Johnny Cash

Anyone asking who was Johnny Cash has to start in the cotton fields of the Arkansas Delta. He was born J. R. Cash on February 26, 1932, in Kingsland, Arkansas, one of seven children of Ray Cash and Carrie Rivers Cash ^[1]. In 1935 the family moved to Dyess, a federal agricultural colony established under the New Deal, where they farmed twenty acres of cotton on land they worked to clear themselves ^[2]. The boy picked cotton alongside his parents and siblings, and the gospel hymns his mother sang, together with the country songs he heard on the family radio, shaped his musical memory for life ^[1].

A family tragedy marked his childhood. In 1944 his older brother Jack, whom he admired deeply, died at fourteen after an accident with a table saw at a school workshop. Cash spoke and wrote about the loss for the rest of his life, and biographers trace much of the guilt, faith, and darkness in his songwriting back to that event ^[3].

After graduating from high school in Dyess in 1950, he worked briefly in a Michigan automobile plant before enlisting in the United States Air Force. Stationed in Landsberg, West Germany, he served as a radio intercept operator monitoring Soviet Morse code transmissions. It was in the service that he bought his first guitar, formed a casual band with fellow airmen, and began writing songs, including an early draft of the material that became Folsom Prison Blues ^[2].

Discharged in 1954, Cash married Vivian Liberto, whom he had met in San Antonio before shipping overseas, and settled in Memphis, Tennessee, where he sold appliances while trying to break into music ^[1]. He teamed up with two mechanics, guitarist Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant, who became the Tennessee Two. Their stripped-down accompaniment, a clicking boom-chicka-boom rhythm under Cash's low voice, became one of the most identifiable sounds in American popular music ^[4].

In 1955 he auditioned for Sam Phillips at Sun Records, the small Memphis label that had just launched Elvis Presley. Phillips signed him, and the single Cry! Cry! Cry! reached the country charts that year. Folsom Prison Blues followed, and in 1956 I Walk the Line, written as a pledge of fidelity to Vivian, became his first country number one and crossed onto the pop charts ^[2]. At Sun he recorded alongside Presley, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis; an impromptu December 1956 session with the four of them was later released as the Million Dollar Quartet recordings ^[4].

Seeking a bigger label and the freedom to record gospel material, Cash signed with Columbia Records in 1958 and moved to California. Hits kept coming, including Don't Take Your Guns to Town, and in 1963 Ring of Fire, written by June Carter and Merle Kilgore and arranged with mariachi-style trumpets, became one of the biggest records of his career ^[1].

Any honest account of Johnny Cash achievements centers on two prison concerts. On January 13, 1968, he recorded a live album before inmates at Folsom State Prison in California. At Folsom Prison revived a career that had been faltering under drug problems and canceled shows, topped the country album chart, and produced a hit live version of Folsom Prison Blues ^[3]. The follow-up, At San Quentin (1969), went to number one on the pop album chart, and its single A Boy Named Sue, a comic Shel Silverstein song recorded live, reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100, the highest pop placement of his career ^[2].

From 1969 to 1971 he hosted The Johnny Cash Show on the ABC television network, taped at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. He used the program to present guests well outside the country mainstream, including Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Louis Armstrong, bringing country music into millions of living rooms while widening its borders ^[4]. Dylan, an admirer since the early 1960s, had Cash sing with him on the 1969 album Nashville Skyline, and Cash contributed liner notes that won a Grammy Award ^[3].

His honors accumulated across genres in a way few performers have matched. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1980, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and he received Kennedy Center Honors in 1996 and the National Medal of Arts in 2001 ^[5]. Over his career he won multiple Grammy Awards, and his catalog of recordings runs to well over a thousand songs. He also had a parallel career as an actor, appearing in westerns and television films, and he published a novel about the apostle Paul, Man in White, in 1986 ^[1].

Cash and Vivian Liberto had four daughters, including Rosanne Cash, who became a major recording artist in her own right. The marriage collapsed under the pressure of constant touring and his growing dependence on amphetamines and barbiturates, and the couple divorced in 1966 ^[3]. Drug arrests punctuated the decade, most famously a 1965 stop in El Paso, Texas, where customs agents found hundreds of pills in his guitar case; he received a suspended sentence ^[2].

June Carter, of the celebrated Carter Family, had toured with Cash since 1961 and is widely credited, along with her family and his renewed Christian faith, with helping him fight his addictions. He proposed to her on stage in London, Ontario, in February 1968, weeks after the Folsom concert, and they married that March. Their duet Jackson had already won a Grammy, and their partnership on stage and record lasted thirty-five years ^[1]. Their son, John Carter Cash, born in 1970, later became a producer who worked on his father's final sessions ^[5].

Faith ran through the whole life. Cash recorded gospel albums throughout his career, made a self-financed film about the life of Jesus, The Gospel Road, in 1973, and was a close friend of the evangelist Billy Graham, at whose crusades he often performed ^[3]. He explained his habitual black stage clothing in the 1971 song Man in Black as a form of mourning for the poor, prisoners, and soldiers killed in war, and the nickname followed him ever after ^[4].

The 1980s were commercially lean. Columbia dropped him in 1986 after nearly three decades, and a stint at Mercury Records produced little chart success. He kept busy in the Highwaymen, a country supergroup with Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson, whose 1985 single Highwayman went to number one on the country chart ^[2]. Health troubles mounted as well, including heart surgery in 1988 and recurring battles with painkiller dependence ^[3].

The unlikely last act began in 1993, when rap and rock producer Rick Rubin signed him to his American Recordings label. Their first album together, American Recordings (1994), was mostly just Cash and an acoustic guitar in Rubin's living room. Critics hailed it, it won a Grammy for best contemporary folk album, and it introduced him to listeners raised on alternative rock ^[5]. The series continued with covers of songs by writers as varied as Tom Petty, Nick Cave, and Nine Inch Nails.

In 1997 Cash announced he was suffering from a degenerative neurological condition, later rediagnosed as autonomic neuropathy connected to diabetes, and he stopped touring ^[1]. He kept recording. His 2002 version of the Nine Inch Nails song Hurt, with a stark video filmed at his Hendersonville home and the shuttered House of Cash museum, became one of the most praised music videos ever made and won a Grammy ^[5]. June Carter Cash died on May 15, 2003, after heart surgery. Johnny Cash survived her by less than four months, dying of complications from diabetes on September 12, 2003, in Nashville, Tennessee, at age 71 ^[1].

Few figures in American music cast a longer shadow. Cash sold more than 90 million records worldwide, and his songs, from Folsom Prison Blues to I Walk the Line, remain standards covered across genres ^[5]. His insistence on singing for prisoners, Native Americans (notably on the 1964 concept album Bitter Tears), and the rural poor gave country music a conscience that later artists from Kris Kristofferson to Steve Earle built upon ^[4].

The 2005 biographical film Walk the Line, starring Joaquin Phoenix as Cash and Reese Witherspoon in an Academy Award-winning performance as June Carter, brought his story to a global audience and pushed his recordings back up the charts ^[2]. His boyhood home in Dyess, Arkansas, has been restored by Arkansas State University as a heritage site, and museums in Nashville and elsewhere preserve his instruments, manuscripts, and stage clothes ^[6].

Among the most repeated Johnny Cash facts is his rare triple membership in the Country Music, Rock and Roll, and Gospel Music halls of fame, a spread that captures why any Johnny Cash biography must range across so much of American music. Rolling Stone has ranked him among the greatest artists and greatest singers of all time, and posthumous releases from the Rubin sessions continued to chart for years after his death ^[5]. The voice, the black coat, and the sympathy for people at the bottom remain instantly legible more than two decades on ^[3].