Johnny Cash’s Personal Relationships Immortalized in Son’s New Book
Even in death, Johnny Cash remains a larger-than-life figure. Thanks to the blockbuster film Walk the Line and a recording catalog that stretches across six decades, his dramatic story still resonates with every generation.
The legendary figure’s only son, John Carter Cash, knows that narrative well. Yet in his own memoir, House of Cash: The Legacies of My Father, Johnny Cash, the 45-year-old shows a more personal side of his dad. There are tales of boating trips and Bible trivia contests and even a handwritten recipe for homemade veggie burgers.
It’s immediately clear upon meeting him that Cash has inherited his parents’ welcoming spirit. Once you’re comfortably seated at a kitchen table inside the Cash Cabin recording studio in Hendersonville, Tennessee, he’s happy to pour a cup of coffee (black, naturally) and talk about the family legacy one on one.
“This was just a getaway,” he says. “This was just a place in the woods to go do music. I would sit here with Dad and we’d spend the night. There are beds upstairs. He would fry eggs and make chili. He had his defining recipes. He cooked for me quite a bit because we’d spend time alone together, whether fishing or hunting or just getting away.”
Published in hardcover in 2012, House of Cash took John Carter Cash five years to write. That’s largely due to the sheer volume of notebooks stashed in the family’s office vault after his mother, June Carter Cash, and his father both died in 2003. Their son remembers finding these documents “in total chaos.” But you’d hardly guess it from the tidy paperback edition of House of Cash released last month.
For the last 12 years, the younger Cash has been the caretaker of his parents’ legacy, from curating CD compilations to loaning memorabilia to museums. It’s undoubtedly a daunting task, yet he takes pride in his work. And he’s always careful to honor the family name. That means no alcohol or tobacco endorsements, which his father always declined in his lifetime.
“That’s one thing that’s been my creed with Dad — try to run it as if he were still sitting in the room,” he says.
The Cash Cabin is decorated with engaging heirlooms, including a hand-drawn poster of how to play “I Walk the Line” on guitar, given to John Carter Cash as a child by his father. Getting up from the table, he points out the autographs scrawled on the fireplace mantle, next to a “JC” branded into the wood. That black etching coincides with the 1979 construction of the cabin.
Later he explains that the framed photos of a turtle and crab were taken by his father in Jamaica. Large black-and-white photos of Johnny and June hang from nearly every wall.
“You find these treasures in spirit, first of all,” he says. “To me, those are the greatest treasures — the personal letters between my parents. The things that show spiritual marks in his life, like when he began to have a relationship with my mother’s father, Ezra. His spirit modified and became a lot stronger. And then the letters to me, of course. But there was so much there and it begged to be preserved; it begged to be put [together] in the right away.”