I think it's appropriate to open up this episode with a quote from Bob Dylan about Johnny Cash.

This is from September 26, 2003, after hearing about the death of Johnny Cash.

Truly, he is what the land and country is all about, the heart and soul of it personified,

and what it means to be here.

And he said it all in plain English.

I think we can have recollections of him, but we can't define him any more than we can define a fountain of truth, light, and beauty.

If we want to know what it means to be mortal, we need to look no farther than the man in black.

Blessed with a profound imagination, he used the gift to express all the various lost causes of the human soul.

This is a miraculous and humbling

thing. Listen to him and he always brings you to your senses. He rises high above all and he'll

never die or be forgotten, even by persons not born yet, especially those persons. And that is forever.

Yeah. Hi, friends, this is Otis Gibbs, and you're listening to Thanks for Giving a damn.

I'm sitting here in my living room in East Nashville.

This is a personal journal.

This is a bit of an experiment.

I like to say right up front that I haven't the slightest idea of what I'm doing

by decided to do it anyway.

This show was founded with the idea that there are only two people in art that matter.

There's a creative individual

and the person experiencing it. And everything else is an artificial filter. This is a way for me

to share things with you guys without any filters whatsoever. My guest this week is Pete Finney.

Pete is a steel guitar player who's played with everybody from Doug Somm to Patty Lovelace,

...