Johnny "
J.R."
Cash (February 26, 1932 – September 12, 2003) was an American
singer-songwriter,
guitarist,
actor, and
author,
[2] widely considered one of the most influential
musicians of the 20th century.
[3]
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 inductions in the
Country Music,
Rock and Roll and
Gospel Music Halls of Fame.
Cash was known for his deep, calm
bass-baritone voice,
[a] the distinctive sound of his
Tennessee Three backing band, a rebelliousness
[6][7] coupled with an increasingly somber and humble demeanor, free prison concerts,
[8] and a trademark look, which earned him the nickname "The Man in Black".
[b]
He traditionally began his concerts with the simple "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash"
[c], followed by his signature "
Folsom Prison Blues".
Much of Cash's music echoed themes of sorrow, moral tribulation and redemption, especially in the later stages of his career.
[12]
His best-known songs included "
I Walk the Line", "
Folsom Prison Blues", "
Ring of Fire", "
Get Rhythm" and "
Man in Black".
He also recorded humorous numbers like "
One Piece at a Time" and "
A Boy Named Sue"; a duet with his future wife,
June Carter, called "
Jackson" (followed by many further duets after their marriage); and
railroad songs including "
Hey, Porter" and "
Rock Island Line".
[13]
During the last stage of his career, Cash
covered songs by several late 20th-century rock artists, most notably "
Hurt" by
Nine Inch Nails.
Personal life
Early life
Cash was born on February 26, 1932 in
Kingsland, Arkansas, one of seven
[15] children born to Ray Cash (May 13, 1897, Kingsland, Arkansas – December 23, 1985,
Hendersonville, Tennessee) and Carrie Cloveree (née Rivers; March 13, 1904,
Rison, Arkansas – March 11, 1991, Hendersonville, Tennessee). At birth, he was named J. R. Cash.
[16]
When Cash enlisted in the
United States Air Force, he was not permitted to use initials as a first name, so he changed his name to John R. Cash. In 1955, when signing with
Sun Records, he took Johnny Cash as his stage name.
[7]
The Cash children were: Roy, Margaret Louise, Jack, J. R., Reba, Joanne and Tommy.
[17][18] His younger brother,
Tommy Cash, also became a successful country artist.
In March 1935, when Cash was three years old, the family settled in
Dyess, Arkansas.
He started working in cotton fields at age five, singing along with his
family while working.
The family farm was flooded on at least two
occasions, which later inspired him to write the song "Five Feet High
and Rising".
[page needed]
His family's economic and personal struggles during the
Great Depression inspired many of his songs, especially those about other people facing similar difficulties.
Cash was very close to his older brother, Jack.
[20]
In May 1944, Jack was pulled into a whirling
head saw in the mill where he worked and was almost cut in two. He suffered for over a week before he died on May 20, 1944, at age 15.
[page needed]
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,
causing his mother to urge 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.
[7]
Cash's early memories were dominated by
gospel music
and radio. Taught guitar by his mother and a childhood friend, Cash
began playing and writing songs at the age of twelve.
When Cash was
young, he had a high tenor voice, before becoming a bass-baritone.
[21]
In high school he sang on a local radio station; decades later he released an album of traditional gospel songs, called
My Mother's Hymn Book.
He was also significantly influenced by traditional
Irish music that he heard performed weekly by
Dennis Day on the
Jack Benny radio program.
[page needed]
Cash enlisted in the
United States Air Force on July 7, 1950.
[23]
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 the 12th Radio Squadron Mobile of the
U.S. Air Force Security Service at
Landsberg, Germany as a
Morse Code Intercept Operator for
Soviet Army transmissions.
[24]
It was there he created his first band, named "The Landsberg Barbarians".
[25]
He was the first radio operator to pick up the news of the death of
Joseph Stalin.
He was honorably discharged as a Staff Sergeant on July 3, 1954, and returned to Texas.
[27]
Marriages and family
On July 18, 1951, while in Air Force training, Cash met 17-year-old Vivian Liberto at a
roller skating rink
in her native San Antonio.
They dated for three weeks, until Cash was
deployed to Germany for a three-year tour.
During that time, the couple
exchanged hundreds of pages of
love letters.
On August 7, 1954, one month after his discharge, they were married at
St. Ann's Roman Catholic Church in San Antonio.
The ceremony was
performed by her uncle, Father Vincent Liberto.
They had four daughters:
Rosanne,
Kathy, Cindy and Tara.
Liberto stated that Cash's drug and alcohol
abuse as well as constant touring, affairs with other women, and his
close relationship with
June Carter led her to file for divorce in 1966.
Cash's career was handled by Saul Holiff, a London, Ontario, promoter
and this relationship was the subject of Saul's son's biopic
My Father and the Man in Black.
[29]
In 1968, 13 years after they first met backstage at the
Grand Ole Opry, Cash proposed to June Carter, of the famed
Carter Family, during a live performance in
London, Ontario.
[30]
The couple married on March 1, 1968, in
Franklin, Kentucky.
They had one child together,
John Carter Cash,
born March 3, 1970.
Cash and Carter continued to work together and tour
for 35 years until June's death in May 2003.
Cash died four months
later the same year.
[7]
Heritage
Cash researched his heritage and found a mix of mostly Scottish and English ancestry.
[31][32][33]
After meeting with the then-
laird of
Falkland, Fife, Major Michael Crichton-Stuart, Cash traced his family tree to 11th-century
Fife.
[35]
Cash
Loch and other locations in
Fife bear the name of his family.
Career
Early career
Publicity photo for Sun Records
In 1954, Cash and Vivian 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 that he didn't record
gospel music any longer.
It was once rumored that Phillips told Cash to
"go home and sin, then come back with a song I can sell", although in a
2002 interview Cash denied that Phillips made any such comment.
[37]
Cash eventually won over the producer with new songs delivered in his
early rockabilly style.
In 1955, Cash made his first recordings at Sun, "
Hey Porter" and "
Cry! Cry! Cry!", which were released in late June and met with success on the country
hit parade.
On December 4, 1956,
Elvis Presley dropped in on Phillips while
Carl Perkins was in the studio cutting new tracks, with
Jerry Lee Lewis backing him on piano.
Cash was also in the studio and the four started an
impromptu jam session.
Phillips left the tapes running and the recordings, almost half of
which were gospel songs, survived and have since been released under the
title
Million Dollar Quartet.
In
Cash: the Autobiography, Cash wrote that he was the one farthest from the microphone and was singing in a higher pitch to blend in with Elvis.
Cash's next record, "Folsom Prison Blues", made the country Top 5, and "
I Walk the Line" became No. 1 on the country charts and entered the pop charts Top 20.
"
Home of the Blues" followed, recorded in July 1957. That same year Cash became the first Sun artist to release a
long-playing album.
Although he was Sun's most consistently selling and prolific artist at
that time, Cash felt constrained by his contract with the small label
partly due to the fact that Phillips wasn't keen on Johnny recording
gospel, and he was getting only a 3% royalty as opposed to the standard
rate of 5%.
Presley had already left Sun, and Phillips was focusing most
of his attention and promotion on 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"
became one of his biggest hits and his second album for Columbia was a
collection of gospel songs.
However, Cash left behind a sufficient
backlog of recordings with Sun that Phillips continued to release new
singles and even albums featuring previously unreleased material until
as late as 1964, placing Cash in the unusual position of having new
releases out on two labels concurrently, with one 1960 release, a cover
of "
Oh Lonesome Me" making as high as No. 13 on the C&W charts.
(Unlike when
RCA Victor
signed Presley and also bought his Sun Records masters, when Cash
departed for Columbia, Phillips retained the rights to Cash's Sun
masters; Columbia would eventually license some of these recordings for
release on compilations after Cash's death.)
Early in his career, he was given the teasing nickname
The Undertaker
by fellow artists because of his habit of wearing black clothes -
though he did so only because they were easier to keep looking clean on
long tours.
[38]
In the early 1960s, Cash toured with the
Carter Family, which by this time regularly included
Mother Maybelle's daughters,
Anita,
June and
Helen.
June later recalled admiring him from afar during these tours.
In the 1960s, he appeared on
Pete Seeger's short lived television series
Rainbow Quest.
[39]
He also acted in and wrote and sang the opening theme for a 1961 film entitled
Five Minutes to Live, later re-released as
Door-to-door Maniac.
Outlaw image
As his career was taking off in the late 1950s, 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.
In a behind-the-scenes look at
The Johnny Cash Show, Cash claims to have "tried every drug there was to try."
[citation needed]
Although he was 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.
It was originally performed by June's sister, but the signature
mariachi-style horn arrangement was provided by Cash,
[40]
who said that it had come to him in a dream.
Vivian Liberto claimed a
different version of the origins of "Ring of Fire". In her book,
I Walked the Line: My Life with Johnny, Liberto states that Cash gave Carter the credit for monetary reasons.
[41]
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.
[42][43] When the judge asked Cash why he did it, Cash said, "I didn't do it, my truck did, and it's dead, so you can't question it."
[page needed]
The fire destroyed 508 acres (206 ha), burning the foliage off three
mountains and driving off 49 of the refuge's 53 endangered
condors.
[44]
Cash was unrepentant and claimed, "I don't care about your damn yellow
buzzards." The federal government sued him and was awarded $125,172
($936,741 in 2015 dollars).
Cash eventually
settled the case and paid $82,001.
[45]
He said he was the only person ever sued by the government for starting a forest fire.
[page needed]
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 October 4 by a
narcotics squad in
El Paso, Texas.
The officers suspected he was
smuggling heroin from Mexico, but found instead 688
Dexedrine capsules and 475
Equanil
tablets that the singer had hidden inside his guitar case. Because the
pills were prescription drugs rather than illegal narcotics, he received
a
suspended sentence.
Cash had also been 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 discussed
on his live
At San Quentin album.)
[46]
In the mid-1960s, Cash released a number of
concept albums, including
Sings the 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, and his destructive
behavior led to a divorce from his first wife and canceled performances.
Nonetheless, he continued to find success and in 1967, Cash's duet with
June Carter, "
Jackson", won a
Grammy Award.
[47]
Cash's final arrest was in 1967 in
Walker County, Georgia,
after being involved in a car accident while carrying a bag of
prescription pills.
Cash attempted to bribe a local deputy, who turned
the money down, and then spent the night in a
LaFayette, Georgia,
jail.
The singer was released after a long talk with Sheriff Ralph
Jones, who warned him of his dangerous behavior and wasted potential.
Cash credited that experience for saving his life, and he later came
back to LaFayette to play a benefit concert that attracted 12,000 people
(the city population was less than 9,000 at the time) and raised
$75,000 for the high school.
[48]
Reflecting on his past in a 1997 interview, Cash noted: “I was taking
the pills for awhile, and then the pills started taking me."
[49]
Cash curtailed his use of drugs for several years in 1968, after a spiritual
epiphany in the
Nickajack Cave,
when he attempted to commit suicide while under the heavy influence of
drugs.
He descended deeper into the cave, trying to lose himself and
"just die", when he passed out on the floor.
He reported being exhausted
and feeling at the end of his rope when he felt God's presence in his
heart and managed to struggle out of the cave (despite the exhaustion)
by following a faint light and slight breeze.
To him, it was his own
rebirth.
June,
Maybelle,
and Ezra Carter moved in to Cash's mansion for a month to help him
conquer his addiction.
Cash proposed onstage to June at a concert at the
London Gardens in
London, Ontario, Canada, on February 22, 1968; the couple married a week later (on March 1) in
Franklin, Kentucky.
She had agreed to marry Cash after he had "cleaned up".
[50]
He rediscovered his Christian faith, taking an "
altar call"
in Evangel Temple, a small church in the Nashville area, pastored by
Reverend Jimmie Rodgers Snow, son of country music legend
Hank Snow.
According to longtime friend
Marshall Grant,
Cash's 1968 rebirth experience did not result in his completely
stopping use of amphetamines.
However, beginning in 1970, Cash ended all
drug use for a period of seven years. Grant claims that the birth of
Cash's son,
John Carter Cash,
inspired Cash to end his dependence.
Cash began using amphetamines
again in 1977.
By 1983, he was once again addicted, and entered the
Betty Ford Clinic in
Rancho Mirage,
California for rehabilitation.
Cash managed to stay off drugs for
several years, but by 1989, he was dependent again and entered
Nashville's Cumberland Heights Alcohol and Drug Treatment Center.
In
1992, he entered the Loma Linda Behavioral Medicine Centre in
Loma Linda, California, for his final rehabilitation (several months later, his son followed him into this facility for treatment).
[51][52][53]
Folsom and other prison concerts
Cash felt great compassion for prisoners.
He began performing
concerts at prisons starting in the late 1950s.
His first prison concert
was on January 1, 1959, at San Quentin State Prison.
[54]
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 "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 profanities which
were edited out.
The modern CD versions are unedited and thus also
longer than the original vinyl albums, though they retain the audience
reaction overdubs of the originals.
Cash performed at the
Österåker Prison in Sweden in 1972.
The live album
På Österåker
("At Österåker") was released in 1973.
"San Quentin" was recorded with
Cash replacing "San Quentin" with "Österåker".
In 1976, a further prison
concert, this time at Tennessee Prison, was videotaped for TV broadcast
and received a belated CD release after Cash's death as
A Concert Behind Prison Walls.
Activism for Native Americans
In 1965, Cash and his wife, June Carter Cash, appeared on
Pete Seeger’s TV show,
Rainbow Quest, on which Cash explained his start as an activist for
Native Americans:
“In ’57 I wrote a song called 'Old Apache Squaw' and then forgot the
so-called Indian protest for a while, but nobody else seemed to speak up
with any volume of voice.”
[55]
Columbia, the label for which Cash was recording then, was opposed to
putting the song on his next album, considering it "too radical for the
public."
[56]
Cash singing songs of Indian tragedy and settler violence went
radically against the mainstream of country music in the 1950s, which
was dominated by the image of the righteous cowboy who simply makes the
native’s soil his own.
[57]
In 1964, coming off of the chart success that his previous album “
I Walk The Line” had been, he recorded the aforementioned album
Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian.
The album featured stories of a multitude of native peoples, mostly
of their violent oppression by white settlers: The Pima (“The Ballad of
Ira Hayes”), Navajo (“Navajo”), Apache (“Apache Tears”), Lakota (“Big
Foot”), Seneca (“As Long as the Grass Shall Grow”), and Cherokee
(“Talking Leaves”).
Cash wrote three of the songs himself and one with
the help of
Johnny Horton, but the majority of the protest songs were written by folk artist
Peter LaFarge [58] (son of activist and Pulitzer prizewinner
Oliver La Farge), whom Cash met in New York in the 1960s and whom he admired for his activism.
[59]
The album's single, “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” was neglected by
non-political radio at the time, and the record label denied it any
promotion due to its provocative protesting and thus “unappealing”
nature.
[60]
Cash faced resistance and was even urged by an editor of a country-music magazine to leave the
Country Music Association: “You and your crowd are just too intelligent to associate with plain country folks, country artists and country DJs.”
[61]
In reaction, on August 22, 1964, the singer posted a letter as an advertisement in
Billboard Magazine,
calling the record industry cowardly.
“D.J.’s — station managers —
owners...where are your guts?” he demands.
“I had to fight back when I
realized that so many stations are afraid of Ira Hayes.
Just one
question: WHY???” He concludes the letter, “Ira Hayes is strong
medicine.... So is Rochester, Harlem, Birmingham and Vietnam.”
[62]
Cash kept promoting the song himself and used his influence on radio
disc jockeys he knew eventually to make the song climb to number three
on the
country charts, while the album rose to
number two on the
album charts.
[61]
Later, on
The Johnny Cash Show, he continued telling stories of Native-American plight, both in song and through short films, such as the history of the
Trail of Tears.
[63]
In 1966, in response to his activism, the singer was adopted by the
Seneca Nation’s Turtle Clan.
He performed benefits in 1968 at the
Rosebud Reservation, close to the historical landmark of the battle at
Wounded Knee, to raise money to help build a school.
He also played at the
D-Q University in the 1980s.
[64]
"The Man in Black"
From 1969 to 1971, Cash starred in his own television show,
The Johnny Cash Show, on the
ABC network.
The Statler Brothers opened up for him in every episode; the Carter Family and rockabilly legend
Carl Perkins were also part of the regular show entourage.
Cash also enjoyed booking mainstream performers as guests; including
Neil Young,
Louis Armstrong,
Neil Diamond,
Kenny Rogers and The First Edition (who appeared a record four times),
James Taylor,
Ray Charles,
Roger Miller,
Derek and the Dominos, and
Bob Dylan.
During the same period, he contributed the title song and other songs to the film
Little Fauss and Big Halsey, which starred
Robert Redford,
Michael J. Pollard, and
Lauren Hutton.
The title song,
The Ballad of Little Fauss and Big Halsey, written by Carl Perkins, was nominated for a Golden Globe award.
[65]
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
Kris Kristofferson, who was beginning to make a name for himself as a singer/songwriter.
During a live performance of Kristofferson's "
Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down", Cash refused to change the lyrics to suit network executives, singing the song with its references to
marijuana intact:
On a Sunday morning sidewalk I'm wishin', Lord, that I was stoned.
[66]
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 suits 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.
Cash performing in
Bremen, Northern Germany, in September 1972
He wore black on behalf of the
poor and
hungry, on behalf of "the prisoner who has long paid for his crime", and on behalf of those who have been betrayed by age or drugs.
"And", Cash added, "with the
Vietnam War
as painful in my mind as it was in most other Americans', I wore it 'in
mournin' for the lives that could have been.'... Apart from the Vietnam
War being over, I don't see much reason to change my position... The
old are still neglected, the poor are still poor, the young are still
dying before their time, and we're not making many moves to make things
right.
There's still plenty of darkness to carry off."
Cash in the "one piece at a time" Cadillac.
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.
[page needed]
The outdated
US Navy's winter blue uniform used to be referred to by sailors as "Johnny Cashes", as the uniform's shirt, tie, and trousers are solid black.
[68]
In the mid-1970s, Cash's popularity and number of hit songs began to decline.
He made commercials for
Amoco and
STP,
an unpopular enterprise in an era in which oil companies made high
profits while consumers suffered through high gasoline prices and
shortages.
However, his first autobiography,
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 film about the life of Jesus,
The Gospel Road, which Cash co-wrote and narrated.
Cash and June Carter Cash appeared several times on the
Billy Graham Crusade
TV specials, and Cash continued to include gospel and religious songs
on many of his albums, though Columbia declined to release
A Believer Sings the Truth,
a gospel double-LP Cash recorded in 1979 and which ended up being
released on an independent label even with Cash still under contract to
Columbia.
On November 22, 1974, CBS ran his one-hour TV special entitled
"Riding The Rails", a musical history of trains.
He continued to appear on television, hosting an annual Christmas special on
CBS throughout the 1970s.
Later television appearances included a starring role in an episode of
Columbo, entitled "Swan Song".
He and June appeared in an episode of
Little House on the Prairie, entitled "The Collection".
He gave a performance as
John Brown in the 1985
American Civil War television mini-series
North and South.
Johnny and June also appeared in
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman in recurring roles.
[65]
He was friendly with every US President starting with
Richard Nixon.
He was closest to
Jimmy Carter, with whom he became close friends and who was a distant cousin of his wife,
June Carter Cash.
When invited to perform at the
White House for the first time in 1970,
[69] Richard Nixon's office requested that he play "
Okie from Muskogee" (a satirical
Merle Haggard
song about people who despised youthful drug users and war protesters),
"Welfare Cadillac" (a Guy Drake song which denies the integrity of
welfare recipients), and "A Boy Named Sue."
Cash declined to play the
first two and instead selected other songs, including "The Ballad of
Ira Hayes" (about a brave
Native American World War II veteran who was mistreated upon his return to
Arizona), and his own compositions, "
What Is Truth"
and "Man in Black".
Cash wrote 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.
[page needed]
However, Cash added, even if Nixon's office had given Cash enough time
to learn and rehearse the songs, their choice of pieces that conveyed "
antihippie and
antiblack" sentiments might have backfired.
In his remarks when introducing Cash, Nixon joked that one thing he'd
learned about the singer was one didn't tell him what to sing.
[71]
Highwaymen and Departure from Columbia Records
In 1980, Cash became the
Country Music Hall of Fame's
youngest living inductee at age 48, 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 three hit albums which were released beginning with the
originally titled "Highwaymen" in 1985, followed by "Highwaymen 2" in
1990, and concluding with "Highwaymen – The Road Goes on forever" in
1995.
Of the group's four members, Cash was the only non-Texan.
During that period, Cash appeared in a number of television films.
In 1981, he starred in
The Pride of Jesse Hallam, winning fine reviews for a film that called attention to adult
illiteracy.
In the same year, Cash appeared as a "very special guest star" in an episode of the
Muppet Show.
In 1983, he appeared as a heroic sheriff in
Murder in Coweta County, based on a real-life Georgia murder case, which co-starred
Andy Griffith as his nemesis.
Cash had tried for years to make the film, for which he won acclaim.
[65]
Cash relapsed into addiction after being administered painkillers for
a serious abdominal injury in 1983 caused by an unusual incident in
which he was kicked and wounded by an ostrich he kept on his farm.
[72]
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".
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 was not properly marketing him (he was
"invisible" during that time, as he said in his autobiography).
In 1984, Cash released a self-parody recording titled "Chicken in
Black," about Cash's brain being transplanted into a chicken and Cash
receiving a bank robber's brain in return.
Biographer Robert Hilburn, in
the 2013-published
Johnny Cash: The Life disputes the claim made
that Cash chose to record an intentionally poor song in protest of
Columbia's treatment of him.
On the contrary, Hilburn writes, it was
Columbia that presented Cash with the song, which Cash - who had
previously scored major chart hits with comedic material such as "A Boy
Named Sue" and "One Piece at a Time" - accepted enthusiastically,
performing the song live on stage and filming a comedic
music video
in which he dresses up in a superhero-like bank robber costume.
According to Hilburn, Cash's enthusiasm for the song waned after
Waylon Jennings
told Cash he looked "like a buffoon" in the music video (which was
showcased during Cash's 1984 Christmas TV special), and Cash
subsequently demanded that Columbia withdraw the music video from
broadcast and recall the single from stores—interrupting its bona fide
chart success—and termed the venture "a fiasco.
[73]
Between 1981 and 1984, he recorded several sessions with famed
countrypolitan producer
Billy Sherrill (who also produced "Chicken in Black") which were shelved; they would be released by Columbia's sister label,
Legacy Recordings, in 2014 as
Out Among the Stars.
[74]
Around this time, Cash also recorded
an album of gospel recordings
that ended up being released by another label around the time of his
departure from Columbia (this due to Columbia closing down its Priority
Records division that was to have released the recordings).
After more unsuccessful recordings were released in 1984-85, Cash
left Columbia (At least as a solo artist; he continued to record for
Columbia on non-solo projects until as late as 1990, recording a duets
album with
Waylon Jennings and two albums as a member of
The Highwaymen.)
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;
according to Hilburn, Columbia still had Cash under contract at the
time, so special arrangements had to be made to allow him to
participate.
[75]
Also in 1986, Cash published his only novel,
Man in White, a book about
Saul and his conversion to become the Apostle Paul. He recorded
Johnny Cash Reads The Complete New Testament in 1990.
American Recordings
Johnny Cash sings a duet with a Navy lieutenant c. 1987
After
Columbia Records dropped Cash from his recording contract, he had a short and unsuccessful stint with
Mercury Records
from 1987 to 1991.
During this time, he recorded an album of new
versions of some of his best-known Sun and Columbia hits, as well as
Water from the Wells of Home, a duets album that paired him with, among others, his children
Rosanne Cash and
John Carter Cash, as well as
Paul McCartney.
A
one-off Christmas album recorded for
Delta Records followed his Mercury contract.
His career was rejuvenated in the 1990s, leading to popularity with
an audience which was not traditionally considered interested in country
music. In 1991, he sang a version of "Man in Black" for the
Christian punk band
One Bad Pig's album
I Scream Sunday.
In 1993, he sang "
The Wanderer" on
U2's album
Zooropa. Although no longer sought after by major labels, he was offered a contract with producer
Rick Rubin's
American Recordings label, which had recently been rebranded from Def American, under which name it was better known for
rap and
hard rock.
Under Rubin's supervision, he recorded
American Recordings (1994) in his living room, accompanied only by his Martin Dreadnought guitar – one of many Cash played throughout his career.
[76]
The album featured covers of contemporary artists selected by Rubin and
had a great deal of critical and commercial success, winning a Grammy
for
Best Contemporary Folk Album.
Cash wrote that his reception at the 1994
Glastonbury Festival
was one of the highlights of his career.
This was the beginning of a
decade of music industry accolades and commercial success.
He teamed up
with
Brooks & Dunn to contribute "
Folsom Prison Blues" to the AIDS benefit album
Red Hot + Country produced by the
Red Hot Organization.
On the same album, he performed the
Bob Dylan favorite "
Forever Young".
Cash and his wife appeared on a number of episodes of the television series
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.
He also lent his voice for a
cameo role in
The Simpsons episode "
El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer (The Mysterious Voyage of Homer)", as the "Space Coyote" that guides
Homer Simpson on a spiritual quest.
[65]
In 1996, Cash enlisted the accompaniment of
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and released
Unchained (also known as
American Recordings II), which won the
Best Country Album Grammy in 1998.
The album was produced by
Rick Rubin with
Sylvia Massy engineering and mixing.
A majority of "Unchained" was recorded at
Sound City Studios and featured guest appearances by
Lindsay Buckingham,
Mick Fleetwood and Marty Stuart.
Believing he did not explain enough of himself in his 1975 autobiography
Man in Black, he wrote
Cash: The Autobiography in 1997.
Last years
Cash's original grave (top) and the Cash/Carter memorial
In 1997, Cash was diagnosed with the
neurodegenerative disease
Shy-Drager syndrome, a form of
multiple system atrophy; according to biographer Robert Hilburn, the disease was originally misdiagnosed as
Parkinson's disease, and Cash even announced to a concert audience that he had Parkinson's during a show in
Flint, Michigan
on October 25, 1997 after he nearly collapsed on stage; soon after his
diagnosis was changed to Shy-Drager and Cash was told he had
approximately 18 months to live.
[77]
The diagnosis was later again altered to
autonomic neuropathy associated with
diabetes.
The illness forced Cash to curtail his touring.
He was hospitalized in 1998 with severe
pneumonia, which damaged his lungs.
The albums
American III: Solitary Man (2000) and
American IV: The Man Comes Around
(2002) contained Cash's response to his illness in the form of songs of
a slightly more somber tone than the first two American albums.
The
video that was released for "
Hurt", a cover of the song by
Nine Inch Nails, fits Cash's view of his past and feelings of regret.
The video for the song, from
American IV, is now generally recognized as "his
epitaph,"
[78][page needed] and received particular critical and popular acclaim.
June Carter Cash
died on May 15, 2003, at the age of 73. June had told Cash to keep
working, so he continued to record, completing 60 more songs in the last
four months of his life, and even performed a couple of surprise shows
at the
Carter Family Fold outside
Bristol, Virginia.
At the July 5, 2003, concert (his last public performance), before singing "
Ring of Fire", Cash read a statement about his late wife that he had written shortly before taking the stage:
The spirit of June Carter overshadows me tonight with the love she
had for me and the love I have for her. We connect somewhere between
here and heaven. She came down for a short visit, I guess, from heaven
to visit with me tonight to give me courage and inspiration like she
always has.
Cash continued to record until shortly before his death.
His final
recordings were made on August 21, 2003 and consisted of "Like the 309,"
which would appear on
American V: A Hundred Highways
in 2006, and the final song he completed, "Engine 143," which was
recorded for his son John Carter Cash for a planned Carter Family
tribute album.
[79]
Death
While hospitalized at Baptist Hospital in Nashville, Cash died of
complications from diabetes at approximately 2:00 a.m. CT on September
12, 2003, aged 71—less than four months after his wife.
It was suggested
that Johnny's health worsened due to a
broken heart over June's death.
[80][81]
He was buried next to his wife in
Hendersonville Memory Gardens near his home in
Hendersonville, Tennessee.
In June 2005, Cash's lakeside home on Caudill Drive in Hendersonville
was put up for sale by his estate.
In January 2006, the house was sold
to
Bee Gees vocalist
Barry Gibb
and wife Linda and titled to their Florida limited liability company
for $2.3 million.
The listing agent was Cash's younger brother,
Tommy.
On April 10, 2007, during a major restoration of the property by the
new owner, Cash's home was accidentally destroyed in a spontaneous
combustion-ignited fire caused by workers using linseed oil products.
[82]
One of Cash's final collaborations with producer
Rick Rubin,
American V: A Hundred Highways, was released posthumously on July 4, 2006.
The album debuted in the No.1 position on the
Billboard
Top 200 album chart for the week ending July 22, 2006.
On February 23,
2010, three days before what would have been Cash's 78th birthday, the
Cash Family,
Rick Rubin, and Lost Highway Records released his second posthumous record, titled
American VI: Ain't No Grave.
Religious beliefs
Cash was raised by his parents in the
Southern Baptist faith tradition.
He was baptized in 1944 in the Tyronza River as a member of the Central Baptist Church of
Dyess, Arkansas.
[83]
A troubled but devout Christian,
[page needed] Cash has been characterized as a "lens through which to view American contradictions and challenges."
[d]
A
biblical scholar,
[2][89][90] he penned a
Christian novel,
Man in White,
and in the introduction Cash writes about a reporter who, interested in
Cash's religious beliefs, questions whether the book is written from a
Baptist, Catholic, or Jewish perspective.
Cash denies an answer to the
book's view and his own, and replies, "I'm a Christian. Don't put me in
another box."
[page needed][92]
He made a spoken word recording of the entire
New King James Version of the
New Testament.
[93][94]
Cash declared he was "the biggest sinner of them all", and viewed himself overall as a complicated and contradictory man.
[e]
Accordingly,
[f] Cash is said to have "contained multitudes", and has been deemed "the philosopher-prince of American country music".
[100][101]
Cash is credited with converting actor and singer
John Schneider to Christianity.
[102]
Legacy
Cash's rebellious image and often anti-authoritarian stance have been credited by some with influencing
punk rock.
[103][104]
Cash's daughter
Rosanne (by first wife
Vivian Liberto) and his son
John Carter Cash (by
June Carter Cash) are notable musicians in their own right.
Cash nurtured and defended artists (such as
Bob Dylan[40])
on the fringes of what was acceptable in country music even while
serving as the country music establishment's most visible symbol.
At an
all-star concert which aired in 1999 on
TNT, a diverse group of artists paid him tribute, including Dylan,
Chris Isaak,
Wyclef Jean,
Norah Jones,
Kris Kristofferson,
Willie Nelson,
Dom DeLuise and
U2.
Cash himself appeared at the end and performed for the first time in
more than a year.
Two tribute albums were released shortly before his
death;
Kindred Spirits contains works from established artists, while
Dressed in Black contains works from many lesser-known artists.
In total, he wrote over 1,000 songs and released dozens of albums.
A
box set titled
Unearthed was issued posthumously.
It included four CDs of unreleased material recorded with Rubin as well as a
Best of Cash on American retrospective CD.
[citation needed]
In recognition of his lifelong support of
SOS Children's Villages,
his family invited friends and fans to donate to the Johnny Cash
Memorial Fund in his memory.
He had a personal link with the SOS village
in
Diessen, at the
Ammersee Lake in
Southern Germany, near where he was stationed as a
G.I, and with the SOS village in Barrett Town, by
Montego Bay, near his holiday home in
Jamaica.
[105][106]
In 1999, Cash received the
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
In 2004,
Rolling Stone ranked Cash No. 31 on their "100 Greatest Artists of All Time" list.
[107][108]
The main street in
Hendersonville, Tennessee, Highway 31E, is known as "Johnny Cash Parkway".
[citation needed]
The
Johnny Cash Museum was located in one of Cash's properties in Hendersonville dubbed the
House of Cash
until 2006 when it was sold based on the will of Cash.
Prior to this,
having been closed for a number of years, the museum had been featured
in Cash's music video for "Hurt".
The House subsequently burned down
during the renovation by the new owner.
A new Museum opened in 2013 in
downtown Nashville.
[citation needed]
On November 2–4, 2007, the Johnny Cash Flower Pickin' Festival was held in
Starkville, Mississippi,
where Cash had been arrested more than 40 years earlier and held
overnight at the city jail on May 11, 1965.
The incident inspired Cash
to write the song "Starkville City Jail".
The festival, where he was
offered a symbolic posthumous pardon, honored Cash's life and music, and
was expected to become an annual event.
[109]
JC Unit One, Johnny Cash's private tour bus from 1980 until 2003, was put on exhibit at the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in
Cleveland, Ohio,
in 2007.
The museum offers public tours of the bus on a seasonal basis
(it is stored during the winter months and not exhibited during those
times).
[citation needed]
A
limited-edition Forever stamp honoring Cash went on sale June 5, 2013.
The stamp features a promotional picture of Cash taken around the 1963 release of "
Ring of Fire: The Best of Johnny Cash."
[110]
Portrayals
Country singer
Mark Collie portrayed Cash in
John Lloyd Miller's
award-winning 1999 short film,
I Still Miss Someone.
[65]
In November 2005,
Walk the Line,
a biographical film about Cash's life, was released in the United
States to considerable commercial success and critical acclaim.
The film
featured
Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny (for which he was nominated for the
Academy Award for Best Actor) and
Reese Witherspoon as June (for which she won the
Academy Award for Best Actress).
Phoenix and Witherspoon also won the
Golden Globe
for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy and Best Actress in a Musical or
Comedy, respectively.
They both performed their own vocals in the film
(with their version of "Jackson" being released as a single), and
Phoenix learned to play guitar for the role.
Phoenix received a
Grammy Award for his contributions to the soundtrack.
John Carter Cash, the son of Johnny and June, served as an executive producer.
[65]
On March 12, 2006,
Ring of Fire, a
jukebox musical of the Cash oeuvre, debuted on Broadway at the
Ethel Barrymore Theatre, but closed due to harsh reviews and disappointing sales on April 30.
Million Dollar Quartet,
a musical portraying the early Sun recording sessions involving Cash,
Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins, debuted on Broadway on
April 11, 2010.
Actor
Lance Guest portrayed Cash. The musical was nominated for three awards at the
2010 Tony Awards, and won one.
Robert Hilburn, veteran
Los Angeles Times
pop music critic, the journalist who accompanied Cash in his 1968
Folsom prison tour and interviewed Cash many times throughout his life
including months before his death, published a 688-page biography with
16 pages of photographs in 2013.
[111]
The meticulously reported biography is said to have filled in the 80
percent of Cash's life that was unknown, including details about Cash's
battles with addiction and infidelity.
[112]
The book reportedly does not hold back any details about the darker
side of Johnny Cash and includes details about his affair with his
pregnant wife June Carter's sister.
[113]
Awards and honors
- For detailed lists of music awards, see List of awards received by Johnny Cash.
Cash received multiple
Country Music Association Awards,
Grammys,
and other awards, in categories ranging from vocal and spoken
performances to album notes and videos.
In a career that spanned almost
five decades during which he rose to recording industry icon status,
Cash was the personification of country music to many people around the
world.
Cash was a musician who was not tied to a single genre.
He
recorded songs that could be considered
rock and roll,
blues,
rockabilly,
folk, and
gospel, and exerted an influence on each of those genres.
[citation needed]
His diversity was evidenced by his presence in three major music halls of fame: the
Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame (1977), the
Country Music Hall of Fame (1980), the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1992), and the
Memphis Music Hall of Fame (2013).
Only thirteen performers are in both of the last two, and only
Hank Williams Sr.,
Jimmie Rodgers,
Bob Wills, and
Bill Monroe
share the honor with Cash of being in all three.
Cash was the only
inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the regular manner, unlike
the other country members, who were inducted as "early influences".
[114][115][116]
His contributions to the genre have been recognized by the
Rockabilly Hall of Fame.
[117]
Cash received the
Kennedy Center Honors
in 1996, and stated that his induction into the Country Music Hall of
Fame in 1980 was his greatest professional achievement.
In 2001, he was
awarded the
National Medal of Arts.
[118]
"Hurt" was nominated for six VMAs at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards.
The only VMA the video won was that for Best Cinematography.
With the
video, Johnny Cash became the oldest artist ever nominated for an MTV
Video Music Award.
[119]
Justin Timberlake, who won Best Video that year for "
Cry Me a River",
said in his acceptance speech: "This is a travesty! I demand a recount.
My grandfather raised me on Johnny Cash, and I think he deserves this
more than any of us in here tonight."
[120]
Source: Wikipedia.org
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