Johnny Cash, aside from the power and pathos of his own songs, famously performed songs by others as well. Some were written for him, such as the haunting “Thirteen,” written by Glenn Danzig. Some songs he covered; he took one of his greatest songs, “Hurt,” from the band Nine Inch Nails; and listening to Cash’s performance, NIN frontman Trent Reznor immediately reacted, “That song isn’t mine anymore.”

A slightly less famous example is the song “The Man Who Couldn’t Cry,” originally written and performed by Loudon Wainwright III. When we compare the lyrics of the two renditions, we notice a number of very slight changes that Cash made from Wainwright’s original (don’t rely on the listed lyrics, both of them have occasional errors compared to the audio). And I think closely examining these changes can teach us a lot about Cash’s craft, and how we might think about adapting other works or even making our own compositions.

(We’ll neglect the changes in emphasis in Cash’s vocal performance, except for a couple of points to be noted later.)

In the first stanza, Wainwright sang:

As a child, he had cried as all children will
But at some point, his tear ducts ran dry.
He grew to be a man and the feces hit the fan…

By contrast, Cash’s version goes:

As a child he had cried as all children will
Then at some point his tear ducts all ran dry.
Grew to be a man, it all hit the fan

Changing “But” to “Then” can be read to emphasize the inevitability of this change, for the protagonist—how his new impassiveness was a natural response to growing up in a cruel world. Whether that was Cash’s intention or not, notice how subtle the change was, yet how powerful. Cash is certainly putting his own stamp on the song, but he’s changing as little as possible in the process.

Inserting “all,” cutting “He,” and to some degree replacing “and the feces” with “it all” are in part meant to hew more closely to the song’s meter than in the original—which has the effect of making the lyrics less obtrusive. In part, I think that “feces” is a smirky word choice, much improved by “it all”; Cash is more matter-of-fact, and also conveys that “all” of the protagonist’s life had hit the fan, not just some of it.

(One might imagine that in Wainwright’s live performances, he would actually use the word “s—” instead of “feces,” but I have no way to check this. It would certainly match the meter better. Compare with The Doors and their live performances of “This is the End.”)

Cash makes no more changes up until the protagonist has gone through his tribulations and is sent to “a place for the insensitive and the insane.” At this point, Wainwright sang:

He played lots of chess
And he made lots of friends

And in his vocal performance, he puts an overt, ironic twist on “friends.” One wonders whether this is a contemptuous commentary on the sorts of friends one finds in an asylum, or perhaps a clue that the man’s friends were imaginary, his chess games played against an absent opponent. In either case, Wainwright is again smirking at his subject.

Cash makes a striking change by simply inverting the order of the verses:

He made a lot of friends
and he played a lot of chess

And again, he sings the verses matter-of-factly. After so much suffering, Cash says, the protagonist finally found friendship and belonging in the most unlikely place imaginable. Where Wainwright is ironic, Cash imbues the song with a great deal of empathy. He feels for the protagonist in a way that I think Wainwright does not. And he conveyed that with a simple change in verse order.

Everything else stays the same, except for Cash changing “prison” to “jail house” in the final stanza—perhaps for reasons of meter, perhaps because he liked the word “jail” better than “prison.”

What can we say about all these changes? For one thing, Cash had a very light, but deft, touch. He gets great leverage from very small changes, knowing where to cut and where to edit. He preserves the bulk of the song as is, keeping what made it worthy of his attention in the first place—but where he does make changes, they deepen the song and make it more powerful.

Second, notice the mileage Cash gets from dispensing with Wainwright’s condescension. On the one hand, Cash understands that the lyrics are strong enough on their own, and don’t need excessive vocal ornamentation. On the other hand, he made the clear choice to feel for his protagonist instead of creating ironic distance, as Wainwright does. He thus allows a lifetime of pain and suffering to color the song, much as he did with “Hurt.”

So: careful attention to each word; not tweaking things for tweaking’s sake, but combining respect for the source material with willingness to make changes where necessary. Creating new meaning by changing emotional content; again, much as he did with “Hurt.”

Not all adaptations need to make radical changes. (Though sometimes such radically different versions are strong in their own right, such as Alien Ant Farm’s cover of “Smooth Criminal.”) Cash teaches us that subtlety, mastery of craft, and willingness to be forthright can go a long way.