David Cantwell writes:

Sonny James’ “Young Love” sat atop the country charts for a full month in early 1957, replaced on March 2 by Johnny Cash’s “There You Go.”  This Cash hit has always been one of my favorites, if you’ll allow that by “always” i can mean since I first bought a Cash on Sun greatest hits set sometime in the early-to-mid 1980s.

These days, “There You Go” hardly gets the attention of other early Cash hits like “I Walk the Line,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Big River,” “Ballad of a Teenage Queen,” or, slightly later, “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town.” But it was actually a fairly important record for Cash at the time–and one of his biggest hits ever. At the very least, as not only his second chart-topper in a row (following “I Walk the Line”) but his second consecutive two-sided hit (with top ten “Train of Love”) and his second number one to hold that spot for over a month (five weeks–just one week less than the today iconic “I Walk the Line”) it solidified his status as a big time country star.

It’s also a reminder of how mainstream country has abandoned most of its interest in life’s dark and stormy side, how it’s jettisoned unhappy endings altogether, in favor of songs that incessantly preach carpe diem and (mostly) unearned uplift. “You’re gonna break another heart,” Cash quavers bitterly at the top. “You’re gonna tell another lie.”

Another guy gives you the eye, and there you go.

There you go, you’re gone again. 

I should’ve known I couldn’t win.

The cynicism Cash expresses here, and the world-weary, it-just-figures way he expresses it (the song’s close kin to Ernest Tubb’s “Thanks A Lot”), is strikingly up-to-date. So it’s ironic that there’s no way this lyric gets on country radio today. At least Luther Perkins seems to second Cash’s emotion. His strange boogie woogie here mimick’s the falling of Cash’s bitter tears. Either that, or its skipping off arm-in-arm with the girl that’s once more broken Johhny’s heart.

Johnny Cash “There You Go” (Sun, 1956)

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