And it echoed through the canyons,
Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday.
On the Sunday morning sidewalk,
Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned.
’Cos there’s something in a Sunday,
Makes a body feel alone.
And there’s nothin’ short of dyin’,
Half as lonesome as the sound,
On the sleepin’ city sidewalks,
Sunday mornin’ comin’ down.
Cash first sang “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” during the “Ride This Train” sequence that aired February 25 and illustrated it with footage enacting some of the scenes from the lyrics. But Cash wasn’t satisfied with that version, so he sang the song again on the April 8 show, this time with a more aggressive musical backing and a more convincing vocal. That version was included in the subsequent Johnny Cash Show album.
Kristofferson was at the rehearsal for that second show when he heard Cash sing “Sunday Mornin’” with the exact feeling Kris had when writing the song. When he went over to tell Cash how much he loved his vocal, John was huddling with an ABC rep who was trying to talk him into dropping the line “Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned” in favor of “Wishing, Lord, that I was home.”
“He thought the original line would offend some viewers,” Kristofferson says. “John turned and asked what I thought and I told him the line doesn’t mean the same, but I said I knew how much the show meant to him and that I would understand if he felt he needed to change it.
“I didn’t know what he was going to do until the taping. I was watching from the balcony of the Ryman, and he looked up at me just when he sang the line the way I wrote it, with ‘stoned’ in it. I was so proud of him. I could understand why people were starting to see him as the father of our country or something. He was a real hero.”
Cash introduced the third signature song, “Man in Black,” a year later in a show aimed at young people and featuring guests James Taylor, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell. In a sequence taped at Vanderbilt University, he met informally with students to answer questions on subjects ranging from drugs to Vietnam. Before the concert portion of the show was taped, Cash expanded upon his answers in a song, using his familiar black stage attire as a symbol to make the message more dramatic and personal.
Later, he was surprised when some critics accused him of being a fraud because the black clothing dated back to the Sun days and had nothing to do, really, with any social causes. “Of course,” Cash said in return, “I’m a songwriter. I use my imagination. The important thing is the message of the song, not the imagery.”
The song’s lyrics go:
Well, you wonder why I always dress in black,
Why you never see bright colors on my back,
and why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone.
Well, there’s a reason for the things that I have on,
I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,
livin’ in the hopeless hungry side of town;
I wear the black for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,
but is there because he’s a victim of the times.
I wear the black for those who’ve never read
Or listened to the words that Jesus said
about the road to happiness through love and charity.
Why, you’d think He’s talkin’ straight to you and me.
Ah, we’re doin’ mighty fine, I do suppose,
in our “streak of lightnin’” cars and fancy clothes,
But just so we’re reminded of the ones who are held back,
up front there ought to be a man in black.
I wear it for the sick and lonely old,
for the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold;
I wear the black in mournin’ for the lives that could have been.
Each week we lose a hundred fine young men.
Ah, I wear it for the thousands who have died,
believin’ that the Lord was on their side.
And I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died
believin’ that we all were on their side.
Well, there’s things that never will be right, I know
and things need changin’ eve’ywhere you go.
But until we start to make a move to make a few things right,
you’ll never see me wear a suit of white.
Oh, I’d love to wear a rainbow every day
and tell the world that ev’rything’s OK.
But I’ll try to carry off a little darkness on my back.
Till things are brighter, I’m the man in black.
Rather than release the live version, Cash went into the studio and recorded it again. For one of the few times in his career, he produced the session himself. The record proved as evocative in its gentle way as his Folsom tunes had been with their defiance. The record went on to get substantial pop and country airplay when released as a single, but its main impact was from his TV show. Within weeks, “Man in Black” joined “What Is Truth” and “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” as songs that largely established Cash as a symbol of American honor, compassion, and struggle.
The Vanderbilt episode was one of the high points in a series that spoke to young and old, urban and rural viewers at a time of great division in the country. Similarly, the series challenged racial boundaries in country music, which had embraced only one African American star in decades: Charlie Pride. Besides Pride, who was a repeat guest on the TV show, the program featured such black artists as Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, O. C. Smith, and Odetta. Cash was especially proud of bringing Louis Armstrong onto the Ryman stage, where the jazz great had once been barred from performing because of his race. On the show, Armstrong re-created the trumpet solo he’d played on a Jimmie Rodgers recording of “Blue Yodel No. 9” in a 1930 session in Hollywood; Cash was thrilled to sing Rodgers’s part. By celebrating that historic pairing, Cash wasn’t just saluting his heroes; he was subtly underscoring his message of unity and tolerance.
III
Billy Graham and Richard Nixon weren’t the only famous people interested in cultivating America’s new hero. Bob Hope not only invited Cash to join him on his own TV show but also flew to Nashville to appear on Cash’s program. Even Lester Maddox, the Georgia governor who was a leader in the Southern resistance to segregation, managed to share the stage with Cash at a concert for prisoners at the Municipal Auditorium in Atlanta. A special guest was Sheriff Ralph Jones, who three years earlier had given Cash the sobering lecture in his LaFayette jailhouse.
All the exposure finally led Gordon Jenkins, the arranger-composer who wrote “Crescent City Blues,” to file suit in U.S. District Court in New York charging Cash with copyright infringement for using so much of “Crescent City Blues” when he wrote the lyrics of “Folsom Prison Blues.” (Cash eventually paid Jenkins $75,000 to waive all future rights and royalties to the song.)
Even Hollywood came calling again. Cash recorded songs for two films, I Walk the Line, a drama starring Gregory Peck, and Little Fauss and Big Halsy, a comedy-drama featuring Robert Redford and Michael J. Pollard. He also put together modestly successful soundtrack albums to coincide with the release of both films. Neither album felt remotely inspired, except for “Flesh and Blood,” one of Cash’s most beautifully framed love songs. The track was released as a single and went to number one on the country charts.
Hollywood also reached out in another way. Still hopeful of a career in the movies, Cash signed to co-star with Kirk Douglas in A Gunfight, an eccentric western about two aging gunfighters who agree to sell tickets to a public showdown with the winner taking all. The most novel thing about the film, which was shot in New Mexico and Spain during the TV show’s summer recess, is that it was financed by the Jicarilla Apaches of New Mexico.
“They said they wanted to support me [for what] I’d done with Bitter Tears,” Cash said. “You see, the Americans gave them some of this dried-up old desert and
what they did was strike oil on it. They had a lot of money lying around that they wanted to invest to make more money. They heard there was a movie possibility that I might be interested in.”
Released in 1971, the film fared poorly at the box office, and critics were largely unimpressed. Mel Gussow of the New York Times was intrigued by the casting, though. “It is mostly the stars’ presence that gives the movie authenticity—Douglas with his aging chin-dimple more and more resembling a bullet wound; Cash, his face corrugated, his voice rumbling and gravelly. They are a natural match: Douglas’s grin hiding despair, Cash’s frown concealing an inward ease.”
On the recording front, there was so much public demand for Cash material that even the flimsy World of Johnny Cash album—a bargain-priced collection of old album tracks, none of them hits—was certified gold (500,000 sales). Cash’s next album, The Johnny Cash Show, was drawn from the TV series performances, and on casual listening it seemed lazy by Cash’s best standards. On reflection, the album was another daring step. Rather than showcase the TV show’s most popular moments, it was built around the train segments that Cash felt so strongly about. After all those years, he was getting a second chance to expose that music to his new, larger audience. Thanks to the inclusion of “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” the album, too, went gold.
It was the last significant album of the Cash-Johnston partnership. Both men were vague about just what went wrong. Years later, Johnston says he went to London to record an album with Leonard Cohen, and by the time he got back to Nashville, both Dylan and Cash had moved on. “I don’t know what happened,” he continues. “He might have said, ‘I don’t want to work with Bob anymore.’ I never heard anything from him.’”
Columbia’s Clive Davis thinks that Cash grew disenchanted with Johnston’s combative, anti–record company attitude. Johnston was still working with Cash in late 1970 when Davis flew to Nashville because of reports that the label’s biggest star was unhappy with the way the company was treating him.
“Here was our biggest seller, and I was hearing that he was complaining we didn’t promote or advertise his music enough,” Davis says. “The fact was, we spent tremendous amounts of money to promote his music on every type of radio format and in all kinds of publications, including underground papers.
“I asked if he was really unhappy or was I getting bad information? I told him, ‘We’re behind you 100 percent in advertising and promotion.’ He reacted with surprise and dismay, and he began to wonder how these misconceptions might have come about. He finally said the problem might be Johnston. Just before Christmas, Johnny notified me that he wouldn’t be using Johnston again.”
The TV show continued to be Cash’s top priority, but the weekly schedule was far less demanding than his normal touring itinerary would have been. That allowed him to spend hours with John Carter, go fishing, work in his garden, and contribute to various philanthropic causes. “I have had two good years and I want to help people less fortunate than I,” Cash said when asked by a reporter about his $10,000 gift to a thirty-five-year-old kidney patient in Nashville.
“It was typical of John,” said Marshall Grant. “In that case, he read about the man in the paper, but he could just as easily have been driving along the highway and seen someone in trouble.”
During the TV show run, anything Cash-related was news, especially in Nashville. The papers carried a steady stream of reports of Cash sightings and activities, whether it was two-month-old John Carter returning to Madison Hospital because of a cold or Cash serving as honorary “bell ringer” for the Tennessee Mental Health Association. Nashville readers also learned that a twenty-four-year-old man from nearby Smyrna, Tennessee, was arrested after sending Cash an extortion letter that threatened the safety of Cash and his family. The letter read, “Johnny Cash, if you want to keep making money and keep your family healthy, leave $200,000 in old bills in a plastic bag at I-24 and Old Hickory Boulevard Friday night.”
Another consequence of Cash’s new celebrity status was that tour buses, sometimes five at a time, lined up on the narrow road outside his house. They’d stop long enough for fans to take photos of the gate and even throw notes over the wall. In fact, there were now crowds everywhere he went.
In a notebook he carried around to jot down thoughts for songs he wrote, “Public life is unbelievable.…Being a ‘star’ means so many things and all of them opposite normalcy. If your face is familiar, you are stared at, pointed at, laughed at, whispered at, yelled at and followed. People say lots of things about you that they wouldn’t say if they knew you heard. Everything you do well is taken for granted. Any mistake is a matter for great attention.”
However uncomfortable the endless parade of fans sometimes made him feel, Cash appreciated the support and invariably went out of his way to be gracious. Rather than stay in the house, he would often go outside to shake hands with or sign autographs for the tour bus fans. Even on mornings when he’d be outside hoeing or tending to his grapevines, he would stop and chat with fans who drove by. Dr. Nat Winston believed that Cash’s allegiance to fans went deeper than trying to thank them for their support. Like many in show business, the psychiatrist says, Cash had an enormous need for affirmation and adoration.
“One time we spent much of the day on a boat, fishing and relaxing, and John kept talking about how he needed to get away from everything, and he specifically mentioned the tour buses,” Winston adds. “Well, when we got back to the house around six o’clock, there must have been ten or twelve buses lined up outside the gate, and he almost broke his leg trying to get out the car so he could race over to the fans. Whatever he said, he needed the adoration.”
It wasn’t only hard-core fans who wanted something from Cash. “Twenty state governors called me in the last year trying to get favors from me,” he told Christopher S. Wren, in the first Cash biography. “People have called me from Washington asking me to use my name for something. They’ve put all this power in my hands. I keep searching for the wisdom, hoping I’ll say the right thing and do the right thing.”
For guidance, Cash continued to turn regularly to Billy Graham, whose constant message was that God had given Cash this power and that he should use it to tell people what God had done for him and what God could do for them. The words were reinforced by the feeling Cash got when he sang “What Is Truth” to sixty thousand people at his first Graham Crusade in Knoxville on May 24, 1970. The adrenaline rush, he said, was even greater than at either of the prison shows.
After that Crusade appearance the evangelist told him, “God has given you your own pulpit. You can reach more people in one TV show than in fifty Crusades.”
IV
Cash’s escalating popularity made him feel invincible, and it was no surprise when ABC picked up the TV show for a third season. Yet there was trouble ahead. Almost immediately after the show returned to the air on September 23, viewership started to decline, though no one involved in the show could agree why.
In retrospect it is easy to see that the falloff could well have been due to circumstances beyond his reach. The public was tiring of the variety show format. Within nine months, nearly a dozen network variety shows would be canceled. In the final months of 1970, the arguments in executive offices from New York to Hollywood to Nashville over the reason for the drop in ratings ranged from the perennial matter of the wrong mix of guests to Cash’s increasing emphasis on gospel music. Jacobson, who was in a key position to observe the ups and downs of the show’s dynamics, eventually pointed to the religious factor. But his subtle warnings were overruled by other forces in Cash’s life. The star received thousands of letters from fans and ministers around the country, all urging him to go beyond singing gospel songs to making a public declaration of faith.
Closer to home, June, too, was pushing for him to do the same thing. She even persuaded him to attend services from time to time at the neighborhood Baptist church. In a newspaper interview at the time, she said the country needed greater s
piritual direction, telling the reporter, “If we don’t have some kind of spiritual comeback, I think we’re going to be in really bad trouble. Our morals are deteriorating to the point where people will just disintegrate.”
The TV staff’s grumbling about the gospel component made Cash even more aggressive on the issue. “John didn’t like being told what to do,” says Don Reid. “Nine times out of ten, when someone told John not to do something, he’d end up doing it. Plus, this was something deep in his heart.”
The crisis came when Cash showed Jacobson a statement he planned to read on the show that would air November 18.
It read: “All my life I have believed that there are two powerful forces: the force of good and the force of evil, the force of right and the force of wrong, or, if you will, the force of God and the force of the devil. Well now, the force of God is naturally the Number One most powerful force, although the Number Two most powerful force, the devil, takes over every once in a while. And he can make it pretty rough on you when he tries to take over. I know.
“In my time, I fought him, I fought back, I clawed, I kicked him. When I didn’t have the strength, I gnawed him. Well, here lately I think we’ve made the devil pretty mad because on our show we’ve been mentioning God’s name. We’ve been talking about Jesus, Moses, Elijah the prophet, even Paul and Silas and John the Baptist. Well, this probably made the devil pretty mad alright, and he may be coming after me again, but I’ll be ready for him. In the meantime, while he’s coming, I’d like to get in more licks for Number One.”
Jacobson found the statement unnecessarily strident and advised Cash not to use it, but Cash wouldn’t listen. After the taping, Jacobson again suggested they cut the statement before the actual broadcast, but Cash was insistent. He told his closest ally on the show, “If you cut that out, I’ll never talk to you again.”
Years later, Jacobson stood by his position.
Johnny Cash: The Life Page 43
