Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  John LaGale “Johnny” Horton was born in Los Angeles in April 1925, but his father—a construction worker with Texas roots who had taken his family west in search of a job—returned to Texas a few years later, and young Johnny was raised in Tyler, Texas, halfway between Shreveport and Dallas. Horton loved the area and continued to make Shreveport his home even after he started having hit records on Columbia. He was a big fellow, just over six foot two, and handsome in a good ole boy sort of way.

  There was a lot Cash liked about Horton. He didn’t drink or fool around on the road. Most of all, perhaps, Horton was a fisherman. He would rather go fishing than walk onstage any day. One of the best-known tales in Hayride annals is about the way Horton would stand on one side of the stage with a fishing reel and sail a lure into a coffee cup all the way across on the other side. It was as popular with the Hayride regulars as any song in the show.

  Horton invited Cash to spend the night at his house after one early Hayride show, and Cash immediately felt at home. Horton’s wife, Billie Jean, was the widow of Hank Williams and by all accounts the prettiest woman in country music. Claude King’s wife, Barbara, describes her as “beyond Elizabeth Taylor.”

  What Cash liked about her was that she was funny, self-assured, and ready to jump into the conversation whether the topic was country music or bass fishing. “Horton had a lot of friends but nobody bonded with him like Cash,” Billie Jean says. “They were inseparable.”

  III

  Things couldn’t have been brighter when Cash came home to Memphis on June 1 to play the Overton Park Shell, this time as the headliner, joined on the bill by Carl Perkins and Roy Orbison. It was a heady time because “I Walk the Line” was number one in Memphis and it had just entered Billboard’s list of national country best-sellers at number eight. To make it even better, “Rock ’n’ Roll Ruby,” a song Cash had written backstage at the Hayride, was number four in Memphis, thanks to a version recorded by Warren Smith. Cash didn’t feel that the song, with its rock imagery, was quite right for him, but he thought Sam might want it for one of his new horde of rockabilly-minded singers.

  This was the first time Johnny had been able to spend more than a week at the house since the family moved in. Except for three shows, he would be at Sandy Cove through the month, and he was relaxed. He already had written his next Sun single, a mid-tempo song called “Train of Love” that was a good-natured mix of Cash’s favorite country song image (trains) and country music’s most commercial topic (romance).

  Vivian was thrilled that Johnny was home and in such good spirits. This is what she had always envisioned their marriage to be. According to her sister Sylvia, they walked around like high school sweethearts, holding hands and giving each other quick kisses. But nothing could stop Cash from listening to music. One song that fascinated him was Tennessee Ernie Ford’s recording of “Sixteen Tons,” a folk-country tale about a coal miner who works through intense pain only to get “another day older and deeper in debt.” The song was played on the radio so often during the winter of 1955 that Marshall got to the point where he’d turn it off on their long car drives, only to have Johnny turn the knob back to the station. Cash never mentioned the connection, but one key line in the song is worth noting: “Cain’t no-a high-toned woman make me walk the line.”

  Initially Cash thought “Sixteen Tons” was an old folk song, but he noticed one day in a music magazine that the writer was Merle Travis and the song first appeared in the late 1940s on Travis’s concept album Folk Songs of the Hills. Cash was familiar with Travis’s lively hits, including “So Round, So Firm, So Fully Packed,” but he knew him primarily as a brilliant guitar player, not a songwriter. “Sixteen Tons” made him look at Travis in an entirely different light. From then on, Travis was another of his heroes; he had little further interest in the Ernie Ford record.

  “I think John recognized that the difference between Merle and Ernie was the purity of soul and genuine ‘coal mining, Kentucky mountain man’ folk musician in Merle, whereas Ernie was, in many ways, too smooth and canned, like a studio performer,” says Roy Cash Jr., John’s nephew.

  Folk Songs was built around a series of original and traditional songs about workers on the railroad and in the coal mines. Travis himself had been raised in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, and his family worked in the coal mines there. Listening to the album, Cash started thinking about making more music that was rooted in the soil and the struggle of the people he knew in Dyess. He was especially fascinated by the way each of the songs on the album was preceded by a short narrative that set up the lyrics. But the idea of actually making an album like that seemed a long way off. If Phillips didn’t want gospel music, he wasn’t going to be any more open to old-time folk music.

  But there was lots of good news, too. Cash’s parents were ready to retire and move to Memphis, and he used money from his second royalty check to make the down payment on a place a couple of miles from his own house. Ray and Carrie were already spending most weekends in Memphis to be with the family, and it was at one of those gatherings that Cash proudly declared he had graduated from the Louisiana Hayride. He was now going to be singing at the Grand Ole Opry.

  Despite the them-versus-us nature of the Nashville-Memphis relationship, the brain trust at the Opry couldn’t ignore the change going on with the arrival of rock ’n’ roll, and they felt they needed to embrace one of the young mavericks in the Sun stable. They had already lost out on Elvis, and they didn’t want to make the same mistake twice.

  Once “I Walk the Line” started breaking out in the country and pop fields, the Opry booked Cash and the Tennessee Two for its July 7 broadcast. While excited to appear on country music’s premier show, Cash was sad to leave the rival Hayride, which had given him his start, and he would return occasionally for old time’s sake.

  Cash wasn’t the only one who was nervous on the night of his Opry debut. The Opry folks, too, were hoping this new partnership would work. A write-up on the show in the Nashville Banner focused on the anticipation in the Ryman Auditorium as Cash prepared to go onstage to sing “I Walk the Line”: “All the Opry people were pulling for this newest member of their family to score big with those 3,800 folks looking on and folks listening to the network show from coast-to-coast.”

  There was no need to worry. As the Banner reported, Cash was a smash. After the opening lines of “I Walk the Line,” there was a veritable tornado of applause. “As his last words filtered into the farthermost corners, many in the crowd were on their feet, cheering, waving and clapping.”

  Most significantly, the paper quoted “one of America’s foremost authorities on country music” as saying, “Cash will be every bit as good as Elvis Presley. Probably better and he’ll last a whole lot longer. He has sincerity, he has bombast, he has tone, and he carries to the rafters, the top row hears him.”

  Asked that night about his feelings after the show, Cash said, “I am grateful, happy and humble. It is the ambition of every hillbilly singer to reach the Opry in his lifetime. It’s the top for us. I feel mighty lucky to be here tonight…and I thank everyone.”

  The article was so glowing that Phillips couldn’t have written it better, but the Banner, a big booster of Nashville’s country music industry, was reaching out to Cash on behalf of the entire industry, saying: Enough of this Nashville-Memphis war, enough of this country–rock ’n’ roll war! Join us!

  Cash was deeply proud of making the Opry stage, but he didn’t feel as comfortable there as he had at the Hayride. He played the Opry only twice more in 1956. He was too busy doing higher-paying shows around the country. Nashville wasn’t alone in reaching out to him.

  In mid-July he was about to embark on his most ambitious tour yet, a series of Opry package shows that would take him as far north as Toronto and as far west as New Mexico. But first Phillips wanted to record a new single so that he’d have something ready when “I Walk the Line” started to slow down. They entered the studio on August 8 with just two songs, a
nd no one seemed all that sure about either one. In fact, Cash was surprised that Phillips hadn’t asked him to go back and write something else.

  “Train of Love” had a playful sing-along side, but it wasn’t going to make anyone take notice the way “I Walk the Line,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” and “Hey, Porter” had. Cash even said as much in a letter to one of his old Landsberg buddies. The song was so routine that country DJs ended up devoting more airtime to the record’s flip side, “There You Go,” a more upbeat tune, though still lacking the character and personal tone of the earlier singles. Both songs were a reminder that Cash, for all his early flashes of brilliance, was still trying to figure out what he wanted to say in his music and how to say it.

  Privately, Cash also wondered if Phillips wasn’t spreading himself too thin by taking on so many new artists. He felt that Sam had begun to accept pretty much any song he brought in, rather than insisting on something stronger. And Phillips may finally have been feeling the strain. He hired an assistant to help him in the studio.

  Jack Clement had served as a member of the U.S. Marine Corps’s ceremonial band in Washington, D.C., before returning to his native Memphis in hopes of getting into the music business. He had recorded a couple of songs with a young rockabilly singer named Billy Lee Riley, and Phillips was so impressed he hired Clement on the spot. He paid immediate dividends by discovering Jerry Lee Lewis, who showed up at the Sun studio one day just as Cash had. Clement made a test recording with Lewis and played it for Sam, who decided to sign Lewis after hearing less than thirty seconds.

  There was an old joke among road-weary country artists that agents must plan a tour by throwing darts at a wall map. Everyone had stories about playing a show in, say, Memphis and then having to drive 280 miles to Atlanta, then turn around and drive 250 miles back to Nashville for a show the next night, then drive back east 286 miles to Montgomery, Alabama, rather than having the shows booked more sensibly, so they could simply drive straight from Memphis to Nashville to Montgomery to Atlanta.

  It was this need for grueling all-night trips that caused so many musicians to rely on uppers or other fatigue-battling drugs to help them stay awake. They would even speak of the distance between towns by the number of pills they’d need for the drive:

  How far is it from Memphis to Dallas?

  Two pills.

  But there weren’t any drugs in the Cash car in the summer of 1956, and John, Luther, and Marshall would frequently arrive in a city exhausted just hours before a show. To save money, they’d often change clothes and freshen up in a gas station restroom or backstage dressing room rather than check in to a motel. After the show, they’d be back on the road, where it’s a wonder that—without some kind of chemical stimulant—Perkins and Grant didn’t doze off. The trips were made all the longer and more dangerous by the narrow two-lane highways that were common at the time. Cash was still not allowed to get near the wheel. The road was so hard on the cars that Marshall and Luther had to take them into the shop constantly to work on them when they got back to Memphis. “If we hadn’t been mechanics,” said Marshall, “we couldn’t have afforded to go on the road.”

  Booked on multi-act package shows, Cash was making $100 a performance, but it still had to be divided three ways, and the travel expenses continued to mount. On nights when the distance to the next city wasn’t too great, they would check in to a cheap motel. Where there was only one double bed, they’d flip a coin to see which two got to share the bed and who had to sleep on a rollaway bed or, more likely, the floor. Their diet was ridiculous—mostly baloney sandwiches and candy bars. Eventually they splurged and bought a small portable grill, which enabled them to cook themselves some steaks or pork chops. They even started carrying shotguns so they could stop the car if they spotted a rabbit or some other potential meal on rural back roads.

  The compensation for all this work, of course, was the promise of bigger audiences, bigger paychecks, and, for someone with Cash’s deep-rooted wanderlust, the chance to see all those new cities. During that fall alone, they rolled into El Paso, Toronto, and Detroit. They also got to see a wide range of honky-tonks, ballrooms, auditoriums, and fairgrounds: Danceland in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; the Ice Arena in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Fair Park Auditorium in Abilene, Texas; and the Independence Memorial Hall in Iola, Kansas. To battle the fatigue, Cash became adept at taking naps, either in the car outside the venue or in whatever quiet space he could find in the club or auditorium.

  It was all so new and exciting that no one was really complaining. During these tours, the friendship between Cash and Johnny Horton deepened. “Cash could talk to you for hours about any subject, and it was hard to find someone like that in that world,” Horton’s wife, Billie Jean, says. “He was smart, and he wasn’t just interested in chasing girls and getting drunk.”

  IV

  Cash was home for a week in early December before heading west for his first series of shows in California, something he was looking forward to with great expectations. What kid didn’t grow up wanting to go to Hollywood, where all those movies were made and, by the 1950s, where the TV stars lived?

  While in Memphis, Cash visited Phillips the morning of December 4 to talk about the trouble he was having coming up with new songs, and Phillips reassured him. Sam knew it was hard to write on the road, and he told Cash not to worry; ideas would eventually start flowing again. That afternoon Cash got a call from Phillips. Elvis had stopped by unexpectedly, and Sam wanted Cash to come down to the studio so they could get a photo of the two for the local paper. Cash brought Vivian with him, and when they got to the studio, they found a crowded room.

  Carl Perkins had been working on a new record when Elvis stopped by, and they’d started fooling around on some songs in an informal jam session. The material included Bill Monroe bluegrass tunes, some Chuck Berry rockers, a Gene Autry number, a Hank Snow hit, and lots of gospel—“Just a Little Talk with Jesus,” “Peace in the Valley,” and “Blessed Jesus (Hold My Hand).” And there was this loudmouthed piano player, Jerry Lee Lewis, joining in and acting as if he were the real star of the day even though his first Sun single, “Crazy Arms,” had just been released. Phillips was standing behind his soundboard, happily recording the session. Cash claimed he sang on the session, but if so, he must have been standing too far from the mike for it to pick up his voice, because it’s not audible on the tape that was made that day.

  The photo of the foursome ran in the Memphis Press Scimitar along with a story declaring that this “quartet could sell a million.” The story of that afternoon session grew into legend as years went by, and rockabilly fans around the world dreamed of hearing the “Million Dollar Quartet,” as it became known. They got their wish in 1981, when part of the December 4 session was released in bootleg form and became an underground best-seller. Other bootleg editions were also released before RCA finally put out an authorized version in 1990.

  The next day, Cash kissed Vivian and the girls good-bye and headed for California.

  Bob Neal, who was still feeling the pain of having lost Elvis’s contract to Tom Parker, had been talking to Cash a lot about California. Parker had taken Elvis there to get him into the movies, because movies, Parker believed, were here to stay, while this rock ’n’ roll fad could evaporate overnight. So, Neal figured, what’s good for Elvis was good for Cash, too. He told Johnny that he ought to be in the movies, and the idea appealed to Cash. Neal pledged he would set up some meetings with studio heads, with an eye toward signing a multi-picture deal like Elvis had. But that would take time. Cash’s first trip was strictly musical.

  The California tour started at the Red Barn in Salinas, which was one of the roughest spots on the country music landscape; fistfights on the dance floor and hurled beer bottles were commonplace. It was also Cash’s introduction to Stewart Carnall, who came from a wealthy Southern California family and prep school background, but was determined to make it on his own money, much of which he’d spend partying or betting on ho
rses. After a stint in the Army, Carnall began booking some country music shows. When he heard “Hey, Porter” on the jukebox, he fell in love with Cash’s voice. Carnall called Bob Neal in Memphis and booked Cash for $300 a night for some California dates. The Red Barn was the first stop.

  Because he was such a fan, Carnall personally drove Cash and the Tennessee Two to all the California dates in his brand-new Cadillac. Cash and the guys got the false impression that Carnall was this straitlaced rich kid, and they started having fun with him. During their travels through the rural parts of the state, Cash would ask Carnall to stop at roadside fruit stands, and he and Marshall and Luther delighted in leaving the peelings all over Carnall’s shiny El Dorado. They’d also try to embarrass Carnall at restaurants by picking up the food with their hands. Eventually, Carnall realized what was happening and upped the stakes. At a restaurant in Modesto, he ordered breaded veal cutlet and mashed potatoes, all of it covered with thick brown gravy. As soon as the food appeared, Carnall picked up the cutlet, tore it in two, and stuffed a piece in his mouth. As Cash and the guys watched the gravy drip down Carnall’s hand and onto his fancy shirt, they broke into a cheer. The friendship was on.

  The tour was fun, but the date Cash was looking forward to most was Town Hall Party, a Saturday night show in a three-thousand-capacity ballroom in the Los Angeles suburb of Compton that was broadcast live for three hours on KTTV, Channel 11. One reason the show appealed to Cash was that some movie or TV exec just might catch his act on KTTV and jump-start his acting career. But he also wanted to meet some of the cast, especially Merle Travis and Tex Ritter. He felt immediately at home. The atmosphere was far closer to that of the informal, open-minded Louisiana Hayride than the more regimented Opry. Plus, he felt like part of the show’s musical family. He enjoyed sitting around backstage talking to his two heroes during the three-hour telecast as much as going out onstage. But once he was there, the crowd response was wondrous.