Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  Time magazine, the biggest national journalistic platform of all in the 1960s, added its own rave, calling the collection one of “the most original and compelling pop albums of the year.”

  Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison was also embraced strongly by the underground rock radio and press, especially a new national rock journal named Rolling Stone. Aware of the biweekly magazine’s growing cultural impact on the careers of Dylan, Janis Joplin, and other Columbia rock acts, Clive Davis took out a flashy ad for the Folsom Prison album. More significantly, Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner saluted Cash in a passionate and thoughtful essay praising the singer’s profound artistry and his role in the rapidly growing merger of country and rock. At the same time, Tom Donahue, a San Francisco FM disc jockey who helped pioneer underground rock radio in America, started playing the album, which led scores of other FM stations to follow suit.

  In building an audience for the live album, Cash benefited greatly from his ties to the rock ’n’ roll legacy of Sun Records. If any other Nashville country artist, including someone as gifted as Marty Robbins, had made Folsom, it wouldn’t have been embraced by rock tastemakers in the same way; Cash was the only country star (apart from other members of the Sun stable) viewed by rock critics and DJs as one of them. These writers and commentators had grown up adoring Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis—and Johnny Cash. Folsom Prison reintroduced him. Wenner’s Rolling Stone essay outlined the case.

  “Cash, more than any other contemporary [country] performer, is meaningful in a rock and roll context,” he wrote, placing Cash in a time line that stretched from Presley (and Sun Records) to Dylan. Underscoring that rock foundation, Wenner pointed out that Cash’s backup group included Carl Perkins, “the man who wrote ‘Blue Suede Shoes.’”

  He stressed the link between Dylan and Cash: “They are both master singers, master story-tellers and master bluesmen. They share the same tradition, they are good friends and the work of each can tell you about the work of the other.”

  In both its influence and its insight, Rolling Stone was proclaiming Cash an artist for the times—someone equally relevant to rock, pop, and country audiences. The essay provided an enormous sales boost for Cash, because the young rock audience was beginning to control the national sales charts. Wenner’s words also helped increase respect for country music among the cultural elite, which in turn helped open the eyes and ears of people at network radio and television.

  Cash’s reputation as a maverick who’d done jail time, and the El Paso drug bust, too, strengthened his link to rock ’n’ roll; it was his music as well as his image that paved the way for the country-rock coalition that Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings would tap into with their outlaw movement in the late 1970s.

  Folsom Prison would have been a major country seller regardless, but it took the rock ’n’ roll connection to turn it into a cultural and commercial breakthrough. The single, “Folsom Prison Blues,” eventually spent eighteen weeks on the country charts, including four at number one. The album stayed on the pop charts for 122 weeks. The album eventually sold more than 3 million copies in the United States alone.

  On the Folsom stage, Cash combined the raw charisma and creative vitality of his Sun days with the artistic discipline and ambition of the Columbia years in an explosive package. Among those who stepped forward to congratulate him was his old mentor Sam Phillips. “From our first record together, I knew he was a talent and he could be a star,” Phillips said years later. “But he went even further than I imagined. With that album, he became a great talent and a superstar. I told him how proud I was of him because I know what he went through to get there.”

  IV

  After years of wariness caused by the singer’s many no-shows, concert promoters were again scrambling to book Johnny Cash. The success of Folsom built upon that frenzy. Sensing this was Cash’s moment, Holiff booked as many dates as possible, from the Midwest in March and April to Britain in May. Amid this euphoria, Cash told Johnston he wanted to do another gospel album, but not like before. He wanted to produce the most ambitious gospel album ever in country music—and record it live in Israel.

  “He said it was something he’d always wanted to do, like the prison album, but that he couldn’t talk anyone into it,” Johnston says. Columbia hadn’t trusted Cash enough after Carnegie Hall to spend money on a live album in the United States, much less Israel. But that was before Folsom.

  According to the producer, Cash asked him to put aside a couple of weeks and go with him and June to Israel, where they would walk the streets together to get inspiration for the live album.

  But Johnston had a counter-proposal. He remembers telling Cash, “‘That’s a great idea, but you don’t need me. You and June go. Walk around and write songs. I’ll give you a camera and a tape recorder and you just put down what you see and feel. Then bring it back here and we’ll do the album.’ He was quiet for a second, then he winked at me and I knew we were all right, because that’s what he always did when he liked something. He winked.

  “The label had reservations when I told them about it, but they had reservations about everything. Hell, they told me to take the guitars off Dylan’s album. I didn’t care what the hell the label thought. If Johnny Cash wanted to stand under an elm tree and sing ‘Jingle Bells,’ I would have been all for it. You’ve got to believe in your artists.”

  John and June headed back to Israel at the end of the British tour, carrying a tape recorder to capture their thoughts as they visited the historic sites they knew from the Bible. They were deeply moved, and the passion showed in the narrations Cash taped on the trip.

  After a few weeks touring in the States, John returned home and spent most of July going over plans for the album, which he titled Holy Land. Unlike with previous theme albums, he wasn’t looking for traditional material. He wanted everything in this album to be his personal statement.

  One key exception was “Daddy Sang Bass,” a song Carl Perkins wrote backstage one night. He had been humming the melody to “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” the gospel standard popularized by the Carter Family, when he started reflecting on the family sing-alongs of his childhood days. He played the opening verse for Cash, who thought it would be perfect for the album.

  When Cash got together again with Johnston in mid-July, he outlined his grand plans for the album. He was working off the same narration-plus-song blueprint he used on Ride This Train, but he wanted to mix several of the narrations that he taped in Israel with studio recordings of new songs. It was a daunting task, but the always upbeat Johnston said, “Well, let’s get started.”

  The two men went into the studio on July 19 and recorded the prologue for the album. Cash recited the words in a reverential tone that couldn’t have been more different from the raucous, occasionally four-letter-word spirit of Folsom. If Cash understood the soul of a convict, he also knew the faith of a believer.

  Before bringing in the musicians, Cash went to Los Angeles to tape a guest appearance on The Summer Brothers Smothers Show, hosted by Glen Campbell, a sign that TV execs were noticing the growing popularity of country music. Back in the studio July 29 to 31, he recorded most of the songs for the album.

  “John was very absorbed with that album,” the Statlers’ Don Reid says. “I think he felt he was doing something he would be remembered for. Like most sessions, he was still arranging as we were recording. Whatever crossed his mind, he would just stop and say, ‘You guys come in on the second line and then we’ll all hit it big on the last chorus’ or some such instruction. He arranged by feel and always on the spot.”

  When Johnston finished piecing the Holy Land album together, Cash felt he had another major work, and he was ecstatic, but Johnston knew it wasn’t what Columbia wanted to follow Folsom. Sure enough, the promotion department in New York looked at Holy Land as just another concept album that the public was bound to ignore. There was some thought about not even bothering to release a single. The fans seemed to like the rough-edged C
ash image. Why confuse everybody with this choirboy stuff?

  Cash and Johnston resisted and pushed “Daddy Sang Bass” as a single. It was an ultra-catchy tune, and Johnston had captured its nostalgic sing-along spirit. Not wanting to alienate the man who was rapidly becoming its hottest artist, Columbia agreed. But the executives wanted to wait until December to take advantage of its Christmas season appeal.

  The flip side of the single was “He Turned the Water into Wine,” a song Cash wrote for the album and was so well-crafted that it sounded like a gospel standard that had been handed down for generations. Cash felt it was one of the cornerstones of the album, but the tune would always have a bittersweet edge to it.

  The July 31 session was the last time he’d ever be in the studio with Luther Perkins.

  Luther’s second wife, Margie, had hoped her husband would go with her and their three-year-old adopted daughter, Kathy, to a friend’s house for a poker party the night of August 2, but Luther was ill. Margie phoned a couple of times to check on him, but stopped calling after he said he was going to have a cigarette and then try and get some sleep. Marshall Grant had often seen Luther fall asleep in a hotel bed or in the car with a lit cigarette in his hand, and he marveled at Luther’s luck at never having started a fire, though Grant often picked up the dropped cigarette butts and extinguished them just in case. That night, Luther’s luck finally gave out.

  Margie returned to the house on Old Hickory Lake, not far from the Cash home, to find Luther passed out on the floor. The fire department rushed him to the hospital at Vanderbilt University, where doctors found that he had suffered third-degree burns to 50 percent of his body. Cash, too, sped to the hospital, but his friend never regained consciousness. Luther died two days later and was buried in the same Hendersonville cemetery where Cash had bought a series of plots for his own family.

  Grant always looked back on the death as almost merciful. Doctors told him that if Luther had lived, they probably would have been forced to amputate both his hands. He would never have played the guitar again.

  Perkins’s widow says Cash blamed himself. “Johnny told me, ‘Margie, I really believe I caused Luther’s death.’ He said he was the one who gave Luther pills years before because Luther used to get so tired traveling between shows,” she adds. “He never took as many pills as Johnny, but Johnny felt bad because he had gotten him into pills and would even go to Luther sometimes to get more for himself. He was worried that Luther took the pills the night he died.”

  Cash had good reason to feel guilty. Luther had called Cash earlier the night of the fire, in an apparently drugged or drunken state, and asked him to come over and talk. But Cash didn’t pick up the warning signal. It was late, and he figured he could check in on him the next morning. Besides, he assumed that Margie was there to take care of him. In the days after Luther’s death, John and June insisted that Margie and her daughter stay with them until she could find a new place to live. Cash also contributed to the building of a $2 million burn center in Luther’s name at Vanderbilt.

  Decades later, Dr. Nat Winston would recall Cash telling him that two of the events in his life that had had the greatest impact were the day his brother Jack was killed and Luther Perkins’s death. More than once, too, Cash said, “A part of me died with Luther.”

  When Rosanne, Kathy, Cindy, and Tara returned to Hendersonville for their second summer visit, everything had changed. John and June were married, and the room the Cash girls shared the year before had been divided into separate spaces for Carlene and Rosie. Though the girls all got along well personally, the sleeping arrangements were the first in a series of slights that made the Cash kids think Carlene and Rosie were getting preferential treatment.

  “We’d get here as teenagers,” Kathy Cash says, “and Rosie and Carlene would have a Porsche and an MG in the driveway. Then I’d go in their room and they’d have so many clothes and so much makeup that I was really jealous.”

  In her 2007 memoir I Walked the Line: My Life with Johnny Cash, Vivian blamed June for the perceived slights, but she acknowledged they were really due to a difference of philosophy regarding parenting. Her girls “saw June’s two daughters living it up….Meanwhile back in California, Rosanne, Kathy, Cindy and Tara’s wardrobes consisted of their school uniforms and maybe two or three other outfits. No extras. No luxury items. I didn’t believe in spoiling them. So compared to June’s daughters, I know the girls felt second rate.”

  Carlene and Rosie recognized that they were being treated royally.

  “At our old home with Daddy Rip, when Mom was on the road, Rosie and I had chores,” Carlene says. “We mowed the lawn, did the dishes, dusted and vacuumed. When we moved in with Big John, which is what I called [Cash], those chores stopped. We had people cleaning up for us hand and foot. Mom said now that we had full-time staff and lawn workers, life would be different.”

  But even when money was scarce for the Carters in the 1950s and early 1960s, June had made sure to put enough aside so she could show her daughters some of the high life that she craved. “Mom used to take us to New York religiously, at least twice a year all through our lives,” Carlene adds. “We would stay at the Sherry-Netherland, go out to eat at Delmonico’s, go for a ride in a buggy in Central Park, and see Broadway shows or the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. It was just me and Mama and Rosie, usually for a long weekend.”

  Back in Tennessee, Cash, for all his misadventures, tried to be a strict parent to June’s daughters. It was a big deal, Carlene remembers, when she asked permission to go on her first date.

  “I had just turned fourteen and we wanted to see the rock band Steppenwolf in Nashville and Big John was in a tizzy about the whole thing. He thought he should set a curfew, but he didn’t know what time it should be. He finally asked me what time the curfew should be. I figured the show would be over around ten thirty, so I told him, ‘What about this: I’ll see the band, then go to Shoney’s with the others for a hamburger and be home by eleven.’ He said, ‘That sounds good. Go ahead.’

  “Well, I get home around eleven thirty and he was waiting at the door, smoking cigarettes like there was no tomorrow. He grounded me for three months. The next day he runs into Braxton Dixon, who went to the same show, and Braxton told him he was being too harsh. Braxton had gone out to dinner too, and he didn’t get home until midnight.”

  To everyone’s surprise, Steppenwolf’s tour bus pulled up outside the house the next day. The band’s leader, John Kay, was a big fan and wanted to meet Cash. “They just fawned all over him,” Carlene recalls. “I think it made him feel even guiltier about grounding me, but he held me to it. The whole thing showed me how little experience he had as a father. I mean, Vivian handled all the discipline in that family. It was totally new to him.”

  Tragedy hit Cash’s world again on September 16 when the neighboring home of Roy Orbison burned down, killing two of the singer’s sons. Orbison, who was on tour in England, rushed home. It was the second horrific loss for him. His wife, Claudette, had been killed in front of his eyes when her motorcycle was struck by a semi-trailer truck in 1966. When Orbison told Cash after the fire that he could never live on the site again, Cash bought the property and planted an orchard so no one else could build there either. Orbison was forever grateful.

  With the shock of Luther’s and the Orbison boys’ deaths, Cash started cutting back on his drug use, according to Grant. “I think those deaths reminded him of how close he had come to death himself. In the months after Luther’s death, he’d still slip up,” Grant noted. “But he was definitely better.”

  Reluctant to look for a replacement for Luther, Cash asked Carl Perkins to take over Luther’s part, but even though Perkins was a far superior guitarist, he couldn’t duplicate the steady, unbending rhythm which maximized that signature sound. Cash also thought it was unfair to set such narrow limits on Perkins’s talent. So he put out the word in Nashville that he was looking for a new guitarist—and he got lots of applicants. Ever
yone knew Cash paid his band members handsomely.

  Cash was in Fayetteville on September 17 for a show in support of the reelection campaign of Arkansas governor Winthrop Rockefeller when he found his new guitarist. Marshall and Carl were scheduled to fly in from Memphis, but their flight was canceled because of bad weather. Cash was getting ready to do the show when June introduced him to a young woman who said her boyfriend knew all his songs and could play just like Luther. Cash invited the young truck driver backstage, where he played “Folsom Prison Blues” and “I Walk the Line” almost exactly like Luther. His name was Bob Wootton, and Cash brought him onstage that same day. He soon became the newest member of the Tennessee Three. Though he’d remain an important part of the group for almost two decades, and was even married to Anita Carter for a while, Wootton never became as close to Cash as Luther had been.

  One of Wootton’s first dates was at Carnegie Hall on October 23, Cash’s first engagement there since his embarrassment six years earlier. Cash faced a star-studded crowd that included Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin, and he triumphed. In a rave New York Times review, Robert Shelton contrasted the new Cash with the one he’d seen in 1962.

  He wrote: “Soul music of a rare kind—country soul from the concerned and sensitive white South that Northerners tend to forget—was heard Wednesday night at Carnegie Hall as Johnny Cash made a stirring comeback to New York….His performance was testimony that his own personal bouts with illness and control have been resolved, putting him at as strong a level as he has had since the middle nineteen-fifties.”