Johnny Cash

Johnny Cash: The Man Who Sang for the Locked Up

In a listening post at Landsberg, West Germany, a staff sergeant from Arkansas sat taking Morse code off Soviet army transmissions. He was reportedly among the first Americans to learn that Stalin was dead. Fourteen months after his discharge he had a record on the country charts about a man in Folsom Prison who shot someone in Reno just to watch him die. Almost nothing about Johnny Cash's life ran in the direction you would expect.

Dyess, Arkansas

He was born J. R. Cash on 26 February 1932 in Kingsland, Arkansas — initials only, no name behind them. In 1935 the family moved to Dyess, a New Deal resettlement colony built to give Depression farmers a chance, and from the age of five he picked cotton alongside them.

The defining event came in 1944. His older brother Jack, fifteen, was cut almost in two by an unguarded table saw at work and took a week to die. Cash carried the guilt of it for the rest of his life, and it is not hard to hear where the preoccupation with sin, punishment and undeserved survival in his songwriting came from. That same year he was converted at the Central Baptist Church in Dyess.

Morse Code in Landsberg

He enlisted in the Air Force on 7 July 1950, trained in San Antonio, and was posted to the 12th Radio Squadron Mobile in Germany as a Morse operator. He came out on 3 July 1954 a staff sergeant, moved to Memphis, and within months was standing in front of Sam Phillips at Sun Records with a guitarist named Luther Perkins and a bass player named Marshall Grant.

Boom-Chicka-Boom

The Tennessee Two were not much of a band, which turned out to be the point. Perkins's muted electric guitar and Grant's upright bass produced a clipped, freight-train rhythm — the "boom-chicka-boom" — under a voice that sat lower than any voice on country radio. "Hey, Porter" and "Cry! Cry! Cry!" came in 1955. "Folsom Prison Blues" went top five country. "I Walk the Line" went to number one country and into the pop top twenty.

The Country Music Hall of Fame's assessment is worth quoting because it is so unusually blunt about how little he changed: "the style Johnny Cash set early on changed little over the years; the addition of drummer W. S. 'Fluke' Holland in 1960 merely reinforced his trademark rhythm-based sound." He signed to Columbia in 1958 and stayed twenty-eight years.

Pills, and June

From the late 1950s he was heavily addicted to amphetamines and barbiturates — stimulants to get through the touring, then barbiturates to come down. By the middle of the 1960s it was a crisis. It cost him his marriage to Vivian Liberto in 1966, and in 1967 he was arrested in Walker County, Georgia, carrying prescription pills after a car wreck.

June Carter, of the Carter Family, had been touring with him for years; their duet "Jackson" won a Grammy in 1967. He proposed on stage in London, Ontario, on 22 February 1968, and they married nine days later in Franklin, Kentucky. She and her family moved into his house to get him off the drugs. It worked, more or less, for a while, and she stayed through every relapse for thirty-five years.

Folsom and San Quentin

He had been playing prisons since the late 1950s — the first notable one at San Quentin on New Year's Day 1958. *At Folsom Prison*, recorded in January 1968, and *At San Quentin* the following year both went to number one on the country chart, and San Quentin went to the top of the *Billboard* pop album chart as well. It carried "A Boy Named Sue," a Shel Silverstein joke that went to number one country and number two pop.

The prison records did something no amount of publicity could: they put his sympathies beyond argument. From June 1969 to March 1971 he hosted *The Johnny Cash Show* on ABC from the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and used network television to introduce Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Linda Ronstadt and Ray Charles to a country audience.

The Man in Black

The black stage clothes started as practicality and became a position: he wore them, he said, on behalf of the poor and the hungry and those broken by age or by drugs. He meant it in specific ways. In 1964 he recorded *Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian*, an entire album about the oppression of indigenous Americans, at a moment when country radio had no use for the subject. The Seneca Nation's Turtle Clan adopted him in 1966; he raised money for schools on the Rosebud Reservation. He answered an altar call at Nashville's Evangel Temple on 9 May 1971, recorded gospel albums and eventually the entire New King James New Testament, and in 1986 wrote: "I'm a Christian. Don't put me in another box."

Dropped by the major labels, he signed in 1994 with Rick Rubin's American Recordings, which stripped him back to a voice and a guitar and handed him other people's songs. *American IV: The Man Comes Around* (2002) contained his version of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt"; the video won a Grammy and became the most famous four minutes of his late career.

Why Johnny Is Called a Genius

The case cannot rest on musicianship, and it is more interesting because it can't. Cash's vocal range was narrow, his guitar playing rudimentary, and his band's arrangement vocabulary about three ideas wide. The Hall of Fame's own summary — that his style "changed little over the years" — would be an indictment of almost anyone else. He found one sound in 1955 and used it, essentially unaltered, for half a century.

What he had instead was authority, and it is worth saying precisely what that consists of, because it is a real and rare capacity rather than a compliment. It is the ability to make a listener believe that the person singing has personally earned the right to the story. Partly that is timbre — a bass-baritone that carried more moral weight than its actual range justified. Partly it is that he chose material with obsessive consistency: the convict, the sharecropper, the dispossessed Native American, the sinner who knows he is one. He described himself as "the biggest sinner of them all," and the songs never let him off. That consistency is why the Rubin recordings work; at seventy, singing a young man's song about self-harm, he sounds less like a cover artist than like a man arriving at a conclusion. He has been called "the philosopher-prince of American country music," and the phrase is fair if you understand the philosophy as moral rather than intellectual.

The counter-case is real. He spent decades at Columbia making a great deal of ordinary music between the landmarks, and much of the outlaw legend was iconography — the criminal record that underwrote the prison albums amounted to pills in a car after a crash. He was a magnificent interpreter and a good but not prolific songwriter; a substantial share of his most famous late performances are other people's compositions. Call it the genius of a persona so completely inhabited that it stopped being one.

Legacy

June Carter Cash died on 15 May 2003. He told Rick Rubin, "You have to keep me working because I will die if I don't have something to do," and recorded until 21 August. He died on 12 September 2003, aged seventy-one, and is buried near his Hendersonville home. He took the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999 and the National Medal of Arts in 2001, and he sits in the Country Music Hall of Fame (1980, which he called his greatest professional achievement), the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame (1977), the Rockabilly Hall of Fame (1999), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1992) and the Gospel Music Hall of Fame (2010). Apart from Elvis Presley, he is the only performer inducted into both the Country and the Rock and Roll halls.

Achievements

• National Medal of Arts
• Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award — 1999
• Grammy Legend Award — 1991
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — 1992
• Kennedy Center Honors
• Notable work: At Folsom Prison
• Notable work: Folsom Prison Blues
• Notable work: I Walk the Line
• Instruments: guitar and voice
• Genres: country music, outlaw country and gospel music