Johnny Cash

• 1. Introduction

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  Johnny Cash began his concerts the same way for decades, walking to the microphone and saying four words: "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash." The man who said them was born J. R. Cash on the 26th of February 1932, the son of poor cotton farmers in Kingsland, Arkansas. His parents could not agree on a name, so they compromised on two initials. He would sell more than 90 million records, wear black for the poor and the imprisoned, and play free concerts inside prison walls. He would also be arrested seven times, set a forest on fire, and very nearly throw it all away to amphetamines. How does a child who picked cotton at age five become the only artist inducted as a performer into both the Country Music and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame? And why did a man who never served a prison sentence become country music's most convincing outlaw? The answers run through a Tennessee studio, a Mississippi jail cell, and a living room in Virginia where a dying man kept singing.

• 2. The Sound And The Voice

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  His backing band built its identity on a train. The Tennessee Two, guitarist Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant, gave Cash a chugging rhythm that listeners compared to a moving locomotive. When Perkins and Grant later expanded, the group became the Tennessee Three. The voice on top of that rhythm was a deep bass-baritone, calm and low. It had not always been so. As a boy Cash sang in a high-tenor before his voice changed.

  His catalogue refused to sit in one genre. Cash recorded country, rock and roll, rockabilly, blues, folk, and gospel, and he influenced each of them. That crossover reach earned him a rare distinction, induction into the Country Music, Rock and Roll, and Gospel Music Halls of Fame. He recorded humorous numbers like "One Piece at a Time" and the novelty hit "A Boy Named Sue." He recorded railroad songs including "Hey, Porter," "Orange Blossom Special," and "Rock Island Line." He cut a duet with June Carter called "Jackson."

  Most of his music carried themes of sorrow, moral tribulation, and redemption, especially in his later years. In his final stretch he turned to younger rock artists for material. He covered "Hurt" by Nine Inch Nails, "Rusty Cage" by Soundgarden, and "Personal Jesus" by Depeche Mode. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails was skeptical at first that Cash should cover "Hurt," then admitted he was moved by the result. The video for that cover won a Grammy Award.

• 3. Cotton Fields And A Table Saw

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  In March 1935, when Cash was three, his family settled in Dyess, Arkansas, a New Deal colony built during the Great Depression under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The colony was meant to give poor families land they might one day own. From age five Cash worked the cotton fields beside his family, singing as they labored. A flood once struck Dyess and the Cash farm, and he later turned it into the song "Five Feet High and Rising." That hardship gave him a lifelong sympathy for the poor and working class.

  In 1944 his older brother Jack, to whom he was close, was cut almost in two by an unguarded table saw at work. Jack was fifteen and died of his wounds a week later. By Cash's own account, he, his mother, and Jack all felt a sense of foreboding that morning. His mother had urged Jack to skip work and go fishing, but the family needed the money and Jack insisted on going. Cash carried guilt over the death for the rest of his life. He said he looked forward to "meeting his brother in Heaven."

  Gospel music and the radio shaped his earliest memories. His mother and a childhood friend taught him guitar, and he began playing and writing songs at twelve. Decades later he released an album of traditional gospel songs called "My Mother's Hymn Book." One early mentor was the Memphis-based African American singer Gus Cannon. In a 1997 interview, Cash recalled sitting on the porch with Cannon "day after day" after he arrived in Memphis in 1954.

• 4. Morse Code And Memphis

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  Cash enlisted in the Air Force on the 7th of July 1950, shortly after the Korean War began. After training in San Antonio, Texas, he was assigned to a radio squadron of the U.S. Air Force Security Service at Landsberg, West Germany. There he worked as a Morse code operator, intercepting Soviet Army transmissions. He was said to be among the first Americans to learn of Joseph Stalin's death, picked up by Morse code. His daughter Rosanne later said he told the story many times. While in San Antonio he had met Vivian Liberto, and during his years overseas the two exchanged thousands of letters. He was honorably discharged as a staff sergeant on the 3rd of July 1954, and soon married Vivian.

  In 1954 Cash moved to Memphis, sold appliances, and studied to become a radio announcer. By night he played with Perkins and Grant. He worked up the courage to visit the Sun Records studio and auditioned for Sam Phillips, singing mostly gospel. Phillips told him he no longer recorded gospel. Cash eventually won the producer over with new songs in an early rockabilly style.

  In 1955 he made his first Sun recordings, "Hey, Porter" and "Cry! Cry! Cry!," and began using the name "Johnny Cash." "Folsom Prison Blues" reached the country top five, and "I Walk the Line" hit number one on the country charts and entered the pop top 20. On the 4th of December 1956, Cash joined an impromptu jam with Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Phillips left the tapes running, and the session survived as the "Million Dollar Quartet." Cash wrote that he stood farthest from the microphone and sang higher to blend with Presley. Feeling underpaid at a 3% royalty and overshadowed by Lewis, he left Sun for Columbia Records in 1958.

• 5. The Outlaw Who Never Served

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  As his career rose in the late 1950s, Cash began drinking heavily and grew addicted to amphetamines and barbiturates. For a time he shared a Nashville apartment with Waylon Jennings, who was also deeply addicted. The stimulants kept Cash awake on tour and pushed his behavior toward the erratic. Even spiraling, he kept producing hits. His "Ring of Fire" reached number one on the country charts and entered the pop top 20.

  In June 1965 Cash's camper caught fire during a fishing trip in Los Padres National Forest in California. The blaze burned 508 acre, stripped the foliage off three mountains, and drove off 49 of the refuge's 53 endangered California condors. Asked by the judge why he did it, Cash answered, "I didn't do it, my truck did, and it's dead, so you can't question it." Unrepentant, he said, "I don't care about your damn yellow buzzards." The federal government sued and was awarded $125,172. He settled for $82,001.

  Despite the outlaw image, Cash never served a prison sentence. He landed in jail seven times for misdemeanors and was held only one night each. On the 11th of May 1965, police in Starkville, Mississippi, arrested him for trespassing to pick flowers, which inspired "Starkville City Jail." That October, a narcotics squad in El Paso, Texas, found 688 Dexedrine capsules and 475 Equanil tablets hidden in his guitar case. Because they were prescription drugs, he received a suspended sentence. His final arrest came in 1967 in Walker County, Georgia, where Sheriff Ralph Jones gave him a long talk and warned him about wasting his potential. Cash credited that night with helping save his life. He later said, "I was taking the pills for awhile, and then the pills started taking me."

• 6. Songs For The Forgotten

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  In 1957 Cash wrote a song called "Old Apache Squaw," his first step into what he called Indian protest. He used his fame to draw attention to the treatment of Native Americans, singing of subjects that most country artists of the 1950s avoided. His 1964 album "Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian" gathered stories of the Pima, Navajo, Apache, Lakota, Seneca, and Cherokee peoples. Most of the protest songs came from folk artist Peter La Farge, son of the activist and Pulitzer winner Oliver La Farge. Cash wrote three of the songs himself and one with help from Johnny Horton.

  The album's single, "The Ballad of Ira Hayes," was largely ignored by commercial radio, which considered it provocative and unappealing. Ira Hayes was a Native American among the six soldiers in the photograph raising the U.S. flag at Iwo Jima. On the 22nd of August 1964, Cash bought an advertisement in Billboard, accusing the industry of cowardice. "D.J.s, station managers, owners, where are your guts?" he wrote, calling the song "strong medicine." He badgered disc jockeys he knew until the song reached number three on the country charts and the album rose to number two.

  In 1966 the Seneca Nation's Turtle Clan adopted him in recognition of his activism. He played a 1968 benefit at the Rosebud Reservation, near Wounded Knee, to help build a school. He performed in entirely black suits, a long knee-length coat over the lot, against the rhinestone suits worn by most country acts. He said he wore black for the poor, for the prisoner who has paid for his crime, and in mourning for the lives lost in the Vietnam War. As he put it, "There's still plenty of darkness to carry off."

• 7. June, Faith, And Recovery

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  Cash met June Carter of the famed Carter Family while on tour, thirteen years after they first met backstage at the Grand Ole Opry. June, Maybelle, and Ezra Carter moved into his mansion for a month to help him get off drugs. On the 22nd of February 1968, he proposed to June onstage at a concert in London, Ontario, Canada. They married a week later, on the 1st of March, in Franklin, Kentucky. She had agreed only after he had "cleaned up." Their son, John Carter Cash, was born on the 3rd of March 1970, the only son for both of them. Marshall Grant said the boy's birth inspired Cash to end his dependence, though the singer did not fully quit for another two years.

  His recovery ran alongside a rediscovery of faith. On the 9th of May 1971 he answered the altar call at Evangel Temple in Nashville, an Assemblies of God congregation pastored by Jimmie R. Snow, son of Hank Snow. Cash had first become a Christian in 1944 at the Central Baptist Church in Dyess and was baptized in the Tyronza River. Asked once whether his novel "Man in White" was written from a Baptist, Catholic, or Jewish view, he replied, "I'm a Christian. Don't put me in another box." He called himself "the biggest sinner of them all."

  Sobriety did not hold cleanly. Cash began using amphetamines again in 1977 and was deeply addicted by 1983. He entered the Betty Ford Clinic, relapsed, and later sought treatment in Nashville and in Loma Linda, California. Throughout, June flushed his pills down the toilet and stayed with him through every admission. They worked, toured, and raised their child together for 35 years until her death.

• 8. The Comeback And The End

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  After Columbia dropped him and a brief stint with Mercury Records ended, Cash had no major label seeking him out. Then producer Rick Rubin offered him a contract with American Recordings, a label better known for rap and hard rock. Under Rubin's direction, Cash recorded "American Recordings" in 1994 in his living room, accompanied only by his Martin Dreadnought guitar. The album won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album and drew a new following among alternative and rock audiences. He called his reception at the 1994 Glastonbury Festival one of the highlights of his career.

  In 1997, during a trip to New York City, Cash was diagnosed with the neurodegenerative disease Shy-Drager syndrome, a form of multiple system atrophy. He was told he had about 18 months to live. The diagnosis was later changed to autonomic neuropathy associated with diabetes. The illness curtailed his touring, and a bout of pneumonia in 1998 damaged his lungs. He kept recording, releasing "American IV: The Man Comes Around" in 2002.

  June Carter Cash died on the 15th of May 2003, aged 73, after heart surgery. She had told him to keep working. He completed 60 songs in the last four months of his life. At his final public performance on the 5th of July 2003, before "Ring of Fire," he read a statement he had written that day. "The spirit of June Carter overshadows me tonight," he said. "I thank God for June Carter. I love her with all my heart." His final recordings were made on the 21st of August 2003. Johnny Cash died on the 12th of September 2003 at Baptist Hospital in Nashville, of complications from diabetes, at age 71. He was buried next to June at Hendersonville Memory Gardens. In 2015 a new species of black tarantula found near Folsom Prison was named Aphonopelma johnnycashi in his honor.