Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  John’s family spread the word in Dyess, and John saw lots of familiar faces in the audiences; in fact, it wasn’t uncommon for John to know half the people in the room personally. If Cash didn’t have time to stop by his parents’ house on the way to the show, Carrie would often bring some food along to the venue. They would sit on the lawn outside the building and eat, adding an even more informal touch to the evening. This really was the bottom rung of the show business ladder. For all the energy that went into setting themselves up and then driving to the facility, the shows drew small audiences, between fifty and one hundred most nights, which meant John, Luther, and Marshall usually made between $12 and $25 collectively.

  The first step toward the big time occurred a couple of weeks after the record came out. Sonny James, a self-effacing young singer who’d had a couple of hits on Capitol Records, heard “Cry, Cry, Cry” on the radio and called Phillips to see if he could get John to play a show that James’s manager had put together for that night in nearby Covington. Cash jumped at the chance, even though he hadn’t checked with Marshall and Luther to see if they were free. How could anything be more important than this? It was going to be a real show, not a “pretend” one like most of those in Arkansas. When Cash wasn’t able to reach Marshall, he and Luther headed to Covington, figuring they’d work out something. They were relieved when James’s bass player volunteered to take Grant’s part.

  Backstage, Cash was more excited than Vivian had ever seen him, even more than on the day he came home from his first recording session. Actually, there were only a few hundred people in the audience, but it must have seemed like thousands after all the intimate shows in Arkansas. Years later Cash would talk about the show as if it had been a blur—and it probably was. By showtime, he and Luther were so nervous they played their two songs at super-speed.

  Later that night, Cash thanked James profusely for the opportunity, and James in turn complimented Cash on a “great sound” and told him he thought he had a big future in country music. John also had a question. He noticed that James had included a hymn in his set. John told Sonny he had originally wanted to be a gospel singer and asked whether someone could hold on to his Christian values despite all the wild stories he’d heard about life in country music. James assured Cash that it was possible to avoid temptations if he worked at it, but it wasn’t always easy. By late July, two things were apparent: the single was going to be big, at least by Sun standards, and “Cry, Cry, Cry” was the hit side. Cash was too happy to fret about it. To him, “Hey, Porter” would always be his first hit.

  III

  Cash and the guys had done a dozen or so shows when John got a message he couldn’t believe. Bob Neal, the local DJ who also managed Elvis, invited John to join a short tour he was putting together for early August starring Webb Pierce and Presley. Best of all, the tour would end with a big show at the outdoor, four-thousand-capacity Overton Park band shell in Memphis.

  Touring with the red-hot Elvis was cool, but the real thrill for Cash was being onstage with Webb Pierce, who was the show’s official headliner. With his robust yet high-pitched voice, Pierce had so dominated country music radio ever since his first hit in early 1952 that he’d held the number-one spot on the charts for more than eighty weeks—an average of twenty-five weeks a year. He had also been one of the favorites among the country fans in the Landsberg barracks.

  This was such a major step that Cash talked Marshall and Luther into taking a couple of days off work so they could rehearse. He always thought that Elvis was responsible for getting them on the package show, but it is more likely that Sam Phillips asked Neal to do him a favor and add his new singer to the lineup. Sam had arranged for Neal to handle the concert bookings for all the Sun acts; eventually they would become partners in a talent agency called Stars, Inc.

  Two days before the tour started, Phillips returned to the studio with Cash to record the next single so he’d have something ready when “Cry, Cry, Cry” started to peak. Again, the idea with a new act was to keep the momentum going. At the session, John, Luther, and Marshall sang “Luther Played the Boogie” and “Mean Eyed Cat,” a ditty by Cash in the mock-angry style of Hank Snow’s “My Two Timin’ Woman.” But Phillips had little interest in either of them. He still wanted to stay focused on “Folsom Prison Blues” and, secondarily, “So Doggone Lonesome.”

  More than he had with the first single, Phillips worked on making sure Cash was out in front of the music on “Folsom” so the voice and words caught the listener’s full attention. That required him to fiddle a lot with microphone placement to guarantee the right distance between Cash and the Tennessee Two. More than with most other recording artists, Phillips later maintained, people listened to Johnny Cash records to listen to Cash, not the band. The Tennessee Two’s role was to accentuate his vocals, not compete with them.

  Afterward, Cash waited around for a verdict. Was “Folsom Prison Blues” good enough this time? What did Sam think of “So Doggone Lonesome”? All he heard was “I think we’re okay.” The next day Phillips was on the phone to Cash. He seemed a little unsure about which of the new songs to push with the DJs. To test “Folsom Prison Blues,” he asked John to play it on the tour, maybe the closing show in Memphis.

  As one of the supporting acts, Cash didn’t have much time onstage during the brief tour, but he went over well in the opener on Monday, August 1, in Tupelo, Mississippi, which happened to be Elvis’s birthplace. Even Pierce came up to John backstage and said he’d enjoyed his set. John couldn’t believe he was talking to the biggest star in country music, or that Pierce invited him to stop by the motel after the show so they could get to know each other.

  After what happened during the show that night, however, Pierce didn’t even go to the motel. He was so rattled by the way the fans reacted to Presley—his support act—that he left town as soon as his performance was over. Though Elvis had only four singles out, much of the crowd had come to see him, and they kept yelling for more long after the twenty-year-old had left the stage. When it was clear that Elvis wasn’t coming back, most of his fans left—before Pierce even got to the microphone.

  Webb tried to brush it all off when he saw Cash the next day in Sheffield, Alabama. Tupelo, after all, was Elvis’s town. But Presley upstaged Pierce again in Sheffield and the next two nights in Little Rock and Camden, Arkansas. It was a major embarrassment for Webb, who was known around Nashville to have an ego as big as his booming voice. While Cash didn’t get nearly as big a reaction as his Sun label mate in those cities, he got respectable responses—and he got loud cheers from many of the fans on Friday when the mini-tour hit the Overton Park Shell amphitheater. Befitting their hometown status, Elvis and John got their photos in one Memphis newspaper’s write-up of the show, but not Pierce.

  All this further convinced Phillips that the country music old guard in Nashville was vulnerable. Pierce was only thirty-four, but the young artists from Sun had made him look fifty. And it wasn’t just Pierce who was being pushed aside. Country radio either had to embrace these new young acts fully or see young country fans follow the artists to pop and rock ’n’ roll stations, which was what eventually happened. As Sam watched Presley and Cash onstage at the Overton, he knew that Billboard was reporting strong sales for “Cry, Cry, Cry” throughout the South and Southwest. He also liked the crowd’s reaction to “Folsom Prison Blues.”

  Marshall remembered Vivian’s being a bit overwhelmed by all the screaming young girls at the shows, even if they were mostly going crazy over Elvis. This wasn’t the fun-loving, relatively tame family crowd she had seen at country shows in San Antonio. This was something much more intense and sexual.

  After the triumph at Overton, John shook hands and signed autographs with fans. His parents had come in for the show, and he made sure to introduce both Sam Phillips and George Bates to his father, praising both men so lavishly that Marshall got the idea John was trying to send a message to Ray that these two successful businessmen believed in h
is son. Why didn’t he?

  Ray, in turn, was quiet as usual. The only thing Cash remembered about his father’s reaction was that he asked him—perhaps innocently—if he still had his day job.

  John also took Vivian around to meet the other musicians in the show. He was so affectionate, he made her blush. “Here’s my wife,” he would say. “Isn’t she the prettiest thing you ever saw?” His sweetness almost allowed her to recover from the sight of all those screaming girls.

  Johnny and Vivian celebrated their first anniversary two days later, about as content as they could be. Johnny Cash was a happy husband, father, and recording artist as he waited for Sam to release his second single—and Vivian was happy because Johnny was happy. Naively, she thought that if he could make enough money in music, he would be able to quit his job at Home Equipment Company and spend more time at home. So a few days later she was as excited as he was when he rushed through the door with a copy of Billboard magazine. Turning to page forty-six, he pointed to the country music singles charts for the Memphis area. “Look, honey, we’re number three! That’s just two spots behind Webb Pierce!”

  Still, Vivian couldn’t help asking how he felt about the screaming girls. It wasn’t, at this early stage, so much fear as simply curiosity.

  “No, baby, I am never tempted,” he replied over the breakfast table. “Do you know why? When those women come up to me, I think of them as mannequins….Just phony, plastic mannequins. You don’t ever need to worry, baby. You’re on my mind every minute, day and night.”

  Vivian believed in her husband. If their relationship could survive the three years when John was in Germany, it could survive anything. She was so proud of him that she didn’t even mind that he was starting to spend more and more time off by himself around the house trying to come up with some new songs. It was his work. Besides, she had plenty to do herself. The couple had learned there was another baby on the way.

  Bob Neal was lining up tour dates for her husband, which meant he’d probably be hitting the road again soon, but Vivian tried not to think about it, and John was especially affectionate. He’d take her out roller-skating or to the movies, but the most fun was sitting around the house playing with Rosanne.

  Waiting for Neal to act, Cash became restless and resumed seeking out whatever minor club dates he could find around Memphis and northeast Arkansas—to polish his performance skills and to make a few dollars. To help bring in extra money, Grant arranged with a photographer-friend to print up eight-by-ten photos of Cash and the Tennessee Two, which he sold for twenty-five cents at the shows. Cash later insisted he could have made a lot more money in those days by playing honky-tonks, but he refused for religious reasons. As Marshall said, however, he and John did play a few, but they were so rowdy that John worried about Vivian’s safety, especially now that she was pregnant. At some of the places, Marshall joked, you saw more guns and knives than fans.

  Soon Neal did line up a few dates. This time Elvis would headline and John would be a special guest attraction. The tour would start in Texarkana, Arkansas, on September 2 and continue in Forest City and Bono, Arkansas; Sikeston, Missouri; and Clarksdale, Mississippi. Again, the crowds in Arkansas were dotted with family and friends. Even though Elvis was the star, Cash was starting to get his share of the attention.

  “I could see the momentum already there,” Marshall said. “John was becoming popular, with that little different sound we had. His big gigantic voice was cutting through something fierce. You could see it grow day by day.”

  After another few weeks off, they went back on the road with Elvis, this time to dates in Texas—Cherry Spring, Midland, Amarillo, Lubbock (where a teenage Buddy Holly was the opening act)—that were too far from Memphis for the band members to return home after each show. That meant wives stayed home.

  When John, Marshall, and Luther first talked about touring, the plan was for them all to go in the same car—alternating among their cars—and to take turns behind the wheel, but John proved to be such a terrible driver that Marshall and Luther soon decided they would do all the driving. “Oh my God,” Cash’s daughter Kathy says about his driving. “The thing is he’d push the gas pedal to the floor and the car would swerve forward, then he’d slam on the brakes, and it was like that mile after mile, this sudden jerking, and it didn’t help that he would be looking at you and talking rather than watching the road.”

  The boredom of the road caused John to revive his teenage love of pranks. It started off pretty tamely—simply something to liven up those long hours on the road or in hotel rooms as they waited for the next show. One of Grant’s favorite pranks of his own came on the Texas tour, when Elvis and many of the musicians pulled in to a truck stop around three a.m. to eat. At the time, the artists would travel caravan-style, partly for the companionship and partly to help out in case someone had car trouble on those long, often desolate Southern highways. The caravan system also provided some security in the event they ran into a few locals who wanted to impress their friends by roughing up a bunch of hillbilly singers.

  On this occasion, John, Elvis, and Marshall went to pay their bills, but the cashier was in the kitchen. While they waited, Marshall noticed some slices of pie in the round glass display case. When he spotted a piece of pumpkin pie without the usual whipped cream on it, he reached into his toiletry bag for a can of shaving cream, which he sprayed on top of the pie. Elvis thought it was so funny that he decided to wait in the truck stop in hopes of seeing someone take a bite of the pie.

  Marshall never learned if Elvis actually saw anyone get a soapy bite, but he could tell that the incident struck a chord with Cash. From that point on, John, Marshall, and Luther would try to out-prank one another.

  Around this time, Cash started to hear rumors that RCA Records was trying to buy Presley’s contract. When he brought it up, Phillips told him he didn’t want to sell the contract, but that Elvis and Colonel Tom Parker, who had taken over the young phenom’s management contract from Neal, were determined to move to a bigger label. By the time Cash returned from the brief West Texas swing with Presley in mid-November, the deal was done. RCA paid Sun $35,000 for the rights to Presley and everything he had recorded for the label; it was one of the largest amounts ever paid at that point for a recording artist’s contract.

  Phillips told Cash that as much as he hated to see Elvis go, he was excited about the future. Thanks to the RCA deal, Phillips had more money to spend promoting Sun Records and expanding distribution around the country. He also had good news for Cash: “Cry, Cry, Cry” was number fourteen on Billboard’s latest list of the best-selling country records in the nation—the nation, Phillips stressed, not just the South.

  During the meeting with Phillips, Cash got the feeling he had just received a promotion. From what he could tell, Phillips was now going to be putting as much energy into his career as he had once done for Elvis: he was now Sun’s number-one artist. Phillips told Cash his top priority was to get him on the Louisiana Hayride’s radio show in Shreveport because of the crucial role the Hayride had played in building Elvis’s popularity.

  Vivian tried to share Johnny’s joy, but the time apart—even though it was only a few days here and there—troubled her more than she had expected. She knew that the traveling was necessary and that Johnny was just trying to take care of his family. But it didn’t make her any less lonesome in the duplex on Tutwiler.

  IV

  The Louisiana Hayride, which was broadcast from Shreveport throughout the South, meant a lot to Cash. Airing on KWKH every Saturday night from the downtown three-thousand-seat Municipal Auditorium, a lavish art deco structure opened in 1929, the Hayride was launched in April 1948. Though the opening lineup wasn’t exactly star-studded, it was only a few months before Hank Williams started a residency there—moving rapidly from fifth on the bill to the wildly popular headliner. Williams’s spectacular rise gave the Hayride a reputation throughout the country music world of a star-maker, and Elvis took the Hayride similar
ly by storm in 1954.

  The importance of the Hayride wasn’t its pay scale. Most of the performers were paid union scale, $12 a night, which barely covered their gas and food. The value was the exposure. With its potent fifty-thousand-watt station, KWKH’s signal alone provided invaluable reach, but the Hayride show was also carried by some two hundred other stations, from as far west as El Paso, north to St. Louis, east to Jacksonville, and down the coast to Miami. That meant a lot of potential record buyers.

  Phillips started lobbying Horace “Hoss” Logan, who was both program director at KWKH and emcee of the Hayride, about Cash in November. He sent Logan a copy of Cash’s single along with a note saying the record was outselling Elvis’s latest release in Memphis. Logan was impressed by both the record and the sales, so he told Phillips he’d find a guest spot on the show for him as soon as he could. The debut turned out to be on December 3, when Cash and the Tennessee Two were billed as “special guests” at the bottom of a bill featuring Jimmy Newman, Johnny Horton, David Houston, and others. John couldn’t have been more thrilled. To him, the Hayride meant one thing: he’d be standing on the same stage as Hank Williams.

  “I have to admit he was pretty rough around the edges—rougher even than Elvis was when he’d debuted just over a year earlier,” Logan later maintained. “But the raw talent was there. So were the sincerity and style that would soon make Johnny famous, and the crowd reacted warmly.”