Johnny Cash: Remembering the Incomparable Legend of Country, Rock and Roll
This was originally published in the October 13, 2003 issue of Rolling Stone shortly after Johnny Cash‘s death.
For so long it seemed that even death would have to back off from a final confrontation with the daunting eminence of Johnny Cash. Even after the singer was found to have an incurable, degenerative disease in 1997, he did not back down. Despite frequent hospitalizations, he recorded some of the best music of his career, made himself available for interviews, oversaw reissues of his extensive catalog of albums and made a heart-stopping video that racked up six nominations at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards. On the night nearly six years ago when, from a concert stage in Michigan, he first publicly announced that he was ill, he said of his disease, “I refuse to give it some ground in my life.” As always with Johnny Cash, his word proved rock-solid.
But when June Carter Cash, his wife of thirty-five years and the exquisite love of his life, died suddenly in May, it became anybody’s guess how long Cash would be able to tolerate this world without her. This was the woman for whom he had written “Meet Me in Heaven”: “At the end of the journey,” he sang, “When our last song is sung/Will you meet me in heaven someday?” Perhaps Bono, who invited Cash to perform on U2‘s Zooropa put it best when the subject of Cash’s death came up. “You know, maybe it’s not that sad,” he said. “I mean, it’s sad for us. But June went off to prepare the house. And he wasn’t long behind her.”
The incomparable Johnny Cash, the self-proclaimed Man in Black, a giant of country music and one of the founding fathers of rock & roll, died on September 12th in Nashville, of complications from diabetes. He was seventy-one years old. He was a songwriter most noted for his ability – in classics such as “I Walk the Line,” “I Still Miss Someone,” “Folsom Prison Blues” and “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town” – to distill complex existential dilemmas into the common imagery of everyday speech. It was a talent perfectly suited to his sturdy baritone voice, a no-nonsense instrument that made every lyric he sang sound as if it had been honed to its absolute, incorruptible essence. He won a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and, other than Elvis Presley, he is the only performer to be elected to both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
And if there were a hall of fame for creating larger-than-life personae, Cash would no doubt have been elected to it as well. His 1971 song “Man in Black” codified an image that the singer had assumed naturally for more than fifteen years at that point. Part rural preacher, part outlaw Robin Hood, he was a blue-collar prophet who, dressed in stark contrast to the glinting rhinestones and shimmering psychedelia of the time, spoke truth to power. “Ah, I’d love to wear a rainbow every day,” he sang, “And tell the world that everything’s OK/But I’ll try to carry off a little darkness on my back/Till things are brighter, I’m the man in black.” It was a self-dramatization that would hold him in good stead more than two decades later, when a younger audience would thrill to his effortless candor and air of authenticity. To the end, he would live up to his friend Kris Kristofferson’s terse characterization of him: “He’s a walking contradiction/Partly truth and partly fiction.”
Apart from his mother’s unshakable belief in his musical talent – “God has his hand on you, son,” she told him when he was a boy, “don’t ever forget the gift” – little in Cash’s impoverished background suggested that the extraordinary life he would lead was possible. He was one of seven children, born to a sharecropping family in Kingsland, Arkansas, on February 26th, 1932. He absorbed all styles of popular music from the radio and spirituals from church and the singalongs on the porch of his family’s home and in the cotton fields where he worked until he graduated from high school. He moved to Michigan and briefly worked at an automobile plant before enlisting in the Air Force. “I spent twenty years in the Air Force,” he once remarked, “from 1950 to 1954.” After leaving the military, he married his first wife, Vivian Liberto, moved to Memphis, took a job as an appliance salesman and pursued his musical ambitions.
With guitarist Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant, Cash auditioned for Sam Phillips at Sun Records, the Memphis label that launched Elvis Presley. Cash’s first single, “Cry, Cry, Cry”/”Hey Porter,” was released in 1955, but “I Walk the Line” made him a star the next year. On those songs, and others such as “Get Rhythm” and “Folsom Prison Blues,” the Tennessee Three, with Cash on acoustic guitar, defined a scratchy, minimalist rockabilly style that proved hugely influential.