In the 50 years since Johnny Cash bought his first guitar, he’s sung gospel songs and murder ballads, teen pop and country weepers, protest songs and vaudeville novelties. It’s an output that’s unmatched in American music, filled with a deep sense of respect for the past and an unsparing honesty about the present.
After starting life in 1932 as the son of an Arkansas sharecropper, he reached mythic proportions as the Man in Black—what Cash calls "my symbol of rebellion"—speaking out for the poor, the hopeless, and the beaten down. Twenty-five years ago, Kris Kristofferson called him "a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction." But as the years go by, those fictions keep dropping away, and the truth is all that remains: Johnny Cash is the quintessential outsider, a stunning songwriter and a frighteningly imperfect man, embracing the best and worst in this country and in himself.
Now 69 years old, Cash is in the middle of his third comeback, resting after last year’s Grammy-winning Solitary Man and getting ready for the release of My Mother’s Hymn Book later this year. Refusing to give in to the illness that’s struck his nervous system, he remains expansive, hopeful, and indomitable, an artist still at the height of his powers.
"I couldn’t have asked for more," he says, talking from his home in Montego Bay, Jamaica, where he and his wife June Carter Cash spend their winters. "I looked at the country charts this morning, and except for George Jones, I’m the oldest person there. And that makes me feel pretty good. You know, maybe the numbers ain’t much, compared to a big rock record, like Garth Brooks or Shania Twain. But I don’t care, I don’t do that kind of stuff. What I do is what I feel like doing, and what I’m proud of doing, from the time I do it until it’s past and gone."
Cash’s earliest memories revolve around music. He remembers listening to his mother Carrie singing spirituals in the cotton fields or sitting by the woodstove while she strummed her Sears and Roebuck guitar, joining in on the chorus of the Monroe Brothers’ "What Would You Give in Exchange for Your Soul?"
"That’s the first song I ever remember singing, when I was about four," he says, his voice slowing to a crawl. "I was just in awe of that guitar, that she could make music with her two hands on this piece of wood. I told her that someday I wanted to have my own guitar, and she said, ‘Maybe we can afford to keep this one.’ I didn’t realize it then, but she was making payments on it, and at some point, when I was five or six, all of a sudden, the guitar just wasn’t there. I remember asking her, ‘Why don’t we sing and play the guitar anymore?’ She just looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, ‘Son, we don’t have a guitar.’"
When they lost that guitar, Carrie Cash took in laundry to pay for John’s three singing lessons, and when he was 12 years old, before he could play a single note on guitar, he started writing songs. By then, a mail-order radio had started to bring home the rest of the world—gospel from the Chuck Wagon Gang, cowboy songs from Gene Autry, country music from the Carter Family, Vernon Dalhart, and Jimmie Rodgers—and those were the songs he wanted to write. He can’t remember much about those first attempts at songwriting; he suspects his ex-wife may still have some of the fragments. But he remembers that they were sad, slow ballads, the kind of country weepers he calls "cry in your milk songs."
He sang them on his walk to school and on the walk to see his friend Pete Barnhill, who taught Cash his first guitar chords on a Gibson flattop. "I thought he was the best guitar player in the world," says Cash, a half century later. The first chance he got, Cash imitated Barnhill’s guitar style, playing both rhythm and lead with his thumb and occasionally brushing the strings with his fingers to accent the beat. As far as he’s concerned, the technique was good enough for his mother and good enough for Barnhill, so it’s been good enough for Cash ever since. "I’m not a musician," he says. "I just accompany myself on my guitar, just me and my thumb, no pick. I can only strum with my thumb; I can’t pick it at all."
At 18, Cash graduated from high school and went to work on an automobile assembly line in Pontiac, Michigan. That job didn’t last long, and after a couple more—pouring concrete and cleaning out vats in a margarine factory—he joined the Air Force. Stationed in Landsberg, Germany, Cash spent the next three years intercepting Russian Morse code transmissions; his voice still swells with pride when he talks about transcribing 35 words a minute. The Air Force gave Cash his first steady paycheck, $85 a month, which he used to buy his first guitar.
"I walked to town from the Air Force base, went to a music store, and bought that guitar for five dollars," he says. "It was snowing when I started walking back, and by the time I got to the base four miles away, the snow was over knee-deep. I was freezing, I just had on these little shoes, but somehow I managed to keep that guitar protected from the snow. I got it back without being damaged, and immediately I started learning to play, as soon as I could thaw out."
A friend from Louisiana taught him a handful of chords, and after two or three days of practice, Cash was able to sing and strum just about any three-chord country song that came to mind. With two friends on the base, a guitarist and a mandolinist, he formed the Barbarians, entertaining rowdy local bars with songs like Hank Thompson’s "The Wild Side of Life" and Joe Maphis’ "Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (And Loud, Loud Music.)" Cash tore off the edge of a drink coaster and used it as a pick. He damped the vibrations by sticking a piece of paper underneath his strings, creating a short, percussive sound that felt like the Morse code he listened to night after night.
It was in Germany, away from his family for the first time in his life, that Cash saw the movie Inside Folsom Prison and immediately identified with the convicts. "It was like imprisonment," he says, talking about his time in the Air Force. "I was locked there on that base, three years without a furlough to come home. The only way they would have let me come home was if there had been a death in my immediate family. I was not only isolated from my loved ones, but there was nowhere to go, no one to reach out to."
Cash quit the Air Force after his second tour of duty and moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where he married Vivian Liberto. Through his brother Roy, he met guitarist Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant. Together, they found an occasional gig, played for free on Memphis radio, and, after a year of knocking on doors, finally secured an audition with Sam Phillips at Sun Records.
It was Phillips who decided to call him Johnny, a name that Cash has never liked. And it was Phillips who decided to record Cash as a rockabilly artist, instead of as the gospel singer he’d claimed to be over the telephone. They ran through a series of songs by Hank Snow, Jimmie Rodgers, and the Carter Family before Phillips heard something he liked: Cash’s "Hey Porter," which became the A side of his first single. Three weeks and 35 takes later, they had the B side, too: Cash’s "Cry Cry Cry," the response to Phillips’ instructions to write "a real weeper."
The single became a regional hit, earning Cash $6.42 in his first royalty check and sending him on the road to open for Sonny James and Elvis Presley. Over the next two years, Cash recorded a string of successes for Sun, peaking with "I Walk the Line," which topped the country charts for six weeks in 1956. There was a wide range of material, from "Ballad of a Teenage Queen" to "Folsom Prison Blues" to "Get Rhythm," but the formula was consistent: Perkins’ crudely effective Fender Telecaster; Grant’s spare, solid bass; and Cash’s paper-dampened Martin D-28 keeping rhythm, rattling with that snare drum boom-chicka beat.
"That rhythm of the Morse code had a lot to do with the rhythm I felt in my music," says Cash. "Every once in a while, I hear Morse code on my shortwave radio, and I scribble it down. I can still copy it pretty fast, and I wonder why that’s stuck with me for so long. I realized that it’s got a rhythm that just begs to have a drum added to it, or a guitar. After I got out of the Air Force, I could still hear it, and when I started writing songs again, I had that rhythm in my head. And those three years in Germany, where I thought I’d thrown away my personal life—well, I like to feel that’s where I got it from."
After those first hits, Cash left Sun for Columbia Records, where he stayed for most of the next 30 years. It’s a period documented on last year’s three-CD Love God Murder, a collection Cash says "took no time at all" to compile. There was a lot of great music during these years—gospel songs like "Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord)," historic ballads like "The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer," and pop hits like "Ring of Fire"—but when Cash looks back, these are some of the recording sessions he wishes he had "been a little more serious about, done a little better."
At Columbia, Cash had the freedom to record concept albums about railroads, Native Americans, blue-collar workers, and the life of Jesus Christ. These were the years of his biggest hits and his busiest tour schedules. But as his popularity grew, so did his drug use, until he was popping amphetamines and barbiturates by the handful. His drug intake was legendary, and so was his appetite for destruction; wherever he performed, he left a trail of drunk tanks, car wrecks, and trashed hotel rooms. After reaching the Grand Ole Opry, he smashed the footlights with his microphone stand and was never asked back. In 1963 he hit rock bottom and left his wife and three daughters to move to New York City.
Making friends in Greenwich Village’s folk scene, Cash started taking new kinds of drugs and getting into even more trouble. At his worst, he went for days without sleeping, carrying a gun with him everywhere he went. At his best, he sobered up long enough to record again, cultivating an outlaw persona out of this downward spiral and releasing albums like Mean as Hell. When people talk about the mythic Johnny Cash, this is the man they remember: dark, violent, and unapologetic.
"Whether we like it not, they’ve always been the most fascinating characters in our history," says Cash of the antiheroes he sings about on Murder, which has sold more copies than Love and God combined. It’s a question he’s answered many times before, but even now, with his voice growing weaker, he’s proud of all the nasty thugs he’s written about. "Those are the songs I love to do," he says, "ever since I started in this business."
Read Part 2.
Excerpted from Acoustic Guitar magazine, June 2001, No.102. That issue also contained a transcription of Cash's "I'm leavin' Now," a story about online guitar communities, and a review of the latest guitars and gear.
Click here to read about Johnny Cash's instruments and gear.
