Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  Logan approached Cash as soon as his short set was over and asked him to become a Hayride regular. The 350-mile drive along two-lane roads from Memphis was arduous, but the opportunity was great. Phillips advised Cash to accept immediately.

  John spent most of the month at home with Vivian, trying his best to concentrate on his job at Home Equipment but finding it increasingly difficult. Marshall and Luther, too, were getting worn out by having to drive home from out-of-town gigs late at night and then be at the auto dealership early the next morning. But they weren’t thinking about quitting their day jobs. Cash thought about it, though, every day.

  He closed out the year in style, returning to Shreveport for a gala New Year’s Eve concert at the Hayride. He was still one of the “special guests” on a bill that was topped by Elvis and also featured Johnny Horton and George Jones, but he felt like a star. After all, he was now a regular. Following the show, he and Vivian celebrated New Year’s with many of the members of the Hayride cast. No doubt about it, 1955 had been a great year.

  Believing he had a “monster” on his hands with “Folsom Prison Blues” and “So Doggone Lonesome,” Phillips took out a half-page ad in the January 21, 1956, issue of Billboard to announce the record’s release. It included a reprint of the Billboard review from two weeks earlier: “Cash delivers two solid, sincere and very genuine country blues sides. There is a great melancholy, minor key flavor and the definitely above-par lyrics for both get a wonderfully expressive treatment….Both could break out.”

  Next to a studio portrait of Cash were the words “handsome and young,” part of Phillips’s continuing effort to link Cash with the new wave in country and rock. In a wry slap at the country establishment in Nashville, Phillips identified Sun Records as “America’s No. 1 Country & Western Label.”

  Two weeks later, the single was number fourteen among country records across the nation—a sales position that had taken “Cry, Cry, Cry” months to reach. Ernest Tubb rushed out his version of “So Doggone Lonesome” a few days later. Though Cash had actually written the song with Tubb in mind, he played no part in getting the veteran country star to record it. Tubb simply heard it on the radio. Veteran artists in the 1950s often re-recorded promising songs by new or unknown artists because they knew DJs would tend to play the known artist over the unknown. But things were happening too fast for Tubb.

  The Cash single was already number ten across the country by the time Billboard announced the Tubb version. Disc jockeys weren’t about to drop Cash’s record, which was getting strong radio response, to play Tubb’s. As a result, the remake never made the charts. Cash’s two-sided hit, meanwhile, went all the way to number four.

  It was during this period that Cash finally quit his job at Home Equipment Company. His first sizable royalty check from Sun was for around $2,000 and he and Vivian drove to San Antonio to pay her parents back part of the nearly $800 they had given them over the months. Soon after, he started repaying George Bates back for the $1,200 he had advanced him. It was an emotional moment for both men. “He got up and hugged me and he had tears in his eyes,” Cash said years later. “He was proud of me.”

  Cash also followed through on a longtime pledge to himself: he started pressing his father to retire from his job at the oleomargarine plant in Wilson and move to Memphis. Cash wanted to help his parents buy a nice place so they could have modern utilities and be closer to the rest of the Cash clan. Besides John and Roy, Reba and Louise were now living in Memphis too. But not wanting to make his folks feel pressured, Cash just planted the seed and waited for them to make a decision. More cautiously, Grant and Perkins took extended leaves of absence, thus keeping the door open in case things didn’t work out.

  Throughout this period, Phillips was urging Cash to come up with some new songs. Thinking of Vivian’s mounting insecurity about all the female fans on the road, he composed his most personal song yet.

  Chapter 6

  Louisiana Hayride and “I Walk the Line”

  I

  GLADEWATER AND LONGVIEW would be just two more names on the list of the hundreds of towns in which Cash performed over five decades—except that he most likely wrote “I Walk the Line” in one of the two neighboring East Texas locales. Cash usually said Gladewater; Marshall Grant always claimed it was Longview. There was even sharp disagreement over the distinctive hum at the start of the record. John himself had two explanations. Usually he said it was inspired by a haunting sound he’d heard one time when he accidentally played a tape backward on the reel-to-reel recorder he bought in Germany. But he also spoke of having wanted to open a record with a hum ever since childhood, when he’d delighted in the way the town doctor always went around humming. Grant thought the humming was simply designed to help Luther get the right feel on the song.

  “I Walk the Line” is a heartfelt, straightforward love song in the tradition of Jimmie Davis’s “You Are My Sunshine” or Don Gibson’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” And as usual, Cash’s authoritative vocal made the declaration all the more human and believable:

  I keep a close watch on this heart of mine.

  I keep my eyes wide open all the time.

  I keep the ends out for the tie that binds.

  Because you’re mine I walk the line.

  I find it very, very easy to be true.

  I find myself alone when each day is through.

  Yes, I’ll admit that I’m a fool for you.

  Because you’re mine I walk the line.

  As sure as night is dark and day is light,

  I keep you on my mind both day and night.

  And happiness I’ve known proves that it’s right.

  Because you’re mine I walk the line.

  You’ve got a way to keep me on your side.

  You give me cause for love that I can’t hide.

  For you I know I’d even try to turn the tide.

  Because you’re mine I walk the line.

  I keep a close watch on this heart of mine.

  I keep my eyes wide open all the time.

  I keep the ends out for the tie that binds.

  Because you’re mine I walk the line.

  While it was undeniably inspired by his love for Vivian, Cash sometimes spoke of a second meaning. Though he never confronted Phillips about it, Cash missed his gospel side, and he designed “I Walk the Line” as an expression of spiritual as well as romantic allegiance.

  In his 1975 autobiography, Man in Black, Cash pointed out that he was intending to “say” something in the song, writing lyrics “that will have a lot of meaning not only for me, but for everybody who hears it—that says I’m going to be true not only to those who believe in me and depend on me, but to myself and God—a song that might give courage to others as well as myself.” During an interview just months before his death, he smiled and told me, “Sam never knew it, but ‘I Walk the Line’ was my first gospel hit.”

  Cash recalled Phillips being more excited about “I Walk the Line” than any other song he had brought him. That’s one of the things Cash loved about Phillips—his enthusiasm. “He was excitable, not at all laid-back,” Cash said. “When we’d put something on tape he liked, he’d come bursting out of the control room into the studio, laughing and clapping his hands, yelling and hollering, ‘That was great! That was wonderful!’”

  Once again, however, Phillips thought the arrangement was too slow and mournful. As always, he wanted a more lively rhythm.

  “Do me a favor,” he told Cash. “Just do one more take for me, and let’s move the tempo up quite a bit.”

  Cash didn’t like what he heard. This song was his baby. He wanted the record to reflect the tender sentiments he felt.

  “We don’t want to make a rock ’n’ roll song out of this,” he told Phillips. “I wrote this song for my wife and I want to keep it as a real slow ballad.”

  Phillips tried to soothe Cash.

  “I don’t have a problem with that, John,” he said. “I just want to hear
it one time for my own personal view. Just move the tempo up to a good flow and record it for me just one time.”

  Cash obliged, but he left the studio believing that Phillips would release the original, slow version.

  Even before “I Walk the Line,” Cash had heard Phillips talk about the importance of rhythm in a record so often that he thought it would be funny to write a song that was, in essence, all about rhythm. He came up with the story line from watching an energetic shoeshine boy at work. By the time he finished the song, which he called “Get Rhythm,” Cash really liked it. It wasn’t just a throwaway after all. He wasn’t sure the song was right for him because it edged closer to rock than anything he had done previously, but Phillips liked it and put it on the flip side of the “I Walk the Line” single.

  Cash heard “I Walk the Line” on the radio for the first time when he was in Shreveport for the Hayride—and he was shocked. It wasn’t the slow version that he’d wanted; it was the slightly faster recording that Phillips had coaxed him into doing. Cash confronted Phillips as soon as he got back to Memphis. Sam explained that he’d released the faster version only because he’d played it for some of his DJ friends and they all liked that version better.

  “Give me just two weeks,” he said. “If it doesn’t do what I think it’s going to do, I promise you right here, I’ll pull the record and we’ll release the slow ballad.”

  Cash was reluctant, but he agreed.

  After those two weeks, the record was a smash, and Cash rarely mentioned the slow version again.

  Typical of the country music industry’s reaction to “I Walk the Line” was Billboard’s glowing review: “‘Mr. Folsom Prison Blues’ has a top-notch pairing on this wax. First, he generates a load of excitement with his special kind of melancholy sound on a superior piece of slow-paced ‘love and devotion’ material. On the flip, there’s a wonderful swinging blues job with the great ‘down’ guitar trademark.”

  Phillips must have been feeling invincible by then. His Sun discoveries were dominating Billboard’s national country sales chart in early May 1956. Elvis Presley was at number one with “Heartbreak Hotel,” his formal RCA debut, followed by Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes” at number two, Elvis’s “I Forgot to Remember to Forget,” which had been Presley’s last Sun single before he went to RCA, at number three, and “Folsom Prison Blues” at number six. Take that, Nashville! Even more spectacularly, “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Blue Suede Shoes” were number one and number three, respectively, on the list of national pop best-sellers. Take that, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles! To add to the celebration around Sun Records, Billboard also had lavish praise for the label’s first Roy Orbison single. The young Texan had been steered to Phillips after Orbison met Cash in Odessa, Texas, and asked for some career advice.

  To celebrate their good fortune, Phillips and Bob Neal took out two ads in the May 12 issue of Billboard. In the first, they showcased “Blue Suede Shoes” in the top half and Cash’s new record in the bottom half. Alongside Cash’s photo, the copy read, “Another two-sider by one of the truly great talent finds.” Perkins, who was signed just before Cash, may have been outselling Cash at the moment, but Phillips still saw Cash as his special talent. Elsewhere in the same issue, Phillips and Neal celebrated their new Stars, Inc. joint venture with photos of their growing roster.

  That ad further aligned Sun and Stars, Inc.—and, in turn, Cash—with rock ’n’ roll. Above photos of Perkins, Cash, Warren Smith, Eddie Bond, Orbison, and Jack Earls, the ad proclaimed boldly, “These are the biggest drawing stars in the rock ’n’ roll business.” This early marketing of Cash to the rock market would prove to be of major significance in his career. Even if he had made the same records in Nashville, he might simply have been viewed as another hillbilly star—like Webb Pierce or Ray Price. But his ties to Elvis and Phillips and Sun Records would forever give Cash credibility in the wider, more culturally important rock ’n’ roll market.

  II

  For all the talk about Cash’s being Sun’s number-one artist after Elvis left, the sudden emergence of Carl Perkins could have caused some strained feelings, but Cash felt an immediate identification with Perkins when they first met at Sun in early 1955.

  Cash admired Elvis’s talent, and they had good times on the road, but they didn’t really have that much in common beyond grand ambitions and the Sun label. Elvis was going after a teen audience. Cash aimed for an adult country crowd. More important, Cash was married and trying to remain faithful to Vivian. Elvis was single and eager to take advantage of it. He pursued the young female fans with such abandon that Cash found it a bit distasteful. About one of Elvis’s shows on the Hayride, Cash said he saw Elvis pick out three or four girls in the audience and motion to them to follow along as he left the stage. “And they would fight each other to get to the stage door,” Cash said. “He took ’em into the dressing room. One night we counted nine girls that he had sex with in the dressing room.”

  Cash also saw Elvis, despite the poverty of his youth, as a city boy. He hadn’t worked the cotton fields or walked those long, lonely country roads the way Cash and, it turned out, Perkins had. Carl was also Cash’s age and married. He was raised in west Tennessee, just across the Mississippi River from Dyess. They even had identical scars on their fingers from the sharp needles of the cotton bolls.

  When they were booked on the same tour, Cash and Perkins often rode in the same car and used the time to bounce song ideas off each other. Just as Cash said Perkins helped him pick “I Walk the Line” as the title of his song, Cash gave Perkins the idea for “Blue Suede Shoes” in the fall of 1955; C. V. White, the sharp-dressing airman in Landsberg, had playfully warned John one night, “Don’t step on my blue suede shoes.”

  So Cash was cheering Perkins on as “Blue Suede Shoes” became a massive hit in the country, pop, and R&B fields in early 1956. In fact, the record shot up the charts so fast that Steve Sholes, the RCA executive who signed Elvis, started having second thoughts about his decision when Presley’s first single, “Heartbreak Hotel,” got off to a slow start. Because of “Blue Suede Shoes,” Carl’s band was booked as a guest on Perry Como’s highly rated national TV show on March 24, but they never made it to New York. On the day before the show, the car in which Perkins and his band were riding crashed at high speed into the back of a pickup truck near Dover, Delaware, in the early morning hours. Perkins suffered three fractured vertebrae in his neck, a concussion, and a broken collarbone. He was taken to a nearby hospital, where he lay unconscious for nearly twenty-four hours. His brother Jay was even worse off, with a fractured neck and serious internal injuries.

  Remarkably, Carl was back on tour within a month, joining Cash for a few West Texas shows starting April 21 in Beaumont. The accident brought the two singers even closer. Though Jay hadn’t died in the crash, Carl understood what it must have felt like for Cash to lose his brother. They grew even closer two years later when Jay died of cancer.

  Once Carl joined the tour, Cash had lots to tell his friend. He had bought a house at 4492 Sandy Cove Circle in northeast Memphis and had a new daughter, Kathy, who had been born the previous week.

  Vivian was another reason why Cash welcomed Perkins back to the road. Carl’s refusal to get involved with the women who threw themselves at country singers made it easier for Cash to resist what he had already admitted to Perkins was a temptation he was finding harder and harder to ignore. Carl was a teenager when he met his future wife, Valda, but the relationship was threatened early on by Carl’s fooling around. When he almost lost her, he pledged that he would change his ways, and they were married on January 24, 1953. Perkins worked hard on the road to live up to his pledge.

  Perkins, who had three children by this time, had even put down rules for himself. He and Jay, who played bass in the band, would return to the motel room after the show and call home. “I took my marriage vows very seriously,” he told Cash. “I knew if I wasn’t true to them that Valda wouldn’t stay
with me for a second.” Carl’s friendship and example helped Cash live up to his own vow to walk the line—at least initially.

  Despite the active touring schedule, the Saturday night Hayride appearances were the centerpiece of Cash’s week. Elvis topped the bill when Cash made his first appearance of the year on January 21, and a Hayride old-timer sensed a bit of a rivalry between the two young men.

  “I think they knew they were different from everyone else on the show,” says Norm Bale, one of the Hayride announcers. “They were from Memphis and they both had hot records on the radio. Lots of people on the show would be regulars for years, but these two felt they were just passing through. They’d both come out to a corner of the stage and watch the other’s show, to see how they were going over. Johnny never got the reaction Elvis did because of all the screaming girls, but he had a lot of charisma and became a favorite of the older Hayride regulars.”

  Cash was going over so well that he was moved into the headline spot on January 28, filling in for Elvis, who was in New York making his first TV guest appearance on CBS’s weekly Stage Show, hosted by Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey. With Elvis still away, Cash continued to headline the Hayride on February 11 and 18, but Elvis returned triumphantly on February 25 to reclaim his top spot. Cash, however, had become such a force on the show that his name was in the same size type as that of the emerging king of rock ’n’ roll. He played the Hayride seven more times that spring, many of the dates with Johnny Horton.

  Claude King, a Shreveport native who would later have a long run of modest country hits as well as one Top 10 pop hit, “Wolverton Mountain,” felt that “Johnny tended to keep to himself a lot backstage. He wasn’t snooty or anything, he was just shy. But he hit it off with Johnny Horton, but then again everybody got along with Johnny Horton. He was the most natural, down-to-earth fellow you ever met.”