Watching James Frey get taken to the woodshed by Oprah last night, I thought of Johnny Cash. Not that the memoirist cum fabulist Frey is as good a writer as Cash was (seriously, who has a heart big enough to write a song like Big River? or enough cold water in their veins to attempt I Walk the Line?). But Cash rose to fame (and stays there, selling better than ever now that he’s dead) by extrapolating from his own rather modest brushes with the law. Folsom Prison Blues was inspired by a movie he saw when he was in the Army, though he got popped for pills and general drunkeness many times later on. But he did not tell people he spent years in prison; when they asked he told them the truth.

Johnny Cash was all about the truth, right up to the end. While Frey explained to Oprah how his hours in a local jail magically turned into months thusly: “I think part of what happened with a number of things in the book is when you go through an experience like the one I went through, you develop different coping mechanisms, and I think one of the coping mechanisms I developed was sort of this image of myself that was probably greater than—not probably, it was greater than I actually was.”

Whatever.

Merle Haggard actually did do some hard time; he was busted trying to break into a restaurant when it was open. (As they say in law enforcement, We don’t get the smart ones.) He saw Cash perform while incarcerated at San Quentin and resolved to follow his example. He went on to write such great prison songs as Mama Tried — “I turned 21 in prison/Doing life without parole/No one could steer me right/But mama tried” — not because he was doing life but because he could empathize. He knew, like Cash, that there but for the grace of God went him to the gas chamber.

Then there was that other great country singer, Dusty Dostoevski.

One thing I haven’t heard much in the Frey fracas is how some of this might have been avoided if he had stayed with the program. Dissing AA at every opportunity, the author has managed to avoid the principles of humility that might have kept him out of this mess. Every drunk and junkie I know wants to glorify their past but they’re afraid of what their sponsor might say. Those people are tougher than Oprah.

And of course, Frey would have had to publish his book anonymously, something that must sound pretty good to him right about now.