‘Ain’t No Grave’: The Web Brings Johnny Cash Back to Life

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By John Jurgensen

TM and Copyright © 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved. Courtesy: Everett Collection

Johnny Cash in “Gospel Road” in 1973; the late singer has a new video out for his song “Ain’t No Grave.”

Johnny Cash has been dead for seven years, but he recently produced a new music video, with the help of 5,500 contributing artists and counting.

The video for the song “Ain’t No Grave” is a piece of crowdsourced animation, with individual frames created by online participants. Using virtual drawing tools on the Johnny Cash Project site, users superimpose their own images over old footage of the singer walking through scenes alone. The result, set to Cash’s defiant forecast for the afterlife, is a ghostly vision of the singer that flickers with subliminal messages from an army of Cash fans.

Nine months in the making, the project was directed by Chris Milk, who has made music videos for Kanye West, Gnarls Barkley and other acts. He hatched the collaborative video concept with Aaron Koblin, a digital artist known for his experiments in crowdsourcing, such as an open-source Radiohead video.

The first challenge the project faced: choosing an artist to build the video around, one who wouldn’t get caught in a love-hate crossfire typical of the Internet. “We needed to find an artist that was universally beloved. You can count those artists on two hands, and the majority of them are deceased,” Milk says.

The director found his man after a chance meeting at an art opening with Rick Rubin, the music producer who steered the last six albums of Cash’s career, an elegiac series that includes “American VI: Ain’t No Grave,” released last February. Rubin had worked with Milk previously on a Green Day/U2 collaboration video, and suggested the Cash album’s title track.

For the base video, Milk culled footage from a few obscure sources including “Gospel Road,” a 1973 movie written and directed by Cash, in which the singer followed the story of Jesus in the Holy Land. On a platform built by Radical Media, the production company that represents Milk, users work with a virtual brush and a black-and-white palette, painting in or out of the lines of the underlying images of Cash as walks down a railroad track or leans against a tombstone. The submitted frames are filtered. To preserve continuity in the final video, paintings that ignored the original image are rejected.

The video continues to change as more users submit frames. Viewers can dig into the submissions, clicking to view individual frames and the home of the artist—London, Amsterdam, Sau Paulo–who created it, as well as how long they worked on it. Milk says he was floored to discover a frame that a user in Japan spent 33 hours creating. Rick Rubin says, “It’s surprising how coherent the video is considering the wide range of drawing styles.”

Some artists have used their digital canvas to create meticulous portraits, sculpting and shading Cash’s rugged features. Given the biblical references in the song’s lyrics, resurrection symbols such as angel wings, halos and crosses, crop up frequently in the staticky montage. “The peoople that Johnny meant the most to are collectively bringing him back by their own hand,” Milk says.

Of course, we’ll never know what the Man in Black himself would have made of the interactive pastiche, but Rubin says Cash had an open mind about the music video medium. “We never discussed music videos in general but I know he was pleased with the ones we did together. I think he particularly liked the ‘Delia’s Gone’ clip where he murders Kate Moss.”