A brief news item in the first Billboard issue of October 1964 notes that “Bitter Tears is the title of a new Indian album which Johnny Cash has just finished cutting for Columbia.” It also reveals that the album – AKA Ballads of the American Indian – was rushed out before this tiny announcement was made. Perhaps even then Cash knew the collection of NA-themed protest songs was, in essence, a side-road style experiment. After all, on the album before this, Cash appeared as a cowboy singing The Ballads of the True West, so Bitter Tears was always going to ruffle a few feathers. Indeed, upon its release it had a huge impact and was a seriously controversial record in the country music world. The sleeve notes proclaim that Cash “sings well these tales of the Indian’s woe [and] Johnny is justified in the stand he takes [as he] is proud of his Cherokee blood”.

It is worth remembering that in 1964 Cash was deep into his pills and whiskey trip. So while he may have convinced himself, and told many more, that he was of Native American stock, with both Cherokee and Mohawk blood in his veins, of course, he had neither. “The higher I got,” he told Penthouse magazine in 1975, “the more Indian blood I thought I had in me.” Meanwhile, the Ku Klux Klan was spreading a rumour through the southern states that his then wife, the devoutly catholic Vivian Liberto, was African American. Bookings were cancelled, record sales were affected, and the Klan even tried to abduct Cash from Nashville. Cash, being the innate badass he was, landed them with a $25m lawsuit. Anyway, it’s instructive to see this as a protest record – one that focused on a struggle much less fashionable than the civil rights movement of the time. The key track (like four others on the album) was written by folk singer, former rodeo cowboy, playwright, actor and one-time navy intelligence operative Peter La Farge, whose Ballad of Ira Hayes is a song that tells the story of the Native American from Pima, Arizona, who was among those to raise the US flag at Iwo Jima. Of course, when Hayes returned to the US he met only discrimination, humiliation and poverty; he died an alcoholic, drowned in a ditch. La Farge famously claimed to be a descendant of Rhode Island’s virtually extinct Narragansett Indian tribe and said he was raised as Tewa Indian, so you can be sure there’s plenty of good, strong appropriation and no small amount of paternalism on show here. But Bitter Tears remains an angry and pointedly political album. This is “Indian country” music that decries wholesale cultural dispossession even while Cash poses with a leather belt tied “Native-style” around his head on the cover – but it’s also beautifully realised. Recorded over just two hot June nights, Bitter Tears may not have been Johnny Cash’s most popular album. In fact, he took out a full-page advert in the music press that autumn to harangue DJs and radio station owners for not playing it more. But it’s a fascinating tributary flowing from the great snaking river of this most impressive of careers.