by Steve Turner
He particularly loved being with his grandchildren, who brought out his playfulness and made him laugh again. Laura Cash recalls, "Most days we would bring our daughter, Anna Maybelle, with us. She would come in the front door and head like a bullet for 'Grandpa's room.' He took much delight in her company, as he did with all of his grandkids. He'd say, 'Hi, sweet baby' over and over. She would crawl up in his lap, and he would immediately produce some sugar-free chocolate for her. Even in those sad and lonely times, she could really draw the laughter out of him.
"There were some champagne grapes at the house one day, and John was so patient as Annabelle fed him one after the other for what seemed like an hour. He would brighten up at the mere sight of her and our son, Joseph. He had an electric recliner that, of course, our kids loved to operate. As soon as he sat down, they would be over pushing buttons and have him laid out flat before I knew it. Up and down and up again. I tried to get them to stop, but John wouldn't have it. He was a very loving, patient grandpa."
He restored his relationship with Marshall Grant despite the bitterness of their separation. "In the end," says Marshall, "we became closer than we'd ever been."
According to Kelly, Cash's life became characterized by a spirit of gratefulness. "He felt that he had had a blessed life and that he wouldn't trade one minute of it," she says. "He felt that his struggles he'd been through made him a stronger man, had given him a footstool to climb up to God that he might never have had. I never heard him complain. There were days when I could see that he didn't feel good and didn't look good, and yet he'd get up and go do a session and I would think, 'How is he doing this?' So many times we wondered, 'How can he go over there to the cabin and stay for four or five hours when he's barely able to walk across the room?' We didn't know. We know now that it was a divine strength that he was given. But it continued to amaze us."
His son, John Carter, embraced the same Christian faith and became a close spiritual companion. They spent many hours praying together and discussing the Bible. According to John Carter, he felt that his spiritual strength resulted from all the adversity he had faced. "It's like the strongest sword is made by the hottest fire," he says. "He was like Peter to Christ. Peter was a greatly tortured soul who was in misery and pain but who had something in him that brought him close to Christ. That's how it was with my dad. I think God knew that he would struggle, that he would fall down, but he saw something in him that would be a foundation for a lot of people just as Christ saw something in Peter."
Cash was an unusual figure in American popular music—a Christian with traditional evangelical beliefs who was revered by icons of the subculture as well as figureheads of mainstream culture. Few Christians would find themselves the subject of accolades by such diverse personalities as Snoop Dogg and George W. Bush, Nick Cave and Billy Graham, Trent Reznor and Dolly Parton.
Cash's acceptance didn't come from keeping his light hidden under a bushel. He was as explicit about his beliefs in personal conversation as he was in his songs, but he never appeared sanctimonious and he resisted relying on cliche. When he spoke about God he gained respect because he spoke from his heart—he wasn't merely reciting a creed. And the God of Johnny Cash, the God that shone through Johnny Cash, seemed interesting and relevant.
Rick Rubin tells a story of inviting Cash to a meal at his home, along with some musicians and friends from the film industry. Before eating, Cash asked everyone to hold hands while he prayed and then read from the Bible. "I know that some of these people had never experienced that before," said Rubin. "Some of them were even atheists. But his belief in what he believed was so strong that what you believed didn't matter so much. . . . It was really beautiful."
Everyone who worked with Cash knew of his beliefs because he spoke of God in such a natural way, without proselytizing. He preferred to wait for others to open up to him. "I don't compromise my religion," he said in 1979. "If I'm with someone who doesn't want to talk about it, I don't talk about it. I don't impose myself on anybody in any way, including religion."
His friends agree. "He was a deeply religious man," says David Ferguson, "but he didn't drive it down anybody's throat." Surprisingly Kris Kristofferson says that the two of them never discussed religion. "I think John respected people enough to let them do their own deciding about what they do spiritually," he says. "He got me along to a couple of Billy Graham events and that was enough. I think he was sensitive to the fact that I didn't want to talk about it."
To those who wanted to talk about spiritual matters, he was more than willing to share his thoughts. He and Rick Rubin engaged in deep debates about meditation, mysticism, Jesus, and Eastern thought. "I think that the depth of our connection was always about spirit, and we used music as a vocabulary for that," he says. "It was always about other worldly things, beyond worldly things." In April 2003, they took Communion together for the first time and continued the ritual over the phone every time they spoke over the next five months. Producer Larry Butler was so affected by Cash's faith when he worked with him in Israel on the Gospel Road film that he was baptized in the Jordan River and remains a committed Christian more than thirty years later.
Dyann Rivkin, who produced and wrote the TV Special "Ridin' the Rails" for him in 1974 was another person affected by his faith. "I saw something very special in him as we were doing the show," she says. "I asked him what it was, and he said simply, 'Jesus Christ.'" He bought her a Bible and spent hours answering her questions. She became a Christian as a direct result of his interest and patience, and fourteen years later Rivkin produced him as he recorded the entire New Testament for a cassette collection.
Almost a quarter of the songs he wrote were in some way about his faith or the Bible. Many others, although not specifically about faith, were influenced by his Christian world-view. "I Walk the Line," with its declaration of marital fidelity contained an unconscious Christian impulse as did a lot of his songs about justice and poverty. When he wrote about work he did so from a biblical framework. Work could be a source of dignity and pride, but in a fallen world work could also be degrading and exploitative. He accentuated the nobility of labor but never failed to point out how backbreaking it could sometimes be. In doing so, he celebrated the lives of ordinary hardworking people—from shoeshine boys to police officers, stone cutters to truck drivers—and made them feel that they were important.
He wrote about death, but not as a morbid subject. When people died in his songs it was usually the result of an injustice or a love affair gone wrong. His best known murder line, "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die," appears in a song about imprisonment, freedom, and longing. Murder isn't the focus of the song. Most often, his death songs were actually about salvation. He was looking beyond death to the life to come.
Another quarter of the songs Cash wrote dealt with love—half of them about the joy of it and half about the loss of it. As a man who thrived in the presence of a strong woman, he preferred dark-haired women who were comfortable working in a man's world and who loved music as much as he did.
In June Carter he met his match. Although she always took great pains to say that she didn't "save" Johnny Cash, she certainly provided the stability, reassurance, encouragement, and care he so desperately needed. When they decided to marry, she said she was going to put God first in her life, her husband second, and herself last. She knew it sounded old fashioned, but she believed that inverting this order helped destroy her first two marriages.
June clearly delighted in Cash, and he in her. Not only did they live, work, and travel together, but they also read books, prayed, and listened to music together. Considering their history of relationships and the nature of the business, not many people would have believed their marriage could last thirty-five months, much less thirty-five years. "She's my companion and my friend," he once said. "We talk about things we don't talk to anybody else about. We understand each other. Sometimes it's scary; we can almost read each others' minds. She's my rock, my anchor. She'
s always there."
Without doubt June displayed tremendous fortitude over the years, calming Cash during his self-destructive periods, taking him back in when he wandered, staying by his side during his many illnesses. She considered caring for him as her life's great duty, and the music he made over the past three decades could not have been made without her. Indeed, we might well be talking of Johnny Cash, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix in the same breath if not for June.
"I think they understood each other quintessentially," says Rosanne. "They were both very unusual people. It wasn't easy to understand either one of them. I think there was genuine passion, genuine chemistry. She amused him, and he loved being fussed over and taken care of. She was the talker and he was silent. She filled in the blanks for him. She made his life easy."
The rest of Cash's songs were equally divided between songs about family, justice, music, restlessness, trains, war, country living, the West, and America. He loved his country—its history, its beliefs, its landscape, and its people—and more than any other songwriter of his era, he was identified with the best of American values. He didn't voice disagreements with foreign policy in spite of his love but because of his love. He only got angry when he thought America was behaving in an un-American way.
"One of the last times I talked to him, we spoke about the war in Iraq," says Kris Kristofferson. "I said that we should just go to the table and say that this can't go on because it wasn't going to help us to bomb the country into oblivion. He said, I'm with you this time. We're bombing a tribal people.'"
A diligent student of U.S. history, he not only read books but projected himself into the lives of cowboys, early immigrants, Native Americans, pioneers, and Confederate soldiers. When he crawled through Nickajack Caves, dug up arrowheads on the Trail of Tears, or spent nights alone in the desert of California, he was trying to temporarily put himself in the place of his ancestors, to touch the things they touched, to feel the things they felt.
Cash explored his own family history. Earl Poole Ball can remember being with him in New England when they searched a house that he believed rested on the same spot where the first Cash settled in America. In Chesterfield, South Carolina, while en route to a concert in Georgia, he sought out Edgar Rivers, the oldest living member of his mother's side of the family, to learn about his grandfather, John. L.
Rivers. "I showed him where the old farmhouse used to stand that his granddaddy was raised in," says Rivers. "I took him to the old spring where he would have got water. He said that if he'd had a jar he would have filled it with that water and taken it home."
In his own life Cash had had a front-row seat to many of the climactic events in recent American history. He'd felt the effects of the Depression, and when Mrs. Roosevelt visited Dyess, he shook her hand. He experienced the cold war firsthand in Germany during the early 1950s, participated in the birth of rock-'n'-roll in Memphis in 1954, was driving to a concert in Dallas the day John F. Kennedy was killed, turned down an offer to play at Woodstock in 1969 (on the advice of Bob Dylan), and traveled to Vietnam during the war. He attended the Watergate hearings; shook hands with Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush; and had a poem written for him by Muhammad Ali.
As with many legends in popular music, it's not easy to say exactly what made Cash great. He never became a great guitarist, his voice had a limited range, and his lyrics veered between poetry and doggerel. But the combination of that voice, those words, and that guitar far exceeded the greatness of any one element. He was a presence, a form of energy, a vehicle for truth. "I wouldn't call him a great musician," says Jack Clement. "I'd call him a great musical entity. He was a musical force and a great singer. People believed what he was saying. Most people don't understand that the voice is like an instrument and has to blend in with the other instruments. Somehow Cash understood that. Mostly because he didn't care. He would just sing. Somehow it worked."
His inspiration has been less one of musical form and more one of attitude. The people who have admired him—Steve Earle, Dwight Yoakam, the Dixie Chicks Emmylou Harris, Kid Rock, Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, Bruce Springsteen, Keith Richard, Bono, Nick Cave—are not united by a sound but by an approach to their art. Cash encouraged people to be honest, to have integrity, to fearlessly explore within, to be compassionate, and to search for truth. "I'm sure I learned social consciousness from John," says Kristofferson. "I learned concern for your brother and independence—doing what you believe in spite of what other people tell you. I admired the way he spoke his own words. There was no question of me ever trying to imitate what he was doing because he was as unique as a snowflake."
Cash was an inspiration to Christians because of the candid way in which he discussed the problems that had affected his life. By admitting his mistakes he gave hope to the spiritually battered and abused. He also suggested a way of living the Christian life that was uncompromising yet compassionate, dedicated to timeless truths yet relevant to contemporary issues, in the world yet not of it, orthodox yet hip.
"Can you imagine being a believer in a population where other believers seem like freaks?" says Bono. "I'm talking of my own life as a believer. People were selling God like a commodity, and I couldn't relate to them. Then I met Johnny Cash and I felt like him. You read the Scriptures and you realize that he's actually like these guys in the Scriptures. He's not like these weirdos."
Ultimately what made Johnny Cash great was his unique way of viewing the world. "He didn't think like you and I do," is how his sister Joanne puts it. Rosanne elaborates, "You can't apply the template of a normal person to Dad and fit him into it. It doesn't work because he was such an unusual human being, and his mind worked so differently from anybody I have ever met in my life. He not only thought as a great artist but his thoughts were great art. That was the realm he lived in."
The realm Johnny Cash lived in was clouded by pain and colored by grace. He had the ability to transform the rough and commonplace into objects fit for heaven, just as he had been transformed. Rick Rubin remembers him taking Ewan McColl's song "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" and turning it from a love song into a devotional song. "He loved that," said Rubin. It came really naturally to him. It seemed like his devotion for life came from his devotion for God."
Interview with Johnny Cash
STEVE TURNER (BRIGHTON, ENGLAND, 1988 )
PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED
You've had the respect of most of rock-'n'-roll's key performers from Elvis through the Beatles and o n to U 2 . Didn't you even suggest the title for "Blue Suede Shoes"?
It was my idea. I was in the air force in Germany, and I had a black friend named C. V. White from Virginia. He'd get dressed up for a three-day pass, and in his mind, when he put on his clothes to go out, his black shoes were blue suede shoes. He would say, "Man! Don't step on my blue suede shoes; I'm goin' out tonight." Carl Perkins and I were in Amory, Mississippi, with Elvis. Now Elvis, of course, was hotter than a pistol. He had his second record out. He'd had "That's All Right (Mama);" now he had "Baby, Let's Play House," and Carl hadn't had a hit. He'd had two country records. He asked me to write a song with him. I said, "You take this idea and write it yourself." This "blue suede shoes" line that my buddy used to say had been in my mind ever since I went to Sun. I told Carl about it and he said, "That's the one I'm looking for," and he wrote it that night. He started it backstage, but he went home and finished it.
When Elvis heard that song, he asked me to write him one; so I wrote "Get Rhythm," which was on the other side of "I Walk the Line." But before Elvis could record it, he signed with RCA Victor, and Sam Phillips wouldn't let him have it. I put it down at Sun Studio, and Sam Phillips told him he couldn't have it.
Have you ever wished that you had written "Blue Suede Shoes"?
No. I gave the idea to Carl that night, and I'm still glad I did, because he was my best friend, and he deserved a hit. He'd worked hard for one.
Were blue suede
shoes a fancy thing to wear at that time?
No. Not until the record came out. Maybe C.V. White had worn blue suede shoes before he came into the air force. I don't know. It was just something he used to say when he went out on a three-day pass.
What were your musical influences?
I always liked black gospel and rhythm and blues. I would listen to country music on the radio at night. I would tune into the Mexican border stations that played just country. I grew up just over one hundred miles from Cotton Plant, Arkansas, which was the hometown of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and she was my favorite when I was a kid. I love songs like "This Train Is Bound for Glory." I think that song could be a rock-'n'-roll smash, if somebody recorded it right. Another song she did was "Didn't It Rain." She also did "Don't Take Everybody to Be Your Friend." She had some great songs that were spiritual but still had a universal message. Rock musicians have discovered these gospel and blues roots to an extent, but they haven't gone all the way. They've barely touched the source. When I want to play records to entertain myself, I play Robert Johnson, Josh White, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Pink Anderson, or the field recordings made by John and Alan Lomax. That is real gutbucket music. As far as I am concerned that is seminal rock-'n'-roll.
Do you see yourself as writing in that tradition?
I think so. From the Lomax album Blues in the Mississippi Night I got the idea to write "Going to Memphis," which is a song about chain-gang convicts talking about wanting to bust out and go to Memphis. Then there was "Another Man Done Gone" that I wrote new lyrics to. When I wrote "Big River" I wrote it [to be sung] real slow, not up-tempo as I did it on record. There was a guitar player named Roy Nichols, who later worked with Merle Haggard, and he used to play that song with me, and he played some really black blues on it. It sounded like a real blues song. Sam Phillips wanted it upbeat, and he made it sound like a rockabilly song.
