Sister Boniface Mysteries: "Are Ye Dancin'?" (BBC Studios, Britbox, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, January 31) I watched two of the quirky British mystery shows that abound on the PBS schedule, Sister Boniface Mysteries and Father Brown, and then stayed on KPBS for a tribute show to Johnny Cash, We Walk the Line: A Celebration of the Music of Johnny Cash. The Sister Boniface Mysteries episode was called “Are Ya Dancin’?” and took place at a public event in Scotland that was supposed to be a folk music festival but was secretly a surprise birthday party for the widow Mrs. Clam (Belinda Lang). The surprise party was being put on by Mrs. Clam’s sister and her husband in an effort to bring her out of her shell. Alas, a middle-aged man named John Adams (John Mackay) gets murdered and the main suspects are his son Jimmy (Joseph Prowen) and his daughter’s boyfriend, aspiring musician Callum McIntyre (the incredibly cute Calum Gulvin, whom I have vague memories of having seen before on previous BBC productions). John has a confrontation with Callum in which he smashes Callum’s newly purchased 12-string electric guitar, which Callum is counting on to make it big as a rock star so he can marry the daughter, Maggie Adams (Alyth Ross). We also learn via a flashback that Jimmy wasn’t John’s biological son, but the product of an extra-relational liaison between John’s wife and another man. Later we find that [spoiler alert!] Maggie Adams was the actual killer; she and her dad had a confrontation over his treatment of Callum and she stabbed him with the ceremonial knife included in the kilts a number of the menfolk at the festival/party are wearing. Sister Boniface (Lorna Watson) figures all this out with her skills as a forensic scientist (at a time when most real-life police departments had little to no understanding of forensic science), and the police gallantly allow Maggie to perform the song she was scheduled to sing at Mrs. Clam’s party before they take her into custody.

Father Brown: "The Horns of Cernunnos" (BBC Studios, BritBox, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Father Brown episode, “The Horns of Cernunnos,” was considerably better than the Sister Boniface Mysteries I watched before it on Saturday, January 31. Cernunnos, in case you were wondering, was an ancient pagan deity worshiped by some of the indigenous people of Britain before the Roman conquest. Marianne Gelbert (Zoe Brough), a young woman living in the ancestral castle of her father, Sir Benedict Gelbert (Christian Anholt), is convinced that the god Cernunnos is stalking her and haunting both her waking hours and her dreams. The moment I heard that I assumed that someone was disguising himself or herself as Cernunnos to terrorize poor Marianne for some sinister reason. Marianne wakes up one morning to find her father dead in the bed next to hers, and along the way we learn that Sir Benedict was actually in a Gay relationship with an African-British doctor, Marcellus Lansden (Clarence Smith). He’d just written a dear-john letter to Dr. Lansden breaking off the relationship when he was killed, and naturally the official police assume that Lansden was the murderer because he has the obvious motive. But Father Brown soon deduces that the real killer was [spoiler alert!] Sir Benedict’s wife Lilith (Phoebe Price), who agreed to marry Sir Benedict even though he was Gay because it would give her possession of Sir Benedict’s castle, which happens to be located on the ancestral land where Cernunnos had been worshiped way back when. She was the one who dressed herself in Cernunnos drag in order to intimidate Marianne. There’s an exciting climax (as exciting as a BBC production budget could make it, at least) in which Lilith entraps Father Brown and threatens to push him off a convenient cliff because according to the rules of the Cernunnos cult, the ground can be re-sanctified with the killing of a minister in a rival religion. Father Brown actually rescued Lilith from falling into her own trap and rather sanctimoniously tells her that his religion doesn’t believe in human sacrifice.

We Walk the Line: A Celebration of the Music of Johnny Cash (Blackbird Productions, Southside, 2012)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The main event last night (Saturday,Jaunary 31) was the fascinating tribute concert to Johnny Cash, We Walk the Line: A Celebration of the Music of Johnny Cash, given in Austin, Texas at the same theatre where the Austin City Limits show takes place on April 20, 2012 as a commemoration of the 80th anniversary of Johnny Cash’s birth. (Johnny Cash was actually born on February 26, 1932 in Kingsland, Arkansas, but never mind.) I suspect that we were getting just a portion of the full program shot in Austin and released on DVD in 2012, partly because imdb.com give 107 minutes as the total running time (KPBS slotted it for two hours but burdened it with the interminable “pledge breaks” that afflict all too many of PBS’s music shows) and partly because the cast list on imdb.com included people like Amy Lee and the stunning Rhiannon Giddens who weren’t featured on the portion we got to see. Most of the performances took Cash’s songs (both his own and his covers, including Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” Tim Hardin’s “If I Were a Carpenter,” and Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night”) and remodeled them into the standard sound of modern country music, which is closer to the so-called “Southern rock” of 1970’s groups like the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd than to the music of Johnny Cash and his great predecessors, Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams. The show opened with one of its best performances, Brandi Carlile’s version of “Folsom Prison Blues,” and while I was startled to hear a pedal steel guitar solo in the middle of the song (Cash was famous for never using pedal steel guitar in his bands), Carlile projected the song honestly and as powerfully as she does her own material. Next up was Andy Grammer doing “Get Rhythm,” the closest Cash ever came to doing rock ‘n’ roll. Though Cash has for some reason been inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame as well as the Country Music Hall of Fame, he really wasn’t a rock singer, and he knew it; he once said, “My voice is no good for frantic chanting.” Cash wrote “Get Rhythm” for Elvis Presley and recorded it himself only after Elvis turned it down. Grammar’s version was fun (like the other artists, he was backed by a terrific band including Small Faces keyboard player Ian McLagan, session drummer Kenny Aronoff, and bassist Don Was, a well-known producer of roots records), though he was hardly as intense as Carlile (or as Cash was in his original record).

Then the band’s lead guitarist, Buddy Miller, took his turn with a performance of “Hey, Porter.” Miller was momentarily confused about whether “Hey, Porter” was Johnny Cash’s first record (it was), but he turned in a fine performance of the song. After that Pat Monahan, lead singer of the rock band Train, did a moving version of “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” one of the Kris Kristofferson songs Cash recorded. Then Monahan duetted with Shelby Lynne for an oddball version of Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” which in spite of the clear meaning of Dylan’s breakup song they tried to turn it into a celebration of a working relationship. They modeled their version on Sonny and Cher’s breakthrough hit, “I Got You, Babe,” down to over-emphasizing the word “babe” at the end of every chorus. The next song was “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” which Kris Kristofferson introduced to Johnny Cash in an unusual way. He rented a helicopter and flew it to Cash’s home, landing on his back lawn while Cash was hosting a party. That anecdote made more sense when I watched Ken Burns’s Country Music documentary, which mentioned that before he pursued a musical career he’d been a helicopter pilot during the Viet Nam war. Jamey Johnson performed it with a duet partner whom I later realized was Kristofferson himself – a surprise because nothing about the show had given away that it was filmed in 2012, 12 years before Kristofferson died. The next song was “Jackson,” a duet for Cash and his second wife, June Carter, which was ironically about divorce. It was performed here by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, an African-American ensemble who are sort of a neo-jug band. Then Brett Miller, who was the lead singer for a band called the Old 97’s that did mostly covers of old country classics, came out for an O.K. if rather over-dramatized version of “The Wreck of the Old 97.” This was a song that was introduced by Vernon Dalhart, who recorded it three times: for Edison in 1920 and Victor in 1924 and 1926. The Victor version sold over a million copies, the first country record to sell that well, though for some reason that still baffles me Dalhart wasn’t mentioned in Ken Burns’s Country Music documentary. Johnny Cash had covered this in his early days at Sun Records (1955 to 1958), and Brett Miller did it too fast and threw too much emotion into a song which needs the restraint Dalhart and Cash gave it to depict the tragedy.

After that Shooter Jennings, Waylon Jennings’s son, duetted on “Cocaine” with Amy Morrison. The next song was “Hurt,” a Nine Inch Nails song Cash covered on the fourth of his six American Recordings albums produced by Rich Rubin for his independent label. (So Johnny Cash ended his recording career as he’d begun it: on an indie owned by a visionary producer.) The producers of this show trotted out Lucinda Williams, a singer I wish I liked better than I do; I’ve read interviews in which she’s made all the right noises about wanting to preserve America’s musical heritage. Her problem is she simply can’t sing. That may sound strange coming from someone who loves Bob Dylan, Yoko Ono, Captain Beefheart, Randy Newman, and Lou Reed as much as I do, but I draw the line at Lucinda Williams the way I do at Tom Waits. At least Williams’s relentlessly ugly voice suits Trent Reznor’s tale of a burned-out junkie surprisingly well, even though both Reznor and Cash got much more out of this song. Incidentally Reznor’s original included the line, “I wear this crown of shit,” which Cash refused to sing. Fortunately Reznor had recorded a bowdlerized version of the song for radio play in which he changed the line to “I wear this crown of thorns,” and Cash agreed to sing that version. Not only did it tie in with his life-long love of Jesus (Cash even made a film about Jesus, The Eternal Road, with Bo Elfstrom directing and playing Jesus while Cash narrated the story in song and June Carter Cash played Mary Magdalene), it’s just a much more poetic line. I was wondering whether Williams would go with “crown of shit” or “crown of thorns,” but luckily she did the latter. After “Hurt” the next song was “Ring of Fire,” sung by Ronnie Dunn of the country duo Brooks and Dunn, with two women providing both backing vocals and the mariachi trumpets that helped make Cash’s original so special. “Ring of Fire” was actually written by June Carter Cash and a songwriting partner named Merle Kilgore, and one night Cash woke up his wife after a dream and said, “You know what your song needs? Mariachi trumpets! I just dreamed it.”

Then Iron and Wine (which, like Nine Inch Nails and St. Vincent, is a nom de groupe for a solo artist, Sam Beam) did a lovely version of “Long Black Veil,” a song by Lefty Frizzell which Cash covered on his Live at Folsom Prison album in 1968. Live at Folsom Prison was one of Cash’s most audacious albums because, instead of just going there and doing his regular concert set, he cherry-picked his repertoire to focus exclusively on songs about crime and prisons that his audience could relate to. He also wrote a surprisingly radical liner-note essay denouncing the entire concept of prison: “All of you have had the same things snuffed out of you. Everything it seems that makes a man a man — women, money, a family, a job, the open road, the city, the country, ambition, power, success, failure — a million things. Outside your cellblock is a wall. Outside that wall is another wall. It’s twenty feet high, and its granite blocks go down another eight feet in the ground. You know you’re here to stay, and for some reason you’d like to stay alive — and not rat.” After that Kris Kristofferson returned for “Big River,” a song Cash wrote after a TV Guide writer said, “Johnny Cash has the big river blues in his voice.” Then Sheryl Crow came out and did “Cry! Cry! Cry!,” the hastily written flip side Cash wrote for “Hey, Porter” when Sam C. Phillips of Sun Records told him he needed another song for the back of the “Hey, Porter” record. She was joined by Willie Nelson for a tribute to Cash’s cover of Tim Hardin’s “If I Were a Carpenter,” and then the next number was Jimmy Webb’s “The Highwayman.” It was the lead song for what amounted to the first country-music supergroup – Cash, Nelson, Kristofferson, and Waylon Jennings – which generated three albums and a number of lucrative concert tours. On “The Highwayman,” Shooter Jennings joined Kristofferson and Nelson to fill in for his late dad, and Jamey Johnson took Cash’s part.

Afterwards the whole cast joined together for the usual all-out finale of these productions, a version of “I Walk the Line.” It was an ironic choice given that Cash wrote it after he returned from a long concert tour proud of the fact that he’d virtuously stayed loyal to his then-wife, Vivian Liberto, and resisted the many opportunities being on the road created for extra-relational activities. The irony was that Cash started his relationship with June Carter while both of them were married to others. Songs I wish had been included were “Man in Black,” one of Cash’s signature songs and the title of his autobiography; Cash’s biggest hit, Shel Silverstein’s novelty “A Boy Named Sue”; and the song I’d pick as my all-time favorite of his, “Train of Love,” a superb lament for love lost to wanderlust he’d recorded at Sun: “Every so often everybody’s baby gets the urge to roam/But everybody’s baby but mine is coming home.” Still, We Walk the Line is a moving tribute to one of America’s greatest musical talents and was well worth watching, though it’s an intriguing sign of the times that the promo being offered for a sufficiently large contribution to PBS was a set of vinyl records – two full-length LP’s and a seven-inch EP – with accompanying DVD rather than a CD!