by Steve Turner
Cash, by now, had moved into a bigger apartment at 2553 Tutwiler Avenue, and Vivian was heavily pregnant. Over a period of two weeks he wrote "Cry, Cry, Cry" based on a catchphrase he'd heard used by D. J. Eddie Hill: "We've got some good songs, love songs, sweet songs, happy songs, and sad songs that'll make you cry, cry, cry." He took a copy of the handwritten lyrics to Phillips, who then booked a session for a Thursday evening in May. In a letter typed during work time on Home Equipment Company letterhead he told ex-Landsberg Barbarian Ted Freeman about the session:
We finally made the other side of my record. We worked two and a half hours on it Thursday night. Finally got it perfected. Sounds like hell. No, I believe it'll be purty good. The name of it is "You're Gonna Cry, Cry, Cry." It's a flat romping dob. That ole' clickety-clack rhythm. Other side is "Hey! Porter."
The name of us on the record is "Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two." When you write in to all the stations requesting it, request it. OK? It's gonna be out in two to three weeks. Can't say when 'cause I don't know. It all depends on when the market is right.
When they start making the record here, I'll send you a copy.
He signed the letter, "Johnny Cash of Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two."
Cash originally suggested the Tennessee Three, but Marshall thought they should use John Cash and the Tennessee Two since Cash did all the singing. Sam Phillips suggested he change his first name to Johnny because John sounded old and boring whereas Johnny sounded young and rebellious. Marlon Brando had played a character called Johnny in The Wild Ones; Johnny Guitar was a recent movie directed by Nick Ray; and the R&B singer Johnny Ace had killed himself on New Year's Day in a backstage game of Russian roulette. Cash thought that at twenty-three he was too old to be a Johnny, but Phillips persuaded him otherwise and the name went on the label.
The Cashes' first child, a daughter Rosanne, arrived May 24, 1955, exactly a month before the release of "Hey! Porter." Cash picked up an advance copy the day before and rushed it over to disc jockey Bob Neal at WMPS, who, after approvingly playing both sides, accidentally broke it. Desperate to get radio play and unsure how long it would take to get a replacement, Cash panicked.
"I think that our biggest ambition when we started was just to hear ourselves on the radio," says Marshall. "I know that's how I felt about it. So when I was going to work early one morning alone in the car and heard Sleepy-Eyed John play our record, it was almost more than I could stand. It was unbelievable. I thought that was it. The next day about five stations in Memphis played it. The day after that, all of them were playing it. By the end of the week, they were all playing both sides. Within a month, every station that it had been sent to across the South was playing this record. A lot of these weren't Billboard reporting stations, but even so the record got to number fourteen in the [country music] charts."
A late July letter to Ted Freeman captures the excitement of that spring:
I'm not too happy about writing this letter because I wrote you one and it came back to me because you left no forwarding address [Freeman was still serving in the USAF]. I don't know about a guy that won't leave a forwarding address. Of all things, I say! And another thing. I'm getting to be such a big shot [that] I don't know if I should write to you at all.
But before I go any further, I want to kind of chew you out a little. As soon as my record was off the press I rushed down and got you a copy of it and mailed it to you. Well, you didn't say one dad blamed word about it except that you got it and it was warped. Now if you had said the things that Carnahan said, I don't give a rat's rear end whether you say a thing about it or not. He seemed to think the music is too shallow and I have no business being on that label. But since "Cry, Cry, Cry" has been on top in Memphis and vicinity for the first two weeks, I don't give another rat's rear end.
Guess who your friend John is going to be playing with next Friday night? Just Webb Pierce, Sonny James, Bud Deckleman and about fifteen more. Yep, next Friday night at the Overton Park Shell here in Memphis will be the biggest thrill in my life. And they asked me to be on the show. I didn't ask them. Friend I tell you, it just don't seem real. It seems like a big cherry pink and apple blossom white dream.
Do you hear my record out there? My brother just got back from Alabama and he says they're wearing it out all over Alabama and Mississippi. I've had a lot of good reports on it from Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Virginia. Viv and I went to Texas last week and it's getting a good start down there.
I've got several bookings already three weeks after next in towns around here. Then the week after next my potential manager says he can book me solid five or six nights a week from then on through the winter. I believe I can make a pretty good living at it. This guy says he'll guarantee me I'll never make less than $20 a night and lots of nights I'll make $30 or more when we play the bigger towns. There'll be myself and another boy on Sun and Bud Deckleman on MGM on the tour.
This time he signed himself "Johnny Cash" and added underneath "(the most promising young artist Memphis, Tennessee, has ever produced)."
The "towns around here" that he was playing were places like Etowa, Lepanto, Osceola, and Helena in Arkansas or Henderson in Tennessee. In search of bookings, Cash would drive around approaching theaters, cinemas, and schools, as well as clubs with names like Junior's Dew Drop Inn and Pearl's Howdy Club, telling anyone who would listen that he was Johnny Cash and he had a hit on the Sun Records label. The boys would travel to the venues after work with Marshall's bass strapped to the roof of the car. At the shows they'd play both sides of the new single, some gospel songs, a couple of current hits like Dean Martin's "Memories Are Made of This," and some old favorites like Hank Snow's "Moving On" and Leadbelly's "Rock Island Line." As their fame spread and the shows got bigger, they began to supplement their income by selling photographs of Cash for twenty-five cents during the intermission.
The "boy on Sun" whom Cash mentions in his letter to Freeman will tour with him, was Elvis Presley. Cash probably didn't refer to him by name simply because, although Elvis had become a sensation in Memphis, his name meant very little to those who revered the older singers like Ernest Tubb. In the year he'd been recording, only one of Elvis's four singles had made an impression on the national country charts, and his limited tour had only taken him to a dozen or so Southern states. Though three releases and several months of touring behind Elvis, Cash had every reason to think of himself as someone with the same opportunities. Of all the artists appearing with him at the Overton Park Shell, Cash had the most esteem for headliner Webb Pierce, who'd been recording since the early 1950s. His hit songs, such as "That Heart Belongs to Me" and "The Last Waltz," were among those that a young Cash had listened to while in Germany.
WHEREAS CASH WOULD BECOME CLOSE FRIENDS with some fellow recording artists at Sun—most notably Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins—his relationship with Elvis was always one of rivalry. Never less than courteous to each other, they always each had an eye on the others' record sales and successes in concert. In his show Elvis would frequently mimic Cash, and Cash in turn perfected an Elvis parody that involved hip swiveling, lip pouting, and a comb that needed to be shot after slicking back his greasy hair. The Overton Park Shell concert, which took place on August 5, 1955, proved to be a turning point for both Sun artists. For Elvis it was a homecoming. He'd only given two Memphis shows that year (in February and July). The last time he'd played the Shell, he'd taken bottom billing for a Slim Whitman show. For Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two it was a debut. Not only had they never played a concert in Memphis before, they'd never shared a bill with a major artist. Now they were part of a Bob Neal promotion featuring twenty-two acts that would draw more than four thousand fans. No wonder it seemed like "a big cherry pink and apple blossom white dream."
Cash, Marshall, and Luther played both sides of the single that night and were called back for more. As an encore they premiered "Folsom Prison Blues," the song they'd recently recorded. All Cash's friends and family cam
e to witness his triumph. The next day the only two photos of the show included in the Memphis Press-Scimitar beneath the headline "4000 Jam Shell, Hundreds Turned Away—Country Rhythm Fills a Country Park" were of Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash. He'd only been stateside a year and two days, and already he was making his dream come true.
Yet this concert, which he frequently regarded as marking the birth of his career, also marked the beginning of Cash's marital troubles. Vivian looked, uneasily, over the sea of girls screaming for Elvis. This scene, she realized, could one day greet her husband, and that wouldn't bode well for a happy home. Where Cash saw only fame, success, and financial stability, Vivian envisioned temptation, loss of privacy, and loneliness.
Vivian held the very traditional idea of marriage in which the husband worked and a wife cooked, cleaned, and reared children. When he first spoke to her about a career in music, she never anticipated the screaming women or weeks of separation that went along with a tour.
In September Cash wrote Ted Freeman of the latest touring activity—guest spots on Barnyard Frolics at Little Rock, the Big D Jamboree in Dallas, a concert in San Antonio with Eddy Arnold, and then a trip through West Texas with Elvis, Jean Sheppard, and the Louvin Brothers. It would be, he said, "a heap of picking and grinning."
The West Texas tour of places like Abilene, Midland, Amarillo, and Lubbock, would pay the group one hundred dollars a night between them, which, as he pointed out, didn't leave much after deducting travel and accommodation expenses. They only agreed to the rate because they'd been promised a return engagement within six months for two hundred fifty dollars a night.
Cash wrote about the tour:
It'll take a while for me to get the good money, but if my next record does as well as "Cry, Cry, Cry" I've got it made. We cut one side of my next record Monday night. It's by far the best song I ever wrote, has a nice tune to it and sounds a lot more professional than the first one. The name is "I Get So Doggone Lonesome."
Emboldened by the success of "Cry, Cry, Cry," Cash mocked the conventions of mid-1950s country music, seeing his sound as something new and radical.
It ["I Get So Doggone Lonesome"] probably won't sell over three or four copies because I don't have a steel guitar in the band. Heck, people don't want anything different. They want the same old stuff. If you ain't got a steel guitar, you're hurtin' for certain. That steel guitar is it. Try to sound like Jerry Byrd.
Shoot! Those teenage girls don't care about catchy rhythm. They want to hear a pretty steel guitar. Cause everybody has a steel guitar. Guess I'm just wasting my time. My music is so shallow and simple. Country people don't like it. Although Webb Pierce told me my style was versatile and that I'd go far in country music because I have the honest country flavor that everyone likes, I might as well quit. What does Webb Pierce know about country music? Heck.
Ted Freeman must have failed to detect Johnny's ironic tone. He wrote to Cash and asked him if he was anticipating such failure, why didn't he just add a steel guitar to his sound? Cash responded in his next letter:
You just ain't got no sense. You're just nuts. I used to think you had some sense but now you ain't got no sense. You're just nuts. I didn't put a steel guitar in the band because everybody has a steel guitar in their band. My little ole record still tops in this part of the country, so as the little boy in Mad comics says [a reference to cartoon character Alfred E. Neuman]: 'What, me worry?'. . . Don't listen to the music on the record. Listen to the rhythm.
A week before setting off on the West Texas tour, he again wrote to Ted Freeman, who had obviously asked him why "Cry, Cry, Cry" was not yet a national hit. Cash listed the cities where it had been a hit: number one in Memphis, Little Rock, Shreveport, Texarkana, Richmond, and Jackson; number two in Miami; number three in Cincinnati; number four in Florence and Baton Rouge; and so on down to number nine in New Orleans.
Now you're asking why it didn't make the Top Ten charts coast to coast?
Reason #1—New artist.
Reason #2—Small label.
Reason #3—No financial backing.
Reason #4—(Which could be #1) It's only hot in a few places at once because the disc jockeys in some areas didn't start to play it until they noticed it was a hit elsewhere.
Elvis was now on the cusp of national fame, and until now, he and Cash shared the same manager, Bob Neal. But Colonel Tom Parker had already made himself Elvis's "special adviser" and he was luring him away from Sun Records. "Mystery Train," Elvis's current single when he and Cash toured West Texas together, would be the last produced by Sam Phillips. Parker called the tour the Elvis Presley Jamboree. Charlie Louvin of the Louvin Brothers remembers the tour as the beginning of the orchestrated hysteria around Elvis. "The colonel and his entourage would give away tickets to little girls in Woolworth's and all the dime stores," he says. "They were told that the tickets were free, but the one thing they had to do was to holler 'WE WANT ELVIS' every few minutes. This was very disturbing for the rest of us. By the time Elvis came on, it was pandemonium."
One of Cash's new friends was Sun recording artist Carl Perkins, whom he'd met in February when Carl was cutting his second single "Let the Jukebox Keep on Playing" backed with "Gone, Gone, Gone." The two men had a lot in common. They were born in the same year, grew up on cotton farms beside the Mississippi, faced poverty as children, and were now married with families. Carl was a smart songwriter as well as one of the most distinctive young guitarists in the business. His playing style would eventually have a profound effect on the Beatles.
On November 19, 1955, Carl and Cash were booked on a show in Gladewater, Texas, where Elvis topped the bill. In the dressing room before the show started, Cash ran through the riff that he'd heard on his twisted tape in Germany. He told Carl that he wanted to write a song about being true—about being true to himself, true to Vivian, and true to God. He thought he might call it "I'm Still Being True" or "I'm Walking the Line." Carl pounced on the idea. He said it should be called "I Walk the Line." Cash wrote the song in twenty minutes. He later said that it was one of those songs just waiting to be written.
Cash returned the favor less than a month later when the same package show stopped in Amory, Mississippi. After seeing Carl onstage, Cash was convinced he should record what he described as a "bop" song, and he began telling Carl a story about C. V. White, a black serviceman who'd been with the Twelfth RSM in Landsberg. White, a cool dresser, had a way with the local women. He also had a way with words and often amused Cash with particular phrases. As Jack Matheson remembers the incident that Cash related to Carl that night, "Bill Carnahan and I were with John on the chow line and some guy backed up and stood on C. V.'s toes. What he actually said was, 'Hey man! I don't care what you do with my fraulein or what you do with whatever, but don't step on my blue suede shoes.'" The joke was that C. V, like the rest of the guys, was wearing his regulation-issue black shoes, but at the time, blue suedes were in fashion for leisure wear.
Carl took the phrase and fashioned it into "Blue Suede Shoes," a song that would not only become a hit for him but for Elvis. Later he would claim that he wrote it about a boy he'd seen dancing in front of the stage in Jackson, Mississippi, who had told his girlfriend to be careful with her footwork lest she tread on his blue suede shoes. In that version of the story, Carl recalled that he woke in the middle of the night, December 17, 1955, wrote the words out on a paper potato sack and recorded it two days later.
However, Cash was telling his own version of the story at least as early as January 1957, when he told the Memphis Press-Scimitar that he'd given Perkins the original idea. Both Bill Carnahan and Jack Matheson clearly remember the incident with C. V. White. Marshall Grant backs this version of the story, although he sets it two months earlier at a September 6 concert in Bono, Arkansas: "John told Carl this story about his friend in the service and told him that he should write a song about blue suede shoes," he says. "Carl was in the dressing room while someone else was onstage and then he came out for
his set and played it live. Of all the stories that you'll hear, that's what actually happened. I was standing there when it took place."
Amazingly Cash was still combining his work as a salesman with all of the touring. Signing autographs for adoring fans at night, he would knock on doors trying to sell refrigerators the next morning. He kept his day job mostly because, despite the huge sales of "Cry, Cry, Cry" (it would eventually sell over one hundred thousand copies), his first royalty check wasn't due until the accounts settled at the end of the year.
In late November he wrote to Ted Freeman:
I don't know when I'll quit the Home Equipment Company. I've got three personal appearances this week—in Ripley, Bolivar and Henderson [towns in Tennessee]—and four next week, but I don't yet know where. One of the local disc jockeys is managing me and booking me. I suppose I'll hang on at selling awhile and pick up a few bucks when I can.
I haven't the faintest idea how much my record has sold, and I won't know till they check the records and do all the tabulations at the end of this year. On the hit parade here Saturday night one of the local disc jockeys played my record as #16 coast-to-coast. I don't know if he was lying or not. I'm anxious to check this week's Cashbox magazine. [It was actually #14 on the country charts of November 26th].
Do you hear my record there [in West Virginia]? My sister said it's hot in Norfolk.
Cash released his second single, "Folsom Prison Blues," on December 15. Written from the perspective of a prisoner, it contrasted the restrictions and crushed hopes of jail with the unlimited freedom and hope of someone riding a train. It contained what must be one of the most cruelly dispassionate lines in popular song: "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die," a line he said he made up after asking himself what the most evil reason for killing someone could be.
