Johnny Cash FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Man in Black

Copyright © 2014 by C. Eric Banister

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

Published in 2014 by Backbeat Books

An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation

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33 Plymouth St., Montclair, NJ 07042

The FAQ series was conceived by Robert Rodriguez and developed with Stuart Shea.

Kevin Sport’s interview with Larry Butler used by permission.

Gun World magazine cover used by permission.

Every reasonable effort has been made to contact copyright holders and secure permissions. Omissions can be remedied in future editions.

Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Snow Creative Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Banister, C. Eric.

Johnny Cash FAQ : all that’s left to know about the man in black / C. Eric Banister.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Cash, Johnny. 2. Country musicians—United States—Biography. 3. Cash, Johnny

—Miscellanea. I. Title. II. Title: Johnny Cash frequently asked questions.

ML420.C265B36 2014

782.421642092—dc23

[B]

2014012206

www.backbeatbooks.com

To Brittany, Porter, and Claire

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Where Did All of the Old Songs Go? The Roots of Johnny Cash

2. We Were Just a Plain Ol’ Hillbilly Band: The Tennessee Two (and Three)

3. I Never Did Play Much Rock ’n’ Roll: The Sun Years

4. Country Boy, Ain’t Got No Blues: Sun LPs and EPs

5. He Changed His Clothes and Shined His Boots: Columbia 1959

6. One Day on the Hit Parade: The 1950s #1s

7. When Papa Played the Dobro This A-Way: Columbia 1960–62

8. You’re the One I Need: June Carter Cash

9. I Hate to Beg like a Dog for a Bone: Columbia 1963

10. As Long as the Moon Shall Rise: Columbia 1964

11. My Best Unbeaten Brother: Cash and Dylan

12. Pied Piper of the Desert, Roll On to the Sea: Columbia 1965

13. It’s the Song, the Sign of the Weary: Concept Albums

14. You Know the Only Song I Ever Learned to Play: Columbia 1966

15. You a Long-Legged Guitar Pickin’ Man: Columbia 1967–69

16. Gotta Sleep on the Floor Once More at City Jail: Prison Albums

17. There’s a Lot of Strange Men in Cell Block Ten: Inmates

18. But It Isn’t My Masterpiece: The 1960s #1s

19. Keep the Chilly Wind Off My Guitar: Columbia 1970

20. A Cowboy Met a Fiery Carny Queen: Columbia 1971

21. Stay Away from Crazy Horse: Columbia 1972

22. I’m Doin’ All Right for Country Trash: Columbia 1973

23. I Like My Honey from the Hives of Home: Columbia 1974

24. All of My Songs Remain Unsung: Columbia 1975

25. Get Your Dark Clouds off of Me: Columbia 1976

26. I Woke Up This Morning with a Song in My Heart: Columbia 1977

27. Baby, I Will Rock and Roll with You: Columbia 1978

28. No Fools, No Fun, Bull Rider: Columbia 1979

29. Lately I’ve Been Leanin’ Toward the Blues: The 1970s #1s

30. Her Body Was Made like a Song to Be Played: Columbia 1980

31. Sometimes I Go Crazy, Sometimes I Go Sane: Columbia 1981

32. John Taught Me a Whole Lot About Country Music: Columbia 1982

33. I Tell You Folks I’m Ragged but I’m Right: Columbia 1983

34. Warm Up My Limousine, Take Me to the Top of Some Ol’ Mountain: Columbia 1984

35. Like Desperados Waiting for a Train: The Highwaymen

36. You Know All the Songs as Well as I Do: Columbia 1985

37. Ain’t Gonna Hobo No More: Columbia 1986

38. The Time Has Come to Sing a Traveling Song: The 1980s #1

39. Sometimes I Reckon I Got Here Too Soon: The Mercury Years, 1987–91

40. I Went Out Walking Under an Atomic Sky: Back to Youth, 1991–93

41. I’m Gonna Break My Rusty Cage and Run: American 1993–95

42. Through Glasses Dark as These: American 1996–99

43. There Were Songs Before There Was Radio: American 2000–01

44. Voices Callin’, Voices Cryin’: American 2002–03

45. You Are a Shining Path: American: 2004–10

46. Christmas Times A-Comin’: Christmas in Cash-land

47. I’ll Go Somewhere and Sing My Songs Again: Posthumous Releases

48. Up Front There Ought to Be a Man in Black: Concert Videos

49. Till the Lord Comes and Calls Me Away: Gospel Recordings

Selected Bibliography

Foreword

Johnny Cash. The name resonates. Everywhere. With everyone; young, old, without regard to gender, race, or creed.

I knew Johnny Cash on a personal level for some forty years. As a child, he was my favorite singer and my hero. Later in life, he became my friend, a man who was humble, sincere, compassionate, complicated, and conflicted. Throughout the forty years I knew and observed him, he never fell off the pedestal I had placed him on when I was nine years old. Despite the recurring bouts with drug dependency, the career ups and downs, and the triumphs and tragedies he experienced throughout our friendship, he always remained the same human being. The fabric of the man may have unraveled at times, but his heart, soul, and integrity always endured.

During those four decades, Johnny and I spent a lot of time together, and I never ceased being his greatest fan. I launched his official website in 1996, well before more than a handful of celebrities even knew what a website was (and Johnny didn’t!). In fact, to put things into perspective, JohnnyCash.Com launched within six months of the Microsoft website.

As you will read in C. Eric Banister’s fine book, there were several Johnny Cashes in various carnations through his amazing fifty-plus-year career. Cash was many things to many people—a humble farm boy who sang of his childhood experiences back in Dyess, Arkansas, the young troubadour who drove to hundreds of concert dates a year, fueled by raw ambition and a determination to give the folks a show, the edgy rebel who knocked out every footlight on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, the man who nearly killed himself with amphetamines and barbiturates, all the while scoring millions selling records, the guy who took a recording crew into one of California’s most dangerous penitentiaries to record one of his best known albums, the entertainer who hosted a groundbreaking variety show on primetime television, the redeemed follower of Christ who threw himself into making a feature film on his savior, the superstar whose career skidded to a near halt in the 1980s after he was unceremoniously dropped from the record label he sold millions and millions of records on, and, finally, the aged-yet-hip icon who reinvigorated himself and his career after pairing with hip hop record producer Rick Rubin for a series of stark and brilliant records, which would expose him to an entirely new generation of fans.

This past year, I opened the Johnny Cash Museum in Nashville, Tennessee. I felt that it was akin to a crime for Johnny Cash to not have a major presence in the very town he nearly single-handedly put on the map by virtue of spending the majority of his life and career based in the city. Yet, despite his impact on the town, it had almost been denuded of any fingerprints he might have left behind. Other than a few T-shirts and souvenirs bearing his image, the downtown area visited by millions of tourists from around the world was nearly devoid of anything Cash. Today, we offer visitors an intimate and comprehensive exhibit chronicling the man’s personal and professional life in a setting that has received accolades and awards from the most prestigious critics and publications in the world. Johnny Cash is back in Nashville, and he’s here to stay.

What C. Eric Banister has accomplished on the pages that follow is something of a historical museum archive in words. Every day, visitors from around the world cause our museum team to dig into the Johnny Cash FAQ bag. Was he in prison? Why did he wear black? Did he and June really love each other as portrayed in the movie? These and many other questions arise daily. They never cease as Johnny’s impact, presence, and popularity increase every day, despite the fact that he passed over a decade ago.

Dig into this amazing collection of facts. Learn things you didn’t know about Johnny Cash’s career. The records, the influences, those he influenced, and much more. There are things I didn’t know, which I found on these pages. It’s a great reference and a great read. I know it will be placed among the books I reach for when I want to know more about my late, great friend.

Bill Miller

Founder of the Johnny Cash Museum

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the many writers I’ve read who have helped me gain insight and knowledge on this thing I love—music.

Thanks to the writers who’ve given me time to talk and who continue to produce great work that inspires me: David Cantwell, Don Cusic, Barry Mazor, Alanna Nash, and John Rumple.

Thanks to Dale Sherman, my fellow FAQ’er, who took a chance and recommended me to his editor. Thanks to Robert Rodriguez, that editor who took a chance and recommended me to Hal Leonard Performing Arts Publishing Group. Thanks to Backbeat Books editor Bernadette Malavarca for her immense patience and her guiding hand, and to publisher John Cerullo for running such a fine operation. Thanks to copyeditor Tom Seabrook for making my work presentable.

Thanks to the great Cash historians: Peter Lewry—your work and research is a fantastic resource and an honor to Cash’s enduring legacy; Mark Steipler—thank you for answering my questions and helping point me in interesting directions; and to the late John L. Smith, who did more Cash research than anyone and to whom this work is indebted. Bill Miller—you’ve made Nashville into the Mecca for Cash fans with the Johnny Cash Museum! The work and research you’ve put in is astounding and serves as an example of following one’s passion and honoring a friend’s legacy.

Thanks to my family: my Mom for always encouraging me to do what I love; my Dad for being a music fan; my Aunt Kathy for leaving behind some great records when she moved out of my Grandma’s; my Uncle Randy, who is still just as enthusiastic about a new music find as he was when I was in single digits thumbing through his record collection; Aaron, Joy, Aiden, Maggie, and Aubrie, thanks for the encouragement and laughs.

My greatest thanks go to the three who have to put up with me the most: my wife, Brittany, who put up with my weird moods, stacks of books, records, and CDs, and allowed me to pursue this. I adore you, and I love you more every day. Porter, a Cash fan since birth: thanks for letting Daddy miss a few things in order to write. Claire, my silly sweetie: I can come out of the laundry room now.

Introduction

I guess I have Dick Clark to thank for introducing me to Johnny Cash. Though I’m sure I had heard his music in the background of life, one moment at around age six stands out the most. My grandma lived just down the road from us when I was growing up, and we used to spend a lot of time at her house. My uncle and aunt had left behind records when they moved out, so I spent a lot of time listening through the stacks of 45s and LPs. One of them was a double album called Dick Clark: Twenty Years of Rock N’ Roll, and there, placed between Carl Perkins’ rockabilly rave-up Blue Suede Shoes and Fats Domino’s bouncy I’m Walkin’, I found I Walk the Line. The song stuck out—even to a six-year-old. It seemed darker than any of the other songs on the album. There was something about the singer that drew me in, made me listen.

This scenario isn’t unique to me. Countless people share—and probably will continue to share—the same story of the first time they heard Johnny Cash. His music was his own—incomparable to anyone else’s—and from the beginning, his unique talent captured listeners of all ages. In the early part of his career, he was claimed by country-music fans and young rockabillies alike, and by the end of his life, he had been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Gospel Music Hall of Fame, and the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Despite these accolades, it seems to me that his music has always been pushed into the background of any story told about him. Drug addiction became the central point of many of the stories written about him—even ones that he himself told. And after the drug addiction, the second headline is always the fairytale love story of Johnny and June Carter. That story often intermingles with the drug story, making June the savior that rescued him from certain doom.

Sure, Cash’s life had all of the makings of a Hollywood blockbuster, what with the girls and the money and the fame and the pain—and indeed it eventually became one, in the form of 2006’s Walk the Line. And sure, his life story tells a fascinating tale of caution and redemption, but what gets left behind is the music—the thing that everyone loves the most about him. Of all of the books written about him, none is fully focused on the music. And yet Cash left a legacy of recorded music that spanned forty-seven years. It is a legacy filled with incredible music, all of it worth examining.

Cash’s time at Sun Records may have been brief in the context of his whole career, but it produced some of his best-known and most definitive songs. The music he recorded at 706 Union Avenue laid the foundation for the sound he would carry through his whole career.

In the 1960s, Cash worked hard to grow as an artist, releasing concept albums on topics that interested him, from the history of the True West to the plight of the Native American. His career dipped through the mid-’60s, as addiction took hold, but even then he continued to produce hit records that endure to this day.

By the end of the decade, Cash had come into the light. He was now one of the biggest names in music. With a weekly television show and a string of #1 albums, he was an American icon as the 1970s dawned. He continued to grow as an artist, releasing vital music that is often overlooked today—in large part because it doesn’t fit in with the dark image of Cash the rebel—including a string of gospel recordings, into which he poured more time and energy than any of his other projects.

Those gospel recordings were Cash’s lifeline as he transitioned into the 1980s. His mainstream work often paled in comparison. The decade also brought the supergroup of the Highwaymen: Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson. The group went to the top of the charts, but Cash could no longer reach it as a solo artist. By the midpoint of the decade, Columbia Records, his label of over thirty years, had released him. He landed next at Mercury, where he made a series of albums that are largely overlooked.

In the early 1990s, Cash was a man adrift, releasing only a new gospel project and a Christmas album. And then he hooked up with Rick Rubin, for the American Recordings series. Those recordings found Cash a new audience, solidifying his reputation as a musical icon to fans of all ages.

The aim of this book is to expand on some of the music you might know about, and to introduce you to some of the music you might not have heard. To do that, we will be looking at some of the stories behind the songs and albums. We’ll put much of it in context, in terms both of Cash’s life and also whatever else was going on in the world of music at the time. And although it is true that chart success doesn’t always mean artistic success, we’ll examine Cash’s chart runs as a gauge of how the public, radio, and the industry accepted or rejected him at various points during his career.

C. Eric Banister

Scottsburg, IN

February 2014

1

Where Did All of the Old Songs Go?

The Roots of Johnny Cash

You wouldn’t believe how many different kinds of things he listened to, Marshall Grant told writer Hank Davis in 2006. He just absorbed everything he heard." On Personal File, also released in 2006, Cash himself can be heard, in a recording from 1973, introducing a song by recalling, Some of those old songs that I used to sing when I was a kid, I still remember every word to ’em.

J. R. Cash grew up in Depression-era Arkansas, and music became an escape for him—as it did for many people, young and old, right across the country. In 1935, when Cash was three, his family was selected to move from Kingsland, Arkansas, to a new home in the town of Dyess, a community that had sprang up under the New Deal to help farmers who needed a fresh start. The program was run by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, with each family chosen receiving twenty acres of land, a house, a barn, a mule, a cow, and the first year of groceries, all to be repaid once crops started coming up. The crop in that rich soil was cotton, but before it could be planted, the family would have to clear the land.

Johnny wasn’t the only member of the Cash family for whom music became a lifeline. In 1939, his eldest brother, Roy, began playing with a local group called the Delta Rhythm Ramblers. After a short stint on a radio show and victory in a local talent contest, Roy was drafted into the army, and was soon out of Dyess, leaving behind younger sister Louise, brothers Jack and J. R., and baby sister Reba.

Johnny continued to listen intently to the radio, dreaming of one day becoming one of the voices being broadcast. It was at this time that he first began to absorb the songs, learning as many as he could listen to. In introducing the song There’s a Mother Always Waiting at Home on Personal File, he says:

I learned a lot of them from the radio—I learned a lot of them from the boys that lived across the road, the Williams boys. There was Guy and Otis Williams, Jack Williams. They didn’t play the guitar or anything, but they sang a little bit, and they had a Victrola that they played those old records on. There was Cowboy Slim Rinehart, there was the Carter Family, and there was Jimmie Rodgers, and there was Clayton McMichen. There was the Georgia Crackers. There was Arthur Smith. There was Vernon Dalhart, songs like The Death of Floyd Collins. There was a song about Mother that I remember especially well. I believe Bradley Kincaid might have sung this song—I’m not sure. I remember a lot of his songs—I used to sing a lot of them.

In fact, this particular song was done not by Bradley Kincaid but by Goebel Reeves. In any case, these names—Dalhart, Carter, Rodgers—had a special importance in the formation of Cash as an artist.

Vernon Dalhart

Taking his name from two Texas towns located near to where he grew up, Marion Try Slaughter became Vernon Dalhart when he moved to New York to begin a music career. Though he was a classically trained singer, he didn’t hit pay dirt until he affected a Southern drawl in an audition for Thomas Alva Edison, who was looking for artists for his new label. Dalhart’s biggest success came with the recording of Wreck of the Old 97 b/w The Prisoner’s Song. The pairing proved to be a tremendous hit and became the first million-selling country record. It was released on at least forty-nine other labels under different names, and Dalhart became a star.

Cash first recorded a version of The Wreck of the Old 97 in 1957 and included it on his debut album, Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar. It also became a staple of his live performances.

The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers

Both of these artists were present at what has been termed the Big Bang of country music—when record man Ralph Peer made his way to Bristol, Tennessee, in 1927 to record new acts. Here, the solo act of Jimmie Rodgers and the family band of the Carter Family—husband and wife Sara and A. P. Carter plus Maybelle, who was Sara’s cousin and A. P.’s sister-in-law—made their legendary first recordings and launched careers that would influences scores of performers, including Johnny Cash.

Before and after marrying June, Cash was one of the Carter Family’s biggest cheerleaders.

Author’s collection

Cash drew from each of these pioneering acts throughout his career. He recorded ten songs closely associated with the original Carter Family trio, beginning in 1962 with I’ll Be All Smiles Tonight. At his first Newport Folk Festival appearance in 1964, he made a point of ending his set with Keep on the Sunnyside, and throughout his touring career he often ended his shows with Will the Circle Be Unbroken. He continued to honor the memory of the family in any way that he could.

Although Cash’s respect and admiration for Rodgers was deep, he only dipped into his catalogue five times, and only three of those recordings would be released on albums during his lifetime. One of them, Brakeman’s Blues, wasn’t even a complete take: though it dates back to a Sun recording session in 1956, it first saw the light of day on the 1990 import collection The Man in Black: 1954–1958.

In 1962, Cash took a swing at In the Jailhouse Now and connected with a hit. Webb Pierce’s version of the song had spent thirty-seven weeks on the Billboard charts in 1955, twenty-one of them at #1. Cash’s version spent only ten weeks on the chart, peaking at #8. He included it on The Sound of Johnny Cash, which also featured a version of I’m Free from the Chain Gang Now, a song made popular by Rodgers.

In 1962, Cash released his version of Jimmie Rodgers’ In the Jailhouse Now.

Private collection

The following year, 1963, Cash cut Waiting for a Train for his album Blood, Sweat and Tears. In 1969, he and Bob Dylan would ramble through something resembling T for Texas during their only session together. It remains unreleased. Finally, during the last act of his career, Cash recorded Rodgers’ 1937 song The One Rose (written by Lani McIntire) for his second American release, Unchained. He also returned to I’m Free from the Chain Gang Now during his later years, including it as the closing track on American V: A Hundred Highways.

Beyond the music, Cash sought various ways to honor the memory of Rodgers. Early in his career, he appeared—alongside two other heroes of his, Hank Snow and Ernest Tubb—at the 1957 Jimmie Rodgers Memorial Day, an annual event held in Meridian, Mississippi. Just after the release of his In the Jailhouse Now in 1962, he began to collect Rodgers memorabilia and the singer’s personal effects. That same year, he scheduled a concert at Carnegie Hall, a tribute to country, where his love for Rodgers was literally center stage, as Cash was wearing one of Rodgers’ Singing Brakeman outfits, on loan from the singer’s widow, Carrie. Cash had also began to tell reporters that he would be producing a movie based on the life of Jimmie Rodgers, with himself in the lead role.

The Louvin Brothers

The Louvin Brothers, Ira and Charlie, had a radio show with Smilin’ Eddie Hill at noon on WMPS, and Cash and the men he worked the fields with would listen to it during their lunch break. The Louvins and Hill then became the Lonesome Valley Trio and performed gospel songs. "Mr. Cash donated about two pages, maybe three pages [in his first autobiography, Man in Black], to telling when he first saw the Louvin Brothers, Charlie Louvin said in 2007. In fact, he said he got fired. He said he was the water boy, and he got in somebody’s truck and listened to our one o’clock gospel show on WMPS and he had to get out and carry water real quick and he forgot to turn the man’s radio off and it ran his battery down and he said he got fired for that."

The Louvins and Hill also toured churches and schools throughout the region, including one in Dyess:

Right about 1947, we played Dyess, Arkansas. My brother and I was working with Smilin’ Eddie Hill, and this little boy was standing out—John’s about five years younger than me, maybe six—and he was standing outside the door. It was my job to sell the tickets and when I got done selling tickets I was about to die for a bathroom and I said to him, Son, do you all have a bathroom? and he practically led me to the outhouse. And when I got through, when I came out, he was outside. When I came out I reached into my shirt pocket and got two soda crackers. And I was eating those soda crackers on the way back to the school building, and he said, Why are you eating those soda crackers? And I guess I gave him a smart-aleck answer—I said, To keep from starving to death. In his book he said for the next three or four years—right after he got into the business—the first three or four years he would always eat two soda crackers before he went on the stage. Which would have been the worst thing that you could do, [to] get those dry crackers in your throat, you know?

Brother Jack

A few years before Cash was introduced to the music of the Louvin Brothers, two events occurred in 1944 that would come to define his life. That year, as he turned twelve, he went forward during a service at the Baptist church his family attended to make a public profession of his faith. There is no doubt that the influence of his older brother Jack, to whom he looked up, had led J. R. forward in his decision. Jack, now aged fifteen, had committed himself to his calling to become a preacher. But he would never fulfill that call.

On a Saturday in May, J. R. decided it would be a good day for fishing, and asked his brother to come along. Jack declined, since he had the opportunity to earn $3 by going to the agriculture building of the high school to cut some wood slabs—$3 that the family could use. Jack and J. R. walked along the road together and then split up, J. R. heading for the fishing hole while Jack went to work. But J. R.’s fishing excursion was cut short by the sound of a car skidding to a halt on the dirt road behind him. It was his father, who yelled for him to immediately get into the car. There he found out that Jack had been seriously injured when a saw blade jumped out of place and cut through his abdomen. Jack lingered between life and death for a few days before seeming to come alive in new spirit. But then, with the family surrounding his bedside, he asked his mother if she could hear the angels singing. He told them he was looking forward, and it was beautiful. With that, on May 20, 1944, he slipped from this life to the next.

It was a devastating blow to young J. R. Just months earlier, he had pledged his loyalty to God, and he could tell how proud his mother and Jack were of that decision. He was God’s child now. Wouldn’t everything be perfect from now on? And yet here he stood, on a Sunday, the Lord’s day, watching the person to whom he looked up to the most—the one who had so encouraged him on his path—leave him forever.

Jack’s death was something Cash never really got over. In Man in Black, he writes, The memory of Jack’s death, his vision of heaven, the effect his life had on the lives of others, and the image of Christ he projected have been more of an inspiration to me, I suppose, than anything else that has ever come to me through any man. In his second book, Cash: The Autobiography, he adds, [Jack’s] been showing up in my dreams every couple of months or so, sometimes more often, ever since he died.… He’s a preacher, just as he intended to be, a good man and a figure of high repute.

J. R.’s sister Reba noted a change in him following Jack’s death, telling biographer Christopher Wren, He thought more and talked even less. The event led J. R. inward, and he began to express himself with stories and poems. Jack hadn’t only been his brother but also his best friend. Without him, the loneliness grew.

Ernest Tubb

In time, J. R. found other friends, and one in particular who shared his interest in music. Jesse Barnhill (or Pete, as he is referred to in some texts) lived just a few houses down from Cash and owned a guitar. Pete was crazy about music the way I was, Cash writes in Cash. He was the first person I knew who was that way. Barnhill shared J. R.’s love of the radio, and the two spent time listening to and imitating what they could. Barnhill had caught polio as a child, and his right hand and foot were withered, affecting how he walked but not how he played guitar. He could form chords with his left hand and beat out a rhythm with his right. He and J. R. spent hours singing the songs of their heroes, particularly those of Ernest Tubb and Hank Snow.

Cash recorded two songs in 1979, including this one, with his hero Ernest Tubb.

Private collection

Ernest Tubb was born in 1914 in Crisp, Texas. At age thirteen, he was captivated by a Jimmie Rodgers record, and later, after a few years of recording, playing shows, and doing radio, he found his own voice. He hit with Walking the Floor Over You in 1941 and became one of the biggest stars of country music and the Grand Ole Opry.

Cash and Tubb crossed paths several times, starting early in Cash’s career. They first met in Meridian, Mississippi, for the Jimmie Rodgers Memorial, and not long after that Tubb recorded Cash’s My Treasure. Cash returned the favor on his 1960 album Now There Was a Song, for which he recorded I Will Miss You When You Go, a 1953 album track for Tubb. In 1977, producer Pete Drake put together Ernest Tubb: The Legend and the Legacy, which paired Tubb with popular country artists of the time as a tribute to his influence. Among those included on the album, singing with Tubb on some of his best known songs, were Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, George Jones, Conway Twitty, and Johnny Paycheck. Cash appears on two songs, Jealous Loving Heart and Soldier’s Last Letter.

Hank Snow

As Ernest Tubb drew on one of Cash’s inspirations, Jimmie Rodgers, so Hank Snow drew on another: Vernon Dalhart. Born Clarence Eugene Snow in Brooklyn, Nova Scotia, Canada, on May 9, 1914, Snow discovered Dalhart’s records at a very early age and listened to them every chance he got. He learned the words to songs like The Prisoner’s Song and The Wreck of the Old 97, and entertained workers in nearby logging camps, accompanying himself on harmonica. Like Tubb, he discovered Jimmie Rodgers in his early teens, and he soon began to tread a similar path. After hearing the first record by him, nothing would hold me, he told historian Charles Wolfe. He received a guitar and began to copy as much Rodgers material as he could.

After initially finding success in his native Canada, Snow made his way to the States to begin playing WWVA’s Wheeling Jamboree and the Louisiana Hayride. On July 1, 1950, he released I’m Movin’ On, the song that made his career. It spent forty-four weeks on the Billboard charts, twenty-one of them at #1. A few further hits followed, including the 1962 tongue-twisting traveling song I’ve Been Everywhere.

Snow and Tubb were artists whose music Cash would continually return to, from his early days in Dyess with Jesse Pete Barnhill to sitting around at the Air Force barracks in Landsberg, Germany. As he was fond of saying in concert, Cash spent twenty years in the Air Force between 1950 and 1954. When his tour of duty ended, he made plans to move to Memphis, where his brother Roy worked for a car dealership. Roy had told him about a couple of guitar-playing mechanics he worked with, and Roy told the two mechanics, Marshall Grant and Luther Perkins, that his brother sang just like Hank Snow.

After first recording Two Timin’ Woman, Cash would return to Snow’s catalogue for his 1968 Folsom Prison set list with I’m Just Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail, a song written by Karl & Harty that Snow recorded and performed often. Cash pulled out I’ve Been Everywhere for his 1996 album Unchained, and it has since been featured in several television commercials. He also recorded I’m Movin’ On during those sessions, though it wouldn’t be released until after his death.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

In the excellent Good Rockin’ Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll, authors Colin Escott and Martin Hawkins note, Unlike almost all of his Sun colleagues, Cash grew up without the influence of black music. This was due not to prejudice but to circumstance. The government program that created Dyess wasn’t open to blacks, so there were no African Americans for him to learn from, as Hank Williams did from Tee-Tot Payne, or Bill Monroe from Arnold Schultz. Not until he moved to Memphis after being discharged from the Air Force in 1954 would he actively seek out the sounds of black music.

I heard a lot of blues, Cash told Escott and Hawkins. One day, on a sales trip for the Home Equipment Company, for whom he sold appliances door to door, he happened upon a gentleman playing the banjo on a front porch in one of Memphis’ African American neighborhoods. The man turned out to be performer and songwriter Gus Cannon, who had written Walk Right In and recorded it with his group, Cannon’s Jug Stompers, in 1929.

My favorite music is people like Pink Anderson, Robert Johnson, king of the Delta blues singers, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Papa John Creach, Sister Rosetta Tharpe! Cash told Bill Flanagan in 1988. I love her! I’ve recorded some of her songs.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was a groundbreaking gospel performer who utilized her guitar playing as much as she did her voice. Born in 1915 in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, Tharpe began performing at the age of three. By age five, she and her mother had moved to Chicago in search of better opportunities. She began to perform at churches and religious events in the early 1930s, making a name for herself in gospel music circles, but in 1938 she took a hard left and moved to New York, where she began a career singing secular music at the Cotton Club. After recording a series of records with Lucky Millender and his big band, she began to tire of the club scene, and in 1944 she made a triumphant return to gospel music. Her big hit came that same year with Strange Things Happening Every Day, which spent eleven weeks on the charts, peaking at #2. Her slashing guitar rhythm and the boogie-woogie piano backup laid a foundation for the rock ’n’ roll to come.

The song received a second life when disc jockey Dewey Phillips began to spin it on his Memphis radio show Red, Hot & Blue. By now, there were people hanging around Memphis who had loved her music for years and were now incorporating it into their new recording careers—people like Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash. In Man in Black, Cash recalls how, during his time in the Air Force, his friend C. V. White—the same man who later inspired Blue Suede Shoes—had a Sister Rosetta album that included Strange Things. C.V. would let me borrow that record album about once a week, and I’d listen to her sing that song over and over again, Cash writes. Many years would pass before Cash covered any Tharpe songs, but he would eventually include three on his 1979 album A Believer Sings the Truth: There Are Strange Things Happening Every Day, Don’t Take Everybody to Be Your Friend, and This Train Is Bound for Glory.

Blues in the Mississippi Night and Leadbelly

"Blues in the Mississippi Night is my all-time favorite album," Cash told Bill Flanagan in 1988. The album, originally released in 1947, consists of folklorist Alan Lomax’s recordings of three then-unidentified blues musicians—later revealed to be Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim, and Sonny Boy Williamson—as they take turns singing songs and discussing the issues of racism in the South and their personal experiences dealing with it.

The work of John Lomax and his son Alan fascinated Cash, who listened intently to the field recordings they captured, including those John did at Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana, in 1934. It was there that Lomax was presented to inmate LSP #19469, a prisoner named Huddie Ledbetter. Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, had spent time in various prisons around Texas, off and on, since 1918. When Lomax brought his equipment to Angola in 1933, Ledbetter was able to reel off seven songs, including Frankie and Albert (his version of Frankie and Johnny) and an original entitled Irene. Lomax returned in 1934 to record fourteen songs, including new takes of several of the songs he got the year before.

On his release from prison, Ledbetter went to work for Lomax, accompanying him on a song-collecting trip through Arkansas. To help ease the nerves of the people they found to record, Ledbetter would be recorded singing a song as an example of the types of songs Lomax desired, and to show how recording worked. They made a few more trips in the area before heading north. There, Ledbetter became not a man Friday but an entertainer, presented by Lomax in a concert setting. One of his most popular songs was his 1933 original Irene, which he now called Goodnight, Irene. He continued recording and performing until December 6, 1949, when he passed away from a bone infection.

Cash picked up records like these at the Home of the Blues, his local record shop in Memphis. Of all the black artists Cash heard, it was Leadbelly’s songs that cropped up the most in his early repertoire. On Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar, he included his version of Rock Island Line, a song that Leadbelly had turned from a prison work song to a train song. On November 12, 1957, Cash recorded Goodnight, Irene, although it wouldn’t see release until 1964. Another prison work song—one that was worked over a bit by Cash—was I Got Stripes, which Leadbelly often performed as On a Monday. Cash’s version spent twenty weeks on the charts, peaking at #4, and became a crowd favorite after a live recording of it appeared on At Folsom Prison. He returned to Ledbetter’s catalogue in 1962, recording In Them Old Cotton Fields Back Home for The Sound of Johnny Cash and a version of the work song Pick a Bale O’ Cotton as the B-side to the single Bonanza.

2

We Were Just a Plain Ol’ Hillbilly Band

The Tennessee Two (and Three)

Marshall Grant says that the sound of Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two was born in the first eight bars of the first song they played, and that after that they spent a long time trying to lose it. Luckily, they didn’t.

The boom-chicka-boom sound is as instantly recognizable as the voice that follows it. Author Bill Friskics-Warren has called it a sound as enduring as Bo Diddley’s hambone beat, Ray Price’s 4/4 shuffle, or the one-chord funk vamps of James Brown & the JBs. Throughout his career, Cash would add to that basic template, expanding his band to an eight-piece at times, but he always returned to his most distinctive sound—a sound that rose from Memphis, and the hands of two mechanics and an appliance salesman.

The Tennessee Two: Marshall Grant (Bass, 1954–80) and Luther Perkins (Guitar, 1954–68)

You won’t find Flatts, North Carolina, the birthplace of Marshall Grant, on a map. It’s not a town, he told Christopher S. Wren in 1970. It’s not a community. It was twenty-one people when I lived there. And as far as I know, it’s still twenty-one people. The population may have increased since then, or it might have died out; the location itself was nestled in the Smokey Mountains, where the Grant family—mom, dad, and twelve brothers and sisters—owned twenty acres. The family retained the land, but around 1940, when Marshall was twelve, they moved closer to a larger city—Bessemer City, twenty-five miles west of Charlotte—where they became cotton sharecroppers.

At age eighteen, Grant decided to follow a brother who had moved to Memphis to become a jeweler. Being mechanically inclined, Grant began to train to be a watchmaker. In 1946, after marrying his girlfriend, Etta, he decided that a career change was in order, and found a job running parts for mechanics at C. M. Booth Motor Company. His employers soon noticed his aptitude for things mechanical, and six months later, Grant was offered a job as a mechanic.

In the garage, Grant met a fellow country-music fan named A. W. Red Kernodle, who played some steel guitar. At the time, Kernodle didn’t have his own instrument, so Grant bought one his new friend could use. Kernodle would come over and play, and sometimes they would invite a few other pickers to join them. The duo would play country and gospel favorites while Etta spent time with Kernodle’s wife and three daughters.

Luther Perkins had as much to do with Cash’s sound as Cash himself did. Cash’s 1959 single was a tongue-in-cheek tribute to his stone-faced guitarist.

Private collection

With his family growing, Kernodle was on the lookout for a higher-paying job, and he soon found one as a salesman at Automobile Sales, a large DeSoto-Plymouth dealership a few blocks down the street. In 1951, Kernodle told Grant that Automobile Sales was looking for a new mechanic, and, as it happened, C. W. Booth was closing its doors, so Grant went to talk to the service manager. A week later, Grant started his new job, where he was introduced to the mechanic who worked in the spot next to him: an Arkansas native named Roy Cash.

Two years later, a tall, lanky, black-haired man started work a couple of bays over from Grant. When they finally got around to meeting, Grant learned that the new mechanic was also a musician, so one evening Grant invited him to come out and join him, Kernodle, and a few other picking buddies. As it turned out, Grant later recalled of the man, he was probably the best musician of us all.

Luther Perkins was born in Memphis, the son of a Baptist minister, but the family soon relocated to Como, Mississippi. As a preacher’s son, he was probably well aware of the many biblical stories about the power of dreams. One morning, when he was nine years old, Perkins awoke with vivid memories of that night’s dream, in which he had journeyed to a rainbow’s end and found a pot of gold. The dream was so vivid that he knew exactly where it was. He and his brother found the spot and started to dig, and they soon discovered what was left of an old house. Ingeniously, Luther decided to dig up the individual bricks and take them to a local construction company, which bought them from him for two cents apiece. In the end, Perkins brought along enough bricks to earn himself $9, which he used to buy his first guitar.

In 1942, the Perkins family moved