Johnny Cash
John R. Cash (February 26, 1932 - September 12, 2003) was an American country music singer and songwriter, known to his fans as "the man in black." In a career that spanned almost four decades, he was the personification of country music to many Americans and others around the world who had no other knowledge or interest in that art form. His gravelly voice and the distinctive sound of his Tennessee Two backing band were instantly recognizable to millions.
Biography
Daddy Sang Bass
He was born J.R. Cash in Kingsland, Arkansas, the son of a poor farmer. His family soon moved into a farm in Dyess, Arkansas—provided cheaply by the government as part of the New Deal—and by age five he was working in the cotton fields. His early memories were dominated by gospel music and radio. He began playing guitar and writing songs as a young boy and in high school sang on a local radio station. He was dubbed "John" upon enlisting as a radio operator in the United States Air Force, which refused to accept initials as his name. Thereafter, he was known as Johnny and sometimes John R. While an airman in Germany, Cash wrote one of his most famous songs, "Folsom Prison Blues".
Going to Memphis
After his term of service ended, Cash moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where he sold appliances and studied to be a radio announcer. At night, he played with guitarist Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant (the Tennessee Two). Cash visited the Sun Records studio, hoping to garner a recording contract. Sun producer Cowboy Jack Clement met with the young singer first, and suggested that Cash return to meet producer Sam Phillips. After auditioning for Phillips, singing mainly gospel tunes, Phillips told him to "go home and sin, then come back with a song I can sell." Cash eventually won over Phillips and Clement with new songs delivered in his early frenetic style. His first recording at Sun, "Cry Cry Cry", was released in 1955, meeting with reasonable success on the country hit parade.
His next record, "Folsom Prison Blues", made the country Top 5, and "I Walk the Line" was number one on the country charts, making it into the pop charts Top 20. In 1957, Johnny Cash became the first Sun artist to release a long-playing album. Though Sun's most consistently best-selling and prolific artist at that time, Cash began to feel constrained by his contract with the small label. Elvis Presley had already left the label, and Phillips was focusing most of his attention and promotion on Jerry Lee Lewis. The following year, Cash left Sun to sign a lucrative offer with Columbia Records where his single "Don't Take Your Guns to Town" would become one of his biggest hits.
Ring of Fire
As his career was taking off in the early 1960s, Johnny Cash became addicted to amphetamines and barbiturates. Though friends joked about his "nervousness" and erratic behavior, his wild activities sometimes landed him in jail, charged with a variety of offenses. Despite these problems, his record "Ring of Fire" went to number one on the country charts and broke the Top 20 on the pop charts. The song was co-written by June Carter and Merle Kilgore, but the signature mariachi-style horn arrangement was conceived by Cash, who claimed to have heard it in a dream.
Although he carefully cultivated a romantic outlaw image, he surprisingly spent no time in prison and very little time behind bars. While on tour in 1965, he was arrested by the narcotics squad in El Paso, Texas. Though the officers suspected that he was smuggling heroin from Mexico, he was actually smuggling illegal amphetamines inside his guitar case. He only received a suspended sentence. He was also arrested the next year in Starkville, Mississippi for trespassing late at night onto private property to pick flowers. More notably, he voluntarily entered California's Folsom State Prison in 1968 to perform 19 songs in a classic live concert that was recorded in front of approximately 2,000 convicted felons.
The mid 1960s saw Cash release a number of concept records, including Ballads Of The True West (1965) -- an experimental double record mixing authentic frontier songs with Cash's spoken narration, let down by the modern arrangements -- and Bitter Tears (1964), with songs highlighting the plight of the native Americans. However, his drug addiction deepened, and his destructive behaviour led to a divorce and numerous problems performing.
For his album, Bitter Tears, Cash recorded the Peter LaFarge song called "The Ballad of Ira Hayes". The song told the true saga of Hayes, a Pima Indian who was one of the Marine heroes of the epic WWII battle at Iwo Jima. Despite his heroism, Hayes returned home to crushing despair and to the racism that never disappeared: "Ira Hayes returned a hero, celebrated throughout the land / He was wined and speeched and honoured, everybody shook his hand / But He was just a Pima Indian, no water, no home, no chance / At home nobody cared what Ira had done, and when do the Indians dance?" Though "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" was a No. 3 country single, many stations refused to play it, deeming it too risky. Cash took out a full-page ad in Billboard denouncing country radio for its reluctance. " 'Ballad of Ira Hayes' is strong medicine," he wrote. "So is Rochester -- Harlem -- Birmingham and Vietnam."
Flesh and Blood
The personal problems continued until he moved to [[Hendersonville, Tennessee (outside of Nashville), purchasing a home at Old Hickory Lake, next door to his friend Roy Orbison When Orbison's home burned down in 1968, claiming the lives of his two young sons, Cash was profoundly affected by the incident. He began the long, hard road to recovery, relying heavily on his friends and his new wife, June Carter (a member of the Carter Family). The love ballad "Flesh and Blood" is the first of many songs Cash would write about his lifelong love for his wife.
With his wife's help, and influenced by a religious conversion experienced during a failed suicide attempt, he became a born-again Christian and overcame his addictions. Soon, Johnny Cash released his most successful album ever, titled Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison. The following year, he released another prison album, Johnny Cash at San Quentin, including Shel Silverstein's "A Boy Named Sue", released as a single. "A Boy Named Sue" went to number one on the country charts and to number two on the US Top Ten pop charts.
The Man In Black
Immensely popular, and an imposing tall figure, he began performing dressed all in black, wearing a long black knee-length coat, causing him to be dubbed "The Man in Black." This stemmed from the fact that most of the major acts in his day wore rhinestones and cowboy boots, and he wanted to express something different. In 1971, Johnny wrote the song "Man in Black" to help explain his dress code: "I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down, / Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town, / I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime, / But is there because he's a victim of the times."
In 1969 he had his own television show on the ABC network. Notable rock artists appeared on his show, including Neil Young and Bob Dylan, who was just returning to public life after his 1967 motorcycle accident. Another artist who received a major career boost from the Johnny Cash Show was songwriter Kris Kristofferson. During a live performance of Kristofferson's "Sunday Morning Coming Down", Cash made headlines when he refused to change the lyrics to suit network executives, singing the song with references to marijuana intact: "On the Sunday morning sidewalks / Wishin', Lord, that I was stoned".
In the mid-'70s, Cash's popularity and hit songs began to decline, but his autobiography, titled Man in Black was published in 1975 and sold 1.3 million copies. (A second, "Cash: The Autobiography", appeared in 1998). In 1980, Cash became the Country Music Hall of Fame's youngest living inductee at 48, but during the 1980s his records failed to make a major impact on the country charts, though 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 two hit albums.
As his relationship with record companies and the Nashville establishment soured, he occasionally lapsed into self-parody, notably on "Chicken In Black". After being dropped from his recording contract with Columbia Records, he had a short stint with MCA Records that also ended in failure.
Delia's Gone
His career was rejuvenated in the 1990s. Though unwanted by major labels, he was approached by producer Rick Rubin and offered a contract with Rubin's "American Recordings" label, better known for rap and hard rock than country music. Under Rubin's supervision, he recorded the album American Recordings (1994) in his front room, accompanied only by his guitar. The video for the first single, the murder ballad "Delia's Gone", was put into rotation on MTV. The album was well received by critics, while his versions of songs by more modern artists such as heavy metal band Danzig and Tom Waits helped to bring him a new audience. 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 surprising commercial success.
For his second album with Rubin, 1998's Unchained, Cash enlisted the accompaniment of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. In addition to many of Cash's own compositions, Unchained contained songs by Soundgarden ("Rusty Cage") and Beck ("Rowboat"), as well as a guest appearance from Flea, bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
I Won't Back Down
In 1997 Cash was diagnosed with the neurodegenerative disease Shy-Drager syndrome -- a diagnosis that was later altered to autonomic neuropathy, associated with diabetes -- and his illness forced him to curtail his touring, and he was hospitalised in 1998 with severe pneumonia, which damaged his lungs. The album A Solitary Man (2000) contained his response to the illness, typified by a version of Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down", as well as a powerful reading of U2's "One".
Cash released American IV: The Man Comes Around (2002) consisting partly of original material and partly of covers, some quite surprising. The video for "Hurt", a song written by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, was nominated in seven categories at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards and won the award for Best Cinematography. It also won a Grammy Award for best short form video at the 2004 Grammy awards.
His wife, June Carter Cash, died due to complications following heart valve surgery on May 15, 2003 at the age of 71.
Less than four months after his wife's death, Johnny Cash died due to complications from diabetes, which resulted in respiratory failure, while hospitalized at Baptist Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee. He was interred next to his wife in Hendersonville Memory Gardens near his home in Hendersonville, Tennessee.
Awards
Over the course of his career, Johnny Cash won 11 Grammy awards, one of which came for a 1985 album with Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis. Titled, "The Class Of '55," the record celebrated their debut days at Sun Records. He received a Grammy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1999.
Johnny Cash was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1980 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. In 1996 he was honored with a Kennedy Center Award and he has a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6320 Hollywood Blvd.
In 2002, he was honored at the Americana Awards show with a "Spirit of Americana Free Speech Award".
Legacy
In recognition of his life long support of SOS Children's Villages his family invited friends and fans to donate to SOS Children's Villages in his memory. He had a personal link with the SOS village in Ammersee in Diessen, Germany near where he was stationed as a GI and also with the SOS Children's Village Barrat Town, by Montego Bay near his holiday home in Jamaica.
A boxed 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.
Most popular songs
- "Hey Porter"
- "Cry, Cry, Cry"
- "Folsom Prison Blues"
- "The Ballad of Ira Hayes"
- "I Walk the Line"
- "Don't Take Your Guns to Town"
- "Ring of Fire"
- "Orange Blossom Special"
- "Daddy Sang Bass"
- "A Boy Named Sue"
- "Hurt"
- "Personal Jesus"
- "Man in Black"
Samples
- Download sample "I Walk the Line"