Audio Book:
Johnny Cash: The Life
Written by: Robert Hilburn
Narrated by: Charles Pittard
As I’ve mentioned, I spend a great deal of time in the car — a great deal. In fact, if I sat down and calculated it, I’d say that I average about 2,000 miles a week.
My routine is simple. In the morning I get in the car. I drive. I have meetings during the day and then I drive home. That’s my life. And it’s not unusual for an average day to contain six or eight hours behind the wheel — or more.
And when I get in the car — after I return all the phone calls, send the audio emails and check on my mom at least once — what’s left is pure windshield time. And the majority of that windshield time is spent listening to audio books.
At any given time if you were to look in my car you would see three different audio books. One of them will most likely not have passed my five-minutes-test and I’ll put it in the backseat and not finish it. The second will most likely be tolerable and the third will be good to possibly great. Depending.
I just finished an audio book that was the biography of Johnny Cash. It wasn’t great.
Now, the first thing to know is that I knew very little about Johnny Cash before this book. I could name a handful of songs but I never really followed him and didn’t see any of the films made about him. So I had a clean slate going in and picked up the book to learn more about the singer.
As the book opens, we learn about Johnny’s — then called JR’s — childhood and this beginning had a great few chapters. We looked at the artist’s very early life of growing up in the hills of Arkansas and we saw his family through their struggles and hardships. I enjoyed this part — even though the narration was probably one of the worse I’ve ever heard.
See, audio books are an art form and there is so much talent in these narrators because you don’t have sound effects or music, you have one person reading the book with all the different voices, characters and accents. And a truly good narrator will allow you to forget that there is only one person reading this book and you would swear that there are a dozen or more.
This is not the case with this book.
The narrator — a gentlemen named Charles Pittard — simply reads the book. And he reads the book the same way that you would read a shopping list or instruction on putting together a chair. Drole. Dry. And flat. This is probably the second worse reading I’ve ever heard, next to Juila Roberts when she narrated The Nanny Diaries — it was a long drive and the book was loaned, not my normal choice of books — and I couldn’t get past the first few minutes. She just read it like she had one eye on the clock.
Now you could get around the narration except that most of the book is written in this flat manner as well. In fact, a few chapters in the book stops being a book and becomes more of a report. A list of all the songs Johnny Cash wrote, recorded and all the places he went. I didn’t feel like I was there, I felt like I was sitting in a Moose Halls listening to someone’s presentation on the life of Johnny Cash; while watching slides and getting to see the speakers collection of albums and concert tickets.
Not a good audio book. Don’t bother.
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