Vince Mira Won't Walk the Line
Billed as the Second Coming of Johnny Cash, a teenager from Federal Way wowed rock stars, morning news shows, Ellen DeGeneres, and the Cash estate. There’s just one problem: Vince Mira is done parroting the Man in Black.
“We’re working on getting away from the whole Johnny Cash thing,” Mira said in the dressing room a few hours earlier. Sitting in the cabaret dancers’ tangled lair, which bursts with boas and sequins and smells vaguely like a clothes hamper, Mira fixed his gaze on the ground, lifting his coal-black orbs to press a point. “I have my own songs,” he said, vowels sliding off into an accent acquired in a Spanish-speaking home. He’s shyer around strangers than his powerful and confident stage presence suggests, giggling to fill uncomfortable silences. And he says “man” a lot—as in, “Yeah man, it’s an honor”—a habit likely picked up from hanging with musicians two, three times his age.
Son of a Mexican father and a Native American–Italian mother, Mira’s been shaped by a patchwork of cultures, but the one that influenced him most was the Los Angeles punk and rockabilly scene of his two older brothers, both more than a decade his senior. Before moving to the Northwest, the family lived in LA and San Antonio, where the brothers fed his adolescent ears a steady diet of Social Distortion, the Cash-inspired punk band. When he was 11 his mother bought him a guitar, which his future brother-in-law, Daniel, taught him to play. Together they performed for the family, mostly Mexican ballads, but also Johnny Cash songs, with Daniel singing and strumming and the 11-year-old apprentice playing backup. “My brothers are big fans of Johnny,” Mira said. “He’s different from everyone else. There’s a lot of people who sound like the Beatles. Or Elvis. But nobody sounds like Johnny Cash.”
Vince Mira – Folsom Prison Blues from John Keatley on Vimeo.
Nobody, that is, except Vince Mira. It’s a touchy topic. “We still do Johnny Cash songs for the fans who want to hear them.” But, he admits, channeling the Man in Black has brought him far.
One minute he was 14-year-old Emmanuel Miranda, trying to transition from a San Antonio private school into Todd Beamer High in Federal Way—“Is everything okay with your son?” the school counselor had asked his mother, Lupe. “He never talks to anyone and he eats alone”—and on weekends accompanying Daniel on guitar in Pike Place Market. The next he was a solo busker—Daniel got a job—picking through mostly easy-to-ignore Beatles and Spanish folk tunes. But when he sang “Ring of Fire” he stopped Market patrons in their Crocs. You sound just like …. And the tips got bigger, up to $100 an hour. Do you know “Folsom Prison Blues”? “No, but I’ll learn it and know it next time.” By the time he turned 15 he had learned a handful of Johnny Cash songs.
Published: July 2009
I dug the Johnny Cash act, (have you ever seen it? It’s A-MAZ-ING) but there has already been a Johnny Cash – And Vince is amazing enough to pull his own weight and not just ride on the man-in-black’s coattails.
If he knows what is good for him, he’ll start refusing to sing like Cash. It’s just too eery.
Thank you for pleasing us and sing for us, you have improved A LOT and I am very impress and proud of you because I know how hard it is to feel alone and You are back. Te quiero mucho. Thanks again.