "train" rhythm and mixed
it with a poetry that the common man could understand.
"Johnny Cash laid down on that beat
a poetry that everybody, from the richest man in New York
City to the poorest sharecropper in Mississippi, could understand,"
Soulodre said. "It was a poetry that was so true that
here we are, 50 years later, still talking about it. He really
understood what was going on and wrote it down."
While he started the tribute show before
Cash passed away in 2003, Soulodre said he never got to meet
the inspiration for his performance.
The popularity of last year's Johnny Cash-inspired
film, Walk the Line, got many people interested in
the legend again, Soulodre said. The resurgence has translated
into more interest in the tribute show, he added.
"We're starting to make really good
inroads everywhere," he said. "People love Johnny
Cash. It's unbelievable."
Soulodre said he hopes anyone who walks
away from one of his shows is reminded of what made Cash so
special to them in the first place.
"I'm not Johnny Cash. I give that to
you right away," he said. "But I'm going to give
you, hopefully, a familiar echo that you can take home with
you and say, 'I know that thing because it was real then and
it's real now.'" |
