Johnny Cash had a voice that rumbled as deep as bone and songs that secured his reputation as one of the greats of country music. Now, seven years after his death, his final album, American VI: Ain't No Grave, will be released on 26 February – which would have been his 78th birthday. But while his millions of fans may have believed Cash to be an all-American outlaw, the man himself was obsessed with his Scottish roots.
The unlikely tale begins in the late 1970s when Cash was returning to the United States and found himself seated next to Major Michael Crichton-Stuart, hereditary keeper of Falkland Palace in the Kingdom of Fife on the east side of Scotland. Cash mentioned that he had heard that his family originated in Scotland. Crichton-Stuart told the singer that he knew this to be the case since there were farms and streets in Fife that still bore the Cash name.
Inspired by the chance meeting on the plane, Cash visited a genealogist and discovered that he was of Scottish descent and that his clan had originated around the 12th century in the Strathmiglo area of Fife. The connection was traced back to when the niece of Malcolm IV (1153-1165) – who was named Cash or Cashel – married the Earl of Fife. The first American Cash connection came in 1612 when mariner William Cash sailed from Scotland to Salem, Massachusetts, with a boatload of pilgrims.
What may to others have appeared a tenuous Celtic connection was for the country star something altogether more profound and meaningful. The shared roots of country music and Celtic music inspired Cash to visit Scotland and he travelled to Fife at least three times – most notably in 1981 when he recorded a Christmas special for US television.
Local people were startled to see Cash, dressed in trademark black trench coat and battered leather boots, walking the streets of their tiny town with fellow singer Andy Williams. Bob Beveridge, who runs a secondhand violin store in Falkland, was charged with looking after Cash while he was in town.
"He was a lovely man," Beveridge recalled. "He spent most of his time inquiring about the local people rather than the other way round. There is a wooden post outside the palace and I remember seeing Johnny just perching on that post and talking to anyone who would walk past."
Beveridge, who still lives in Falkland, will reveal in a BBC Radio 4 documentary how, seven years ago, he bumped into Cash's daughter outside his store. "I asked her: 'What's your name', and she told me it was Rosanne Cash, and I said: 'That's strange because Johnny Cash also traced his family to here.' 'That was my dad,' she said. So I went upstairs and dug out my old photographs of her dad and me and told her what a wonderful man he was and she burst out crying. Ever since then she has regularly been in touch with me."
Rosanne was in Fife only months after her father's death. "There was something about going there and feeling so connected and welcomed that satisfied my grief and soothed it," she said. "The knowledge that I was returning to the place where our family's story started and going to somewhere that gave my father so much pleasure and pride."
The links between Cash and Scotland were also musical. "Going further back into our Celtic past made him realise that this was where he derived his tone of voice, the mournful quality to his music," she said, "and it was that sense of place and time that was passed on to him and then on to me."
Rosanne has returned frequently to Fife, visiting Falkland Palace and driving around searching for places that carried the Cash name. She paid tribute to the Cash connection with Fife in a song called 'Good Intent', after the ship that carried the first Cash across the Atlantic in the 17th century.
The connection that her father felt with his Scottish heritage endured until his death. "Our family was descended from King Malcolm IV of Scotland," she said, "and when my dad was very ill and in his last years of life whenever he visited hospital he did not check in as Johnny Cash – he always went under the name of Malcolm."
Johnny Cash Of Easter Cash, presented by Sarfraz Manzoor, can be heard next Saturday at 10.30am on BBC Radio 4
www.sarfrazmanzoor.co.uk
