Johnny Cash | en

Johnny Cash (born J.R. Cash, February 26, 1932 – September 12, 2003) was a Grammy Award-winning American country singer and songwriter.

Cash is widely considered to be one of the most influential American musicians of the 20th century. Although primarily remembered as a country music icon, his genre-spanning songs and sound embraced rock and roll, rockabilly, blues, folk, and gospel. This crossover appeal won Cash the rare honor of multiple induction in the Country Music, Rock and Roll, and Gospel Music Halls of Fame.

Cash was known for his deep, distinctive voice, the boom-chick-a-boom or "freight train" sound of his backing band (Tennessee Two / Tennessee Three), his demeanor, and his dark clothing, which earned him the nickname "The Man in Black". He traditionally started his concerts with the introduction "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash."

Much of Cash's music, especially that of his later career, echoed themes of sorrow, moral tribulation, and redemption. His signature songs include "I Walk the Line", "Folsom Prison Blues", "Ring of Fire", "That Old Wheel" (a duet with Hank Williams Jr.), "Cocaine Blues", and "Man in Black". He also recorded several humorous songs, such as "One Piece at a Time", "The One on the Right Is on the Left", "Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog" and "A Boy Named Sue"; rock-and-roll numbers such as "Get Rhythm"; and various railroad songs, such as "Rock Island Line" and "Orange Blossom Special".

He sold over 90 million albums in his nearly fifty-year career and came to occupy a "commanding position in music history".

Early life
Johnny Cash was born J. R. Cash in Kingsland, Arkansas, United States, to Ray and Carrie Cash, and raised in Dyess, Arkansas. He was reportedly given the name "J. R." because his parents could not agree on a name, only on initials. Giving children initials-only names, or a first name and middle initial only, was a common practice at the time. When he enlisted in the United States Air Force, the military would not accept initials as his name, so he adopted John R. Cash as his legal name. Then when signing with Sun Records in 1955, he took Johnny Cash as his stage name. His friends and in-laws generally called him John, while his blood relatives often continued to call him by his birth name, J. R.

Cash was one of seven children: Reba Hancock, Jack, Joanne Cash-Yates, Tommy, Roy, and Louise Cash Garrett. His younger brother Tommy Cash also became a successful country artist. By age five, J.R. was working in the cotton fields, singing along with his family as they worked.

The family farm was flooded on at least one occasion, which later inspired him to write the song Five Feet High And Rising. His family's economic and personal struggles during the Depression shaped him as a person and inspired many of his songs, especially those about other people facing similar difficulties.

Cash was very close to his brother Jack, who was two years older. In 1944, Jack was pulled into a whirling table saw in the mill where he worked, and cut almost in two. He suffered for over a week before he died. There was some talk that Jack's death might not have been accidental; a local bully was seen running from the shop with blood on his shirt, shortly before Jack was found. However, Cash did not discuss that theory in his autobiography, nor the report in some circles that Cash made investigation of the incident a personal obsession. Cash often spoke of the horrible guilt he felt over this incident. According to Cash: The Autobiography, his father was away that morning, but he and his mother, and Jack himself, all had premonitions or a sense of foreboding about that day, and his mother urged Jack to skip work and go fishing with his brother. Jack insisted on working, as the family needed the money. On his deathbed, Jack said he had visions of Heaven and angels. Decades later, Cash spoke of looking forward to meeting his brother in Heaven. He wrote that he had seen his brother many times in his dreams, and that Jack always looked two years older than whatever age Cash himself was at that moment. It is widely thought that the dark side of his world view was shaped by this traumatic event.

Cash's early memories were dominated by gospel music and radio. Taught by his mother and a childhood friend, Johnny began playing guitar and writing songs as a young boy. In high school he sang on a local radio station. Decades later, he would release an album of traditional gospel songs, called My Mother's Hymn Book. Traditional Irish music that he heard weekly on the Jack Benny radio program, performed by Dennis Day, influenced him greatly.

Cash enlisted in the United States Air Force. After basic training at Lackland Air Force Base and technical training at Brooks Air Force Base, both in San Antonio, Texas, Cash was assigned to a U.S. Air Force Security Service unit at Landsberg, Germany. Assigned as a morse code decoder on Russian Army transmissions, Cash was the first American to discover that Josef Stalin had died.


First marriage
While in Air Force training in 1950, Cash met Vivian Liberto. A month after his discharge, on August 7, 1954, he and Vivian were married. They had four daughters: Rosanne (1955), Kathleen (1956), Cindy (1959), and Tara (1961). However, his constant touring and drug use put intense strain on his marriage, and they divorced in 1966.


Early career
In 1954, the couple moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where he sold appliances, while studying to be a radio announcer. At night, he played with guitarist Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant. Perkins and Grant were known as the Tennessee Two. Cash worked up the courage to visit the Sun Records studio, hoping to get a recording contract. After auditioning for Sam Phillips, singing mostly gospel songs, Phillips told him to "go home and sin, then come back with a song I can sell." Cash eventually won over Phillips with new songs delivered in his early frenetic style. His first recordings at Sun, "Hey Porter" and "Cry Cry Cry," were released in 1955 and met with reasonable success on the country hit parade.

Cash's next record, Folsom Prison Blues, made the country Top 5, and "I Walk the Line" became No. 1 on the country charts, also making it into the pop charts Top 20. Following "I Walk the Line" was Johnny Cash's "Home of the Blues," recorded in July 1957. In 1957, Cash became the first Sun artist to release a long-playing album. Although he was Sun's most consistently best-selling and prolific artist at that time, Cash felt constrained by his contract with the small label. Elvis Presley had already left Sun, and Phillips was focusing most of his attention and promotion on Jerry Lee Lewis. The following year, Cash left the label to sign a lucrative offer with Columbia Records, where his single "Don't Take Your Guns to Town" would become one of his biggest hits.

In the early 60s, Cash toured with the Carter Family, which by this time regularly included Mother Maybelle's daughters, Anita, June and Helen. June later recalled admiring Johnny from afar, during these tours.


Outlaw Image
As his career was taking off in the early 1960s, Cash started drinking heavily and became addicted to amphetamines and barbiturates. For a brief time, he shared an apartment in Nashville with Waylon Jennings, who was heavily addicted to amphetamines. Cash used the uppers to stay awake during tours. Friends joked about his "nervousness" and erratic behavior, many ignoring the warning signs of his worsening drug addiction.


Although in many ways spiraling out of control, Cash's frenetic creativity was still delivering hits. His rendition of "Ring of Fire" was a crossover hit, reaching No. 1 on the country charts and entering the Top 20 on the pop charts. The song was written by June Carter and Merle Kilgore and originally performed by Carter's sister, but the signature mariachi-style horn arrangement was provided by Cash, who said that it had come to him in a dream. The song describes the personal hell Carter went through as she wrestled with her forbidden love for Cash (they were both married to other people at the time) and as she dealt with Cash's personal "ring of fire" (drug dependency and alcoholism).

Cash sometimes spoke of his erratic, drug-induced behavior with some degree of bemused detachment. In June 1965, his truck caught fire due to an overheated wheel bearing, triggering a forest fire that burnt several hundred acres in Los Padres National Forest in California. When the judge asked Cash why he did it, Cash said in his characteristically flippant style at the time, "I didn't do it, my truck did, and it's dead, so you can't question it." The fire destroyed 508 acres (2.06 km²), burning the foliage off three mountains and killing 49 of the refuge's 53 endangered condors. Cash was unrepentant: "I don't care about your damn yellow buzzards." The federal government sued him and was awarded $125,127. Johnny eventually settled the case and paid $82,001. Cash said he was the only person ever sued by the government for starting a forest fire.

Although Cash carefully cultivated a romantic outlaw image, he never served a prison sentence. Despite landing in jail seven times for misdemeanors, each stay lasted only a single night. His most infamous run-in with the law occurred while on tour in 1965, when he was arrested by a narcotics squad in El Paso, Texas. The officers suspected that he was smuggling heroin from Mexico, but it was prescription narcotics and amphetamines that the singer had hidden inside his guitar case. Because they were prescription drugs rather than illegal narcotics, he received a suspended sentence.


Johnny Cash and his second wife, JuneCash was also arrested on May 11, 1965, in Starkville, Mississippi, for trespassing late at night onto private property to pick flowers. (This incident gave the spark for the song "Starkville City Jail", which he spoke about on his live At San Quentin prison album.)

The mid 1960s saw Cash release a number of concept albums, including Ballads Of The True West (1965), an experimental double record mixing authentic frontier songs with Cash's spoken narration, and Bitter Tears (1964), with songs highlighting the plight of the Native Americans. His drug addiction was at its worst at this point, however, and his destructive behavior led to a divorce from his first wife and cancelled performances.

In 1967, Cash's duet with Carter, "Jackson", won a Grammy Award.

Cash quit using drugs in 1968, after a spiritual epiphany in the Nickajack Cave. June, Maybelle, and Eck Carter moved into Cash's mansion for a month to help him defeat his addiction. Cash proposed onstage to Carter at a concert at the London Gardens in London, Ontario on February 22, 1968; the couple married a week later in Franklin, Kentucky. June had agreed to marry Cash after he had 'cleaned up'. Rediscovering his Christian faith, taking an "altar call" in Evangel Temple, a small church in the Nashville area, Cash chose this church over many larger, celebrity churches in the Nashville area because he said that there he was treated like just another parishioner and not a celebrity.


Folsom Prison Blues
While an airman in West Germany, Cash saw the B movie Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison (1951), which inspired him to write an early draft of one of his most famous songs, "Folsom Prison Blues".

Cash felt great compassion for prisoners. He began performing concerts at various prisons starting in the late 1950s. These performances led to a pair of highly successful live albums, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison (1968) and Johnny Cash at San Quentin (1969).

The Folsom Prison record was introduced by a rendition of his classic "Folsom Prison Blues," while the San Quentin record included the crossover hit single "A Boy Named Sue," a Shel Silverstein-penned novelty song that reached No. 1 on the country charts and No. 2 on the U.S. Top Ten pop charts. The AM versions of the latter contained a couple of profanities which were edited out. The modern CD versions are unedited and uncensored and thus also longer than the original vinyl albums, though they still retain the audience reaction overdubs of the originals.

Apart from his performances at Folsom Prison and San Quentin and various other U.S. correctional facilities, Cash also performed at the Österåker Prison in Sweden in 1972. The live album På Österåker ("At Österåker") was released in 1973. Between the songs, Cash can be heard speaking Swedish, which was greatly appreciated by the inmates.


"The Man in Black"

Cash advocated prison reform at his July 1972 meeting with U.S. president Richard NixonFrom 1969 to 1971, Cash starred in his own television show, The Johnny Cash Show, on the ABC network. The singing group The Statler Brothers opened up for him in every episode. Other notable artists who appeared on his show included Neil Young, Louis Armstrong, James Taylor, Ray Charles and Bob Dylan.

Cash had met with Dylan in the mid 1960s and became closer friends when they were neighbors in the late 1960s in Woodstock, New York. Cash was enthusiastic about reintroducing the reclusive Dylan to his audience. Cash sang a duet with Dylan on Dylan's country album Nashville Skyline and also wrote the album's Grammy-winning liner notes.

Another artist who received a major career boost from The Johnny Cash Show was songwriter Kris Kristofferson. During a live performance of Kristofferson's "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down," Cash made headlines when he refused to change the lyrics to suit network executives, singing the song with its references to marijuana intact: "On the Sunday morning sidewalks / Wishin', Lord, that I was stoned."

By the early 1970s, he had crystallized his public image as "The Man in Black." He regularly performed dressed all in black, wearing a long black knee-length coat. This outfit stood in contrast to the costumes worn by most of the major country acts in his day: rhinestone suit and cowboy boots. In 1971, Cash wrote the song "Man in Black" to help explain his dress code: "We're doing mighty fine I do suppose/In our streak of lightning cars and fancy clothes/But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back/Up front there ought to be a man in black."

He and his band had initially worn black shirts because that was the only matching color they had among their various outfits. He wore other colors on stage early in his career, but he claimed to like wearing black both on and off stage. He stated that, political reasons aside, he simply liked black as his on-stage color. To this day, the United States Navy's winter blue service uniform is referred to by sailors as "Johnny Cashes," as the uniform's shirt, tie, and trousers are actually solid black in color.

In the mid 1970s, Cash's popularity and number of hit songs began to decline, but his autobiography (the first of two), titled Man in Black, was published in 1975 and sold 1.3 million copies. A second, Cash: The Autobiography, appeared in 1997. His friendship with Billy Graham led to the production of a movie about the life of Jesus, The Gospel Road, which Cash co-wrote and narrated. The decade saw his religious conviction deepening, and he made many public appearances in an evangelical capacity.

He also continued to appear on television, hosting an annual Christmas special on CBS throughout the 1970s. Later television appearances included a role in an episode of Columbo. He also appeared with his wife on an episode of Little House on the Prairie entitled "The Collection" and gave a performance as John Brown in the 1985 Civil War television mini-series North and South.

He was friendly with every U.S. President starting with Richard Nixon. He was probably closest with Jimmy Carter, who became a very close friend. None of these friendships were about politics (although he supported the Democratic Party). He stated that he found all of them personally charming, noting the fact that it was probably essential to getting oneself elected.

When invited to perform at the White House for the first time in 1972, President Richard Nixon's office requested that he play "Okie from Muskogee" (a Merle Haggard satirical song about the people who disrespected the youthful drug users and war protesters) and "Welfare Cadillac" (a Guy Drake song that derides the integrity of welfare recipients). Cash declined to play either song and instead played a series of more left-leaning, politically charged songs, including "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" (about a brave Native-American World War II veteran who was racially mistreated upon his return to Arizona), and his own compositions, "What is Truth?" and "Man in Black." Cash claimed that the reasons for denying Nixon's song choices were not knowing them and having fairly short notice to rehearse them, rather than any political reason.


Highwaymen

From left to right Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, who formed the country music supergroup, The HighwaymenIn 1980, Cash became the Country Music Hall of Fame's youngest living inductee at age forty-eight, but during the 1980s his records failed to make a major impact on the country charts, although he continued to tour successfully. In the mid 1980s, he recorded and toured with Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson as The Highwaymen, making two hit albums.

During this period, Cash appeared as an actor in a number of television films. In 1981, he starred in The Pride of Jesse Hallam. Cash won fine reviews for his work in this film that called attention to adult illiteracy. In 1983, Cash also appeared as a heroic sheriff in Murder In Coweta County, which co-starred Andy Griffith as his nemesis. This film was based on a real-life Georgia murder case. Cash had tried for years to make the film, for which he won acclaim.

Cash relapsed into addiction after a serious abdominal injury in 1983 caused by an unusual incident in which he was kicked and critically wounded by an ostrich he kept on his farm. He was administered painkillers as part of the recovery process, which led to a return to substance abuse.

At a hospital visit in 1988, this time to watch over Waylon Jennings (who was recovering from a heart attack), Jennings suggested that Cash have himself checked into the hospital for his own heart condition. Doctors recommended preventive heart surgery, and Cash underwent double bypass surgery in the same hospital. Both recovered, although Cash refused to use any prescription painkillers, fearing a relapse into dependency. Cash later claimed that during his operation, he had what is called a "near death experience". He said he had visions of Heaven that were so beautiful that he was angry when he woke up alive.

Cash's recording career and his general relationship with the Nashville establishment were at an all-time low in the 1980s. He realized that his record label of nearly 30 years, Columbia, was growing indifferent to him and wasn't properly marketing him (he was "invisible" during that time, as he said in his autobiography). Cash recorded an intentionally awful song to protest, a self-parody. "Chicken in Black" was about Johnny's brain being transplanted into a chicken. Ironically, the song turned out to be a larger commercial success than any of his other recent material. Nevertheless, he was hoping to kill the relationship with the label before they did, and it was not long after "Chicken in Black" that Columbia and Cash parted ways.

In 1986, Cash returned to Sun Studios in Memphis to team up with Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins to create the album Class of '55. This was not the first time he had teamed up with Lewis and Perkins at Sun Studios. On December 4, 1956, Elvis Presley dropped in on Phillips to pay a social visit while Perkins was in the studio cutting new tracks, with Lewis backing him on piano. Cash was also in the studio and the four started an impromptu jam session. Ph...