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Cash: The Life
One of seven children born to sharecroppers Ray and Carrie Cash, he
came to the world on February 26th 1932, in Kingsland Arkansas. When he was three, the family moved to Dyess Colony in northeast
Arkansas to begin working twenty acres under a Roosevelt farm program. Known then as J.R. Cash, he dubbed himself John serving
in the Air Force years later. Typical of the rural South at the time, his childhood years were filled with a combination of
dusty work in the sweltering cotton feilds, Sundays singing in the community church and evenings listening to the battery-powered
radio in his family's living room.
It was that radio that made little J.R. aware of a world beyond his own, a world
that included the "High Noon Round-up" from WMPS in Memphis, featuring "Smilin' " Eddie Hill and the Louvin Brothers and the
still fledging Grand Ole Opry from Nashville's WSM. And it was that radio, in combination with the church hymns and folk music
his mother taught him, that helped chart the course of Johnny's destiny.
"Nothing in the world was as important to me as hearing those songs on the radio"
Johnny recalled years later. "The music carried me up above the mud, the work and the hot sun"
And the hot sun was made more bearable through
the songs Johnny would sing as he worked. His beloved mother, recognizing his musical gift even then, encouraged him to pursue
a singing career. "My mother told me to keep on singing, and that kept me working through the cotton fields," he once declared.
"She said, 'God has His hand on you, you'll be singing for the world someday.' " But first, twelve-year-old Johnny had to
deal with the weight of the world, the loss of his fourteen-year-old brother, and hero Jack, who died as a result of an accident
while cutting oak trees into fence posts. Johnny never really got over Jack's death and later said it was a likely reason for
the melancholy feel to so much of his music. "He was my hero, my mentor and my protector" Johnny once wrote. "Losing Jack
was terrible"
By the time he reached his teens, Johnny
was writing songs and singing at school assembilies and church events. And his mother wasn't the only one to realize
what Johnny's future had in store for him. A childhood voice teacher was having a hard time getting him to sing the way
she wanted to, and finally, more out of frustration than desire to indulge his personal music taste, she made a suggestion.
"We came to a point where she was ready to throw up her hands because I was not going to budge from the way I was
singing" recalled Johnny. "And she said 'OK, sing something you'd like.' So I sang Hank Williams' 'Love Sick Blues' she put
up her books down and closed them up and said, 'Don't ever let anybody try to give you voice lessons ever again.' "
After graduating from high-school in 1950, Johnny
migrated to Detroit where he worked briefly in the auto industry before joining the Air Force. After a year stateside,
he was stationed in Germany working as a radio intercept operator and was the first Westerner to hear of Stalin's death
when he intercepted a Russian military broadcast.
But music was still his first love, and he got
a guitar and organized his first band, "The Landsberg Barbarians" while in Germany. He also invested in a quality tape recorder
and got serious about his songwriting. "All through the Air Force, I was so lonely for those three years," declared Johnny
in a '90s interview. "If I couldn't have sung all those old country songs, I don't think I could've made it."
But he did make it, receiving an honorable discharge
as a staff sergeant in July 1954. Later that summer, he married Vivian Liberto, whom he had met in Texas during his basic
training. The couple settled in Memphis and eventually had four daughters together. But while music was still in control of
his heart, Johnny had to make a living. He worked as a door-to-door appliance salesman and enrolled at Keegan's School of
Broadcasting with a radio job as his goal.
Eventually, Johnny's older brother, Roy, helped
put him on a path that would take him away from door-to-door sales forever. He introduced Johnny to musicians Luther Perkins and
Marshall Grant, who joined Johnny in playing for friends and neighbors. For their first public performance, at a north Memphis
church, their limited wardrobes helped launch a signature style that Johnny would embrace throughout the remainder of his
career.
"Nobody had a nice suit"
recalled Johnny, "and the only colored shirts we all had were black" and the rest is sartorial history.
After being turned down twice over the phone
by Sam Phillips, Johnny decided to wait outside the Memphis Recording Service one morning in 1955 at risk of being rejected
in person. Eventually, Phillips came to the door, "Mr. Phillips, sir," Johnny said, "If you listen to me, you'd be glad you
did" Sam liked Johnny's confidence and invited him in to audition. John's repertoir included several Gospel songs and
the tunes of Jimmie Rogers, Hank Snow and the Carter Family. But what the Sun Records Visionary really liked Johnny's
own compositions. The next day, Johnny returned to Sun Studio with the Tennessee Two (Luther and Marshall) and recorded "Hey
Porter"
"Now if we had another song, a love song we could
put on the other side, we could release a record" said Sam. "Write a real weeper"
A few days passed, and Johnny returned
to the studio. Thirty-five takes later, he'd recorded "Cry, Cry, Cry" and that "weeper" became his first single. Johnny
followed his debut single with "Folsom Prison Blues" a song that shocked many listeners with the line "I shot a
man in Reno just to watch him die" It helped establish him as an early country out-law. His next single, 1956's "I Walk The
Line" stayed on the charts for an astounding forty-three weeks and sold two million copies. From 1955 through 1958, Johnny
charted nineteen songs, including four No.1s and seven other Top 5 hits.
In 1957, Johnny made his Grand Ole
Opry debut, he sang "Hey Porter" and the enthusiastic crowd made him do six encores before he could leave the stage. Several
other performers lost their slots that night and gave Cash the cold shoulder. However, his spirits lifted when Ernest
Tubb, Hank Snow and Hawkshaw Hawkins rallied around him. "You good lookin' thing, don't you worry about that," said
Minnie Pearl, "You deserve everything you got tonight. You've got to come back." A star was born.
Johnny wasn't the only Sun Records star.
His labelmates Presley and Perkins were also busy burning up the charts. And one of Sun's session piano players,
Jerry Lee Lewis, was months away from stardom.
On December 4th, 1956, all four musicians found
themselves together at Sun. Johnny remembers it as that day Carl Perkins had booked a recording session. He'd come
to watch Carl record, and midafternoon, Elvis appeared with his girlfriend. By the time Jerry Lee showed up, the
recording session had turned into a jam session, and the four guys sang every gospel song they knew, followed by Bill Monroe
tunes. "Contrary to what some people have written, my voice is on that tape," Johnny declared. "It's not obvious because
I was farthest away from the mike, and I was singing a lot higher than I usually did in order to stay in key with Elvis,
but I guarentee you I'm there" The Million Dollar Quartet rolled tape on thirty-nine on that historic day.
Johnny was the first Sun Records artist to release
a full-length album. "Johnny Cash With His Hot and Blue Guitar." Yet after recording for Sam Phillips for three
years, Johnny left the man and the label that had given him his start. From the begining, Sam encouraged Johnny's rebellious
nature, which ironically led to their parting ways. "He always encouraged me to do it my way," said Johnny, "to use whatever
other influences I wanted, but never to copy. That was great, a rare gift he gave me: belief in myself, right from the start
of my recording career."
Johnny didn't leave Sun for the money. For him,
the issue was control over his own music. Since he first joined Sun, he wanted to make a gospel album. The idea was repeatedly
nixed by Sam for financial reasons: Gospel music simply wasn't a moneymaker for the tiny independent label. When Columbia
Records producer Don Law in Nashville got wind of Johnny's dissatisfaction, he offered the singer a contract and the chance to
make not only a Gospel record, but also a concept album aswell. Johnny signed the contract and initially lied to Sam
Phillips about doing so. But the two men later resolved their differences.
"I bear no grudge against the man who did so
much for me," said Johnny. "I have so much respect for Sam. He worked so hard and did so much for people like me. If there
hadn't been a Sam Phillips, I might still be working in a cotton field."
When June Carter, along with mother Maybelle
and sisters Anita and Helen, joined Johnny Cash on his road show in 1961, sparks of love immediately flew. And it all began
with a badly wrinkled shirt. Before a show, June scolded him about the sloppy shirt he was about to wear onstage. "I
jerked the shirt off and threw it at her," Johnny later recalled. "She ironed it, and thus began her lifelong
dedication to cleaning me up, and my lifelong acceptance of that mission."
But before they could become partners for life,
something else had to be ironed out. Both were married to others, June to Rip Nix and Johnny to Vivian Liberto.
But still, they continued to see each other on and off the road. June described the torrid affair in the song "Ring of Fire"
which she wrote with Merle Kilgore. The song hit No. 1 on the country charts and landed in pop's Top 20.
Johnny proposed to June onstage in Ontario, Canada, in front of 5,000 fans, and they wed in Franklin, Ky., March 1st 1968.
As Johnny's marriage to Vivian was crumbling
in the early '60s, the star began to immerse himself in painkillers and amphetamines. "There was always a battle at home,"
Johnny admitted. "I wasn't going to give up the life that went with music, and Vivian wasn't going to accept that. Everything
just got more difficult as time went on."
In 1965 he was arrested for carrying a large
quanity of pills across the Mexican border at El Paso. His life continued on a downward spiral.
Johnny recalled a time in the mid '60s, at a
Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto when June nearly walked out on him because of his drugged-out state. "She'd set out to save
me, and she thought she'd failed," said Johnny. "June came into my room and told me she was going. She couldn't
handle it anymore." Johnny locked June out of the room, clad in only a bath towel. "She promised not to leave if I would
give her back her clothes" But June insisted on a change of behavior. Unless Johnny cleaned up his act, and got off the pills,
she wouldn't marry him. With June's untiring devotion and help, Johnny was finally able to to kick his drug habit. "By November
11th, 1967," he once wrote, "I was able to face an audience again, performing straight for the first time in more than
a decade, in Hendersonville Tennessee. I was terrified before I went on, but I was shocked to discover that the stage
without drugs was not the frightening place I'd imagined it to be."
Johnny was never known as a man who felt comfortable
operating within the system. In his view "convention" was something one attended, not adhered to. Johnny's clashes with the
powers-that-be began in 1964 when his recording of "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" about the tragic death of a Native American World
War II hero, barely made waves at country radio. Some stations didn't care for the anti-war sentiments of the song. In response,
Johnny took out a full-page ad in Billboard magazine asking radio programers "Where are your guts?"
The '60s also found Johnny at odds with country's
more venerable institution, the Grand Ole Opry. He didn't agree with the show's requirment of performing twenty-six times
a year, which cut into his touring schedule. So, even though he was never technically an Opry member, the long running show
often invited him to appear as a special guest star. After a performance one evening, though, Johnny was told that the Opry
no longer needed his services. Johnny was definitely the guilty party. He had been taking drugs and drinking, and as he left
the stage, he smashed all the footlights with his microphone. The Opry manager informed him, "You don't have to come back
anymore."
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