That's the story of the movieWalk The Line, about Johnny Cash and his relationship with June Carter - a movie which, I read somewhere, has been many percentage points more popular with audiences in Ireland than in any other country. It's not exactly an Easter movie, but maybe it's about a form of salvation we can all identify with.

It's no surprise that it did so well here. Drive across this country, tuning in to one local radio station after another, and you'll hear songs about states of emotional loss and gain - as if they were the easiest things in the world to discuss - sung by local stars in accents borrowed from Tennessee and Arkansas. This is traditional Irish music just as fiddle music is - these songs, like Johnny Cash's, with their jog-jog beat and lurid plots that evoke summer nights in marquee tents and the smells of canvas and grass and perfume, and drink on warm breaths, and the sensuality of doing something in unison with another person's body.

Couples don't talk. They sing along with the melodies as if everyone, irrespective of gender, age or circumstance, can fully identify with the tough but lovable bad guy who killed a man in Reno or the golden hearted poker player or the long-married couple who, just because they're married, haven't lost the desire to fool around on a blanket on the ground. That's an important thing about country songs - everyone always knows the words, including people who under torture would not be able to remember the words of the National Anthem or 'Danny Boy'. But then, ?Danny Boy' is an art song, compared to the likes of 'Your Cheatin' Heart'. It is bourgeois, not blue collar. Danny Boy never walked out on a good woman in Amarillo or took a gun to an overseer.

And the tune goes up too high at the end for dancehall singers, not to mention that the speaker in ?Danny Boy' is a woman, and country is par excellence the music of men.

Of course, the reason we all know all the words is that they could hardly be less demanding. They're as near monosyllabic as verbal communication can get. They rhyme.

They are repeated over and over.

The problem, in fact, is trying to get them out of, not into, your head. They are simple because they are chronicles of a simple world, where good is good and bad is bad and men are men and women are sweet and helpful angels whose main task here on Earth is to stand by their man and help him through the night. Not that the ladies don't display a certain sweet feistiness - if her guy goes off to Jackson see if she cares. And not that he doesn't love her; she may well be a yellow rose who is the only girl for him. But in principle, he has been working very hard - at shovelling 16 tons, killing guys, doing time, playing poker with a broken heart etcetera - and he has enough on his plate without having to treat women as equals.

June Carter did all the right things for Johnny Cash in the movie and he was saved, though - in keeping with the general refusal to lend women the same importance as men - it wasn't June or his wife or his mother who was the cause of Johnny's problems: it was his father.

You wouldn't call it a complex plot, and if it had been complex, single-expression Joaquin Phoenix would have been even less convincing than he was. To my mind, he never captured what makes Johnny Cash seem like a heroic everyman to so many people - that he kept trying, even if he kept failing, to be good.

That he did suffer. That his black shirt symbolised a man who walks alone - one who understood loneliness.

And loneliness is not just not having anyone; it is having someone - as Johnny Cash had a wife in the movie - who doesn't understand you. The anthem to this sense of existential loneliness was written by country music veteran Cindy Walker, who died a few weeks ago: You give your hand to me and then you say hello And I can hardly speak my heart is beating so And anyone can tell you think you know me well But you don't know me.

I often wondered why Irish people like country music so much, and I suppose that easiness with songs that are as simple and stripped-down as hymns is part of it - Johnny Cash and June Carter came, of course, from a gospel tradition. But it isn't just the form of those ballads that descends from religion. What struck me as I followed the story of Cash's addiction and self-destruction was the way it relied on the audience believing certain things about the operations of love and the miraculous responsiveness of people to believing they love and are loved.

There was a parable in there, too.