As a rebellious high school student, I wore a lot of black.

"You look like Johnny Cash," my mother once told me.

"Johnny Cash?" I asked, bewildered. I couldn't figure that out. I knew that Johnny Cash was a country singer. As an adamant punk rocker, I didn't think I would have anything in common with a country singer.

"Yes. He wears black all the time." Even though country music was one of the last things I was interested in, I felt a bond with the legendary country great. I didn't give it much thought, except to think that maybe some of those country musicians weren't so bad after all. I continued to resist country music as something reactionary and alien.

Years later, going to college in Georgia, I was introduced to country music by one of my roommates, who made me a tape of Johnny Cash songs. Johnny Cash songs are some of the finest I've ever heard, full of heartfelt songs evocative of poverty, sin, and rebellious angst. I felt lucky to be introduced to his music and ashamed that I never listened to him before. I became an instant Johnny Cash fan.

That he was the mysterious Man in Black made listening to him even better. Here was a musician everyone enjoyed. It should come as no surprise that generation after generation loved Johnny Cash. If both Rev. Billy Graham and David Allen Coe can love Johnny Cash, what excuse is there for anyone else not to?

On his wearing black, Cash wrote the following in his 1997 autobiography Cash:

"I wore black because I liked it. I still do, and wearing it still means something to me. It's still my symbol of rebellion - against a stagnant status quo, against our hypocritical houses of God, against people whose minds are closed to others' ideas."

Johnny Cash was born in poverty in Arkansas. He began his music career at Sun Records at the same time as Elvis Presley (Cash is the only other person besides Presley to be in both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame). As quickly as he built a reputation for being a talented singer and songwriter, Cash earned a reputation for being a maniac. Johnny Cash consumed as many drugs and has been as destructive as even the most excessive rock stars. He was banned from the Grand Ole Opry after breaking all of the stage lights with a microphone stand. He was alleged to have once used a weed-whacker to destroy a hotel room and someone's luggage.

A few years after I graduated from college, my college friends and I decided to see Johnny Cash at Atlanta's Chastain Park. We visited the infamous Gold Club the night before, and thought it was only a fitting tribute to Johnny that we live as recklessly as possible that weekend. I left my ticket at home and had to drive quickly around Metro Atlanta to get my ticket after spending an afternoon drinking at a friend's apartment. I missed the opening act but met up with my friends and had a blast at the show. Looking back on it now, I realize that getting drunk out of your mind is not much of a fitting tribute to anyone, and wish I had approached the weekend with more sobriety. While we liked and respected all of his work, we were much too enamored with Cash's outlaw reputation and his dark past of hard living. Johnny Cash was not in good health then, and his wife June Carter Cash and son John Carter Cash performed significant segments of the concert. It was the first and last time I saw him perform.

Cash married June Carter in 1968 and credited her with turning him away from drugs and alcohol toward a clean life. He remained drug free, minus a relapse or two, and became a devout Christian. Sometimes, musicians who become devoutly religious are often lost. With examples like Al Green and Cat Stevens, it seems preferable to lose great musicians to drugs rather than see them squander their talents blindly following fervent religious dogma. We never lost Johnny Cash in that way, though.

Johnny Cash' Christianity was not the Christianity of judgmental, hypocritical morality or right-wing politics. Cash sang about deep feelings of guilt and the legacy of sin and the promise of redemption and salvation. He never shilled for television evangelists or let himself be used by sleazy politicians. He never used his faith to earn cheap applause or the encomiums of any shameless purveyors of self-righteousness.

While keeping to the straight and narrow, Cash never forgot the excesses of his past or his humble beginnings as the son of a poor sharecropper. One of Cash's most famous recordings is his 'Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison and San Quentin'. Cash regularly held concerts for prisoners and had a recording and a TV special made from these shows. Cash ignored the bothersome instructions given to him by network handlers, refusing to be told where to stand or what to say. "I'm here to do what you want me to and what I want to do," he told the prisoners to rousing cheers. "So what do you want to hear?"

Over 20 years later, when Sinead O'Connor was booed off stage at Madison Square Garden at a Bob Dylan tribute, the only two musicians on the bill that offered her their support were Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson (a long-time Cash collaborator, Kristofferson wrote 'Sunday Morning Coming Down', one of Cash's finest songs; they met when Kristofferson was sweeping the floor of CBS Studios in 1969).

While today's country stars wrap themselves in the American flag, belt out jingoist anthems that will be forgotten as quickly as they are recorded, or sign away their songs to be used as jingles for almost any product, how many have the generosity to sing to prisoners or embrace society's most rejected and despised? Not many.

Johnny Cash never kept himself from the public. He would go to the movies and stand in line like everyone else. If someone asked him for his autograph, he gave it to him or her. "Of course, if I'd turned out to be Elvis or Marilyn Monroe, or Michael Jackson or Madonna, I might not want to do things that way," Cash wrote. "Comparatively speaking, being Johnny Cash isn't that tough a job."

The weekend after he passed away, his music was heard everywhere in New York. In cowboy bars and punk rock clubs and everywhere in between, Johnny Cash's music blared from jukeboxes and was covered by musicians. On Friday, after news of his death hit, people began showing up for work wearing black, a few even wore cowboy boots.

Johnny Cash was friend and hero to felons and preachers, punk rockers and gospel singers, presidents, philanderers, bikers, pimps and more. The Man in Black is gone, but his music and spirit will live on.