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Beauty is not pasted over suffering but grows out of it—like the proverbial shoot from parched ground. Bruce Herman

Rosanna Cash: The Walking Wounded

Rosanne Cash: The Walking Wounded

Rosanne Cash: 'The Walking Wounded' (Johnny Cash: Forever Words / Official Video), 2018. The video for 'The Walking Wounded' was filmed by David McClister at Johnny Cash’s childhood home in Dyess, Arkansas (part of the Dyess Colony Heritage Site and Museum). The track’s black-and-white video features Rosanne Cash exploring the tiny cabin and walking in its surroundings looking at the dry cotton fields and poor mobile homes, while resilient locals are struggling to hold their heads high. 

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The Walking Wounded

by Johnny Cash

We're in the church house kneeling down
We're in the subways, underground
We're in the bars and on the street
We drive a truck, we walk a beat
We're in the mills and factories
We make the steel, we cut the trees
A thousand yards stare as a glass
But we will see you when you pass

We lost our homes, we lost our dreams
All our goals have turned to schemes
We hurt each other and ourselves
So after long traumatic spells

We are the walking, we are the walking
We are the walking wounded

We cried out from the deepest pit
But rise back up each time we're hit
We fell from power and from grace
Resurrection's in our face
We're just like little girls and boys
We play with grown up toys
We never thought of sink or swim
My brother hurts me so I hurt him

We are the walking, we are the walking
We are the walking wounded

Like a circle, round and round
We go up so we come down
We don't explain or apologise
We pull the veil across our eyes
We see through your fake refrain
We won't let you see our pain
You may not know us but you'll see
There are more than you'd believe

We are the walking, we are the walking
We are the walking, we are the walking
We are the walking (a thousand hours of glass)
We are the walking (see our past)
We are the walking wounded

'The Walking Wounded' (Johnny Cash: Forever Words) © Downtown Music Publishing, Peermusic Publishing, Words & Music A Div Of Big Deal Music LLC

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The music video for Rosanne Cash’s ‘The Walking Wounded’ has been released on March 29, 2018, Vietnam Veteran Day.

According to Johnny Cash’s son and album co-producer John Carter Cash, the words to "The Walking Wounded" were written by Johnny Cash during a time in his life when he was suffering from his own physical pain and had immersed himself in literature about the Vietnam War and the PTSD suffered by veterans of that war. His daughter Rosanne Cash sets the moving lyrics to a slow and tender melody.

For more about Rosanne Cash, see https://www.rosannecash.com/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosanne_Cash.

About the album: Johnny Cash: Forever Words is a collaborative album consisting of 16 songs created from Johnny Cash's unknown poetry, lyrics, and letters set to music by an astounding array of contemporary artists including Chris Cornell, Ruston Kelly & Kacey Musgraves, Rosanne Cash, Alison Krauss & Union Station, Brad Paisley, Kris Kristofferson & Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, Elvis Costello, Carlene Carter, The Jayhawks, T. Bone Burnett, Jewel, Dailey & Vincent, I'm With Her, Robert Glasper featuring Ro James and Anu Sun, and Jamey Johnson. For nearly 60 years, the words of Johnny Cash have reached across cultural, spiritual and ideological borders. He was not only a singer of great songs, but a teller of universal truths about justice, faith, love, and independence. It was in this spirit that Johnny Cash: Forever Words, was created. 

Recorded primarily at The Cash Cabin Studio in Hendersonville, Tennessee and co-produced by John Carter Cash and Steve Berkowitz, Johnny Cash: Forever Words is also the musical companion to the best-selling "Forever Words: The Unknown Poems," a volume of Cash's unpublished writing edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon.