Ragged Old Flag

Ragged Old Flag is the forty-fourth studio album by Johnny Cash, released in April 1974 on Columbia Records and produced by Charlie Bragg and Larry Butler, notable primarily for the title track, a spoken-word narrative about American patriotism that became one of Cash's most frequently cited works during the post-Vietnam period of national division and remains one of his most politically complex statements. Cash wrote the title track and several other songs; 'Ragged Old Flag', in which a narrator describes the torn and battle-worn American flag hanging in a county courthouse as a symbol of the nation's endurance through war, tragedy, and division, was simultaneously patriotic and unsentimental about the cost of that history, a combination that made it a significant text for audiences on multiple sides of the cultural divide of the mid-1970s. The album reached the top ten on the Billboard Country Albums chart and the title track received substantial country radio play; Cash performed it extensively in concerts during a period when American cultural confidence had been shaken by Watergate and the Vietnam withdrawal. Ragged Old Flag demonstrates Cash's consistent engagement with American civic identity and the folk tradition of patriotic narrative songwriting that runs from Francis Scott Key through Woody Guthrie, a tradition in which patriotism is inseparable from honest reckoning with national failure. The album's combination of patriotic sincerity and unflinching acknowledgment of national failure established a model for civic songwriting, loving a flawed country without pretending it is perfect, that distinguished Cash from both the uncritical patriotism of mainstream country and the outright rejection of American identity that characterized some protest music of the period.