By Austin Gerth
Arts & Entertainment
Church of Cash to transform Rec Park into a burning ring of fire
Published July 9, 2016 at 8:20 pm
The spirit of Johnny Cash will visit the Rec Park band shell on July 14, when Church of Cash, a tribute act to the Man in Black, plays for Milaca Music in the Park.
Church of Cash was founded by its lead vocalist, Jay Ernest, on the Hawaiian island of Honolulu in 2010. Ernest, a native of New Ulm, moved back to Minnesota in 2011, and he restarted the band here with a new lineup.
Ernest grew up listening to Johnny Cash.
“My old man was a big Johnny Cash guy,” he said.
Before forming Church of Cash, Ernest toured and recorded with several other bands, including 3 Minute Hero, the Warsaw Poland Bros and Go Jimmy Go. These bands were all revivalists of the reggae-related Jamaican style of music known as ska, which first came to popularity in the 1960s and made a comeback in the United States during the 1990s.
Ernest says he doesn’t see much similarity between ska and Johnny Cash and that he doesn’t consider himself to be a “scenester musician,” one who can or will play only one style, but instead he’s one who can study and understand many styles of music on their own terms.
With time Ernest found that his baritone voice naturally sounds like Cash’s, and that’s what motivated him to form a tribute band.
“I decided to study him,” he said, and thereafter the Church of Cash was established.
Ernest studied music at Minnesota State University Moorhead, and he says Cash is easy for him to sing.
“It just lands in my register,” Ernest said. “My background allows me to do many, many gigs without blowing out my voice.”
The challenge of putting on a Johnny Cash tribute instead comes from the sheer size of Cash’s catalog of songs. Cash recorded over 1,500 songs in his lifetime, and Ernest says that if he learned two or three new songs a month it would still probably take more than his lifetime to get through Cash’s entire songbook. Despite this mountain of potential material he says he tries to take as many audience requests as he can at each Church of Cash performance.
Ernest doesn’t strive to rigorously impersonate Johnny Cash’s mannerisms on stage the way some tribute acts do.
“It’s just something I didn’t feel I needed to go into,” he said. “I don’t need to give a history lesson.”
It’s the universality of Cash’s music, its status as authentic American culture, that draws Ernest to it.
“I love that he touches on the American story, or the American ethos,” he said. “He can find a way to communicate with just about anybody and have truth and understanding.”
Ernest is joined in Church of Cash by three other musicians: drummer Jonathon TeBeest, “Sweet” Johnny Becker on guitar and a man their Facebook page identifies only as “Sheriff” Andy on double bass.
Music in the Park takes place 6:30-8:30 p.m. Thursday.