Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  Some nights Kathy would sit with her father and read him a story. When she thought he had dozed off on one visit, she eased out of her chair and almost got to the door, when she heard a weak voice say, “Where do you think you’re going? Tell me a story.”

  Trying to lighten the mood, she says, she replied, “‘Once upon a time there was a little daddy that would not go to sleep,’ and I would tell this whole big story about this dad and this daughter, and he laughed so hard. We ended up staying awake for another hour and a half.”

  As painful as life was, Cash continued to gain strength. He recorded a song on July 31 during Maffetone’s third visit. Maffetone was impressed by engineer Ferguson’s patience with Cash, who could often get out only a few words at a time before pausing, but he kept at it until they had a usable version.

  During each of his visits, Maffetone continued to stress the need to reduce Cash’s medications, but making progress was hard. John Carter, Rosanne, and Kathy agreed with him to varying extents, but they knew their dad liked his doctor and, as with Peggy Knight, would resist breaking ties with her.

  Before going into the studio again at the end of July, Cash learned that his mentor, Sam Phillips, had died in Memphis. It meant almost all the original Sun gang was gone now. Elvis had died in 1977, Roy Orbison in 1988, Charlie Rich in 1995, and Carl Perkins in 1998. As he thought about it, he realized many of those he knew at Columbia Records had also died—Don Law, Johnny Horton, Marty Robbins, and Lefty Frizzell. Throw in Hank Snow, Tex Ritter, Merle Travis, Ernest Tubb, Webb Pierce, Patsy Cline, Roger Miller, Conway Twitty, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Chet Atkins, and Waylon. It was easy to be maudlin. But the only real sign that Cash was losing his will to live was when he would mention June’s name and start sobbing.

  Most days he looked forward to recording another song—even if he usually had to acknowledge quickly that he didn’t feel up to it after all. On July 31 he did record “Here Comes the Boy,” a song he had written years earlier. Ever since finishing “The Man Comes Around,” Cash was no longer looking to make a big statement. The only songs that seemed truly to move him were the gospel tunes.

  Maffetone checked back in on August 15 and was pleased to learn that Cash was feeling well enough to think about attending the MTV Video Music Awards ceremony on the twenty-eighth in New York, where the “Hurt” video was up for six awards, including video of the year. He was excited about the ceremony because he was proud of “Hurt,” and he knew the show spoke to young music fans. His competition for video of the year would come from the rap, R&B, and dance fields—Missy Elliott, Eminem, 50 Cent, and Justin Timberlake—and he was further thrilled when the initial industry buzz suggested “Hurt” was the probable winner in the top category.

  Cash was also talking about flying to Los Angeles in early September to do some recording with Rubin. He was feeling well enough to be looking forward to one of his favorite pastimes: simply going to the local Walmart, where he loved getting into a motorized cart and roaming through the aisles, stopping frequently to talk to shoppers or store employees who recognized him—and most of them did.

  Rosanne visited her dad a few days before the awards show with her son Jake, and she shared her father’s excitement over the MTV event. While at the house, she spent hours watching CNN with her dad or reading to him, from both the Bible and the poetry of Will Carleton.

  On August 21, the day after Maffetone left for Florida, Cash recorded “Like the 309,” according to records filed with the American Federation of Musicians Local 257 in Nashville. It was the last song he would record for the Rubin albums. But later that day he recorded one more song—a version of “Engine 143” for the Carter Family tribute album that his son was producing.

  Years later John Carter would point out how fitting it was that the last words of the song, which was about a railroad engineer killed in a crash, were the final ones Johnny Cash ever recorded: Nearer, my God, to Thee.

  V

  Shortly before Cash was to leave for New York, Lou Robin learned from a member of the MTV staff that Cash wasn’t going to win any of the major awards at the Music Video show, the producers just wanted him to sit in the audience and take a bow. Cash was too weak for such a gesture and the trip was canceled. Plans to go to California were also dropped.

  On August 26—two days before the telecast—Cash complained of stomach pains, and he was rushed back to Baptist Hospital, where he was treated for pancreatitis. He did not watch the MTV show.

  Cash wasn’t alone in feeling that “Hurt” had been unfairly shortchanged.

  “This is a travesty. I demand a recount,” Memphis native Justin Timberlake told millions of MTV viewers when he accepted his award for best male video, one of the categories in which “Hurt” was nominated. “My grandfather raised me on Johnny Cash. I’m from Tennessee and I think he deserves this more than any of us in here tonight. So I guess in some cool way I share this award with him. He deserves a round of applause.” The audience roared its agreement.

  News of Cash’s hospitalization alarmed Maffetone because Cash seemed to end up with more medicines each time he checked in. He kept in touch with Cash by phone, noticing a gradual decline in his vocal strength. Once again the family was on alert. Still, they had gone through this so many times that it was hard to believe their dad wouldn’t rally again. And he was allowed to return home on Wednesday, September 10.

  “I talked to him the day he got out and said, ‘Dad, you went into a tunnel,’ and he said, ‘I sure did,’” Rosanne says. “I remember it feeling like an abyss, that hospital visit. I couldn’t speak to him, that was part of it. I’m not sure why; maybe he was on a ventilator again. I was scared to death. I thought that was it.”

  On Thursday morning Maffetone found Cash slumped in his wheelchair, hardly able to move. Virtually all the progress of the previous weeks had been lost. Cash’s oxygen levels were dangerously low, and his blood sugar levels were also down. Maffetone estimates that Cash was then on close to forty different medications.

  Maffetone tried to work on Cash’s leg and foot muscles in hopes of getting him walking again, but it exhausted Cash, and they agreed to take a break. Shortly after noon, Maffetone was relaxing in John’s office, his hand on Cash’s shoulder as a sign of support. Cash turned around and looked him straight in the eyes. This was strange because Cash’s limited eyesight usually forced him to search around before he could focus on a person’s face, but this time it was as if his vision was suddenly perfect again.

  “It’s time,” Cash said.

  Maffetone felt a chill pass in the room when he heard those words; he had heard them before from patients who were about to die.

  “All I knew was that we needed to get him to a hospital. This was an emergency,” he says.

  Maffetone watched as Cash was wheeled to the ambulance.

  It was a horrible sight.

  Cash’s stomach had shut down.

  John Carter, who was in the cabin setting up equipment in case his father felt up to recording, made it to the house just as the paramedics were strapping Cash onto a stand-up stretcher. As the ambulance left for Baptist Hospital, phone calls were made to Cash’s children. Lou Robin was alerted in California. He took a midnight flight.

  John Carter followed the ambulance to the hospital, where Dr. Jerkins told him that his dad might not make it this time. He stayed by his father’s side in the emergency room and then in the intensive care unit. Kathy and Rosanne joined him, along with other family members, including Cash’s brother Tommy and sister Joanne.

  Shortly after midnight, Friday, September 12, most of the group left, planning to return in the morning after getting some sleep. Rosanne and Kathy settled in a room across the hall from the intensive care unit, while John Carter went upstairs to the suite the hospital kept for his dad and tried to get some sleep.

  Kathy was startled to overhear a nurse telling someone on the phone, “We’re losing him; his vitals are dropping.”

  Kathy, Rosanne, a
nd John Carter rushed to their father’s side, and Cash opened his eyes.

  “I thought for a split second maybe he’d be okay, but the look in his eyes told me different,” Kathy says. “He looked frantic, like he wanted to talk, but couldn’t with the tube down his throat. I told him how much I loved him. I told him he was the best daddy I could have ever had, and if he was tired of his pain and sadness, it was okay to go on. We’d all be okay.”

  At one a.m. J.R. Cash closed his eyes for the last time.

  Moments later a nurse leaned over and clipped locks of his gray hair, one for each of his children.

  Epilogue

  NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) Johnny Cash, a towering musical figure whose rough, unsteady voice championed the downtrodden and reached across generations with songs like “Ring of Fire,” “I Walk the Line” and “Folsom Prison Blues,” died Friday. He was 71.

  WITHIN HOURS OF LEARNING about his friend’s death, Bob Dylan wrote these words: “Johnny was and is the North Star; you could guide your ship by him—the greatest of the greats, then and now.”

  Dylan’s words came in response to a request from Rolling Stone, and they were the first in a series of tributes that appeared in the magazine’s October 16, 2003, issue—and Cash could not have asked for a finer voice. His admiration for Dylan was deep and lasting—the recognition of a standard of artistry that, along with Jimmie Rodgers’s, forever inspired him.

  In an essay as eloquent as his best songs, Dylan went on to say of Cash: “He is what the land and the country are all about, the heart and soul of it personified and what it means to be here; and he said it all in plain English. I think we can have recollections of him, but we can’t define him any more than we can define a fountain of truth. If we want to know what it means to be mortal, we need look no further than the Man in Black. Blessed with a profound imagination, he used the gift to express all the various lost causes of the human soul. This is a miraculous and humbling thing. Listen to him, and he always brings you to your senses. He rises high above all, and he’ll never die or be forgotten, even by persons not born yet—especially those persons—and that is forever.”

  Cash also would have been pleased with the voices of the others who shared their feelings with Rolling Stone readers.

  One of them, Merle Haggard, addressed Cash’s life of physical pain in moving, personal terms: “Johnny Cash lived in constant, serious pain. On a scale of one to 10, it was somewhere around an eight for the last eight years of his life. He dealt himself some terrible years when he didn’t do the right things. He didn’t eat right, so his bones got brittle, his jaw broke during some dental surgery and it never healed. He lives as an example of a man in pain, going from one stage of bad health to another, but he held his head up the whole way. He was like Abraham or Moses—one of the great men who will ever grace the earth. There will never be another Man in Black.”

  In another tribute, Bono addressed Cash’s universality: “Every man could relate to him. But nobody could be him. To be that extraordinary and that ordinary was his real gift. That and his humor and bare-boned honesty….I think he was a very godly man, but you had the sense that he spent his time in the desert. And that just made you like him more. It gave his songs some dust. And that voice was definitely locusts and honey. As for ‘Hurt,’ it’s perhaps the best video ever made.”

  It wasn’t just music magazines that saluted Cash.

  Time magazine, whose covers had served as a road map of who and what was important in life and culture for generations, marked the passing of only one individual on its cover in all of 2003—Johnny Cash. The words next to a stark photo of the elderly Cash on the September 22 cover read simply, “Johnny Cash 1932–2003.” Inside, an essay by Time film writer Richard Corliss recounted the darkness and light in Cash’s life.

  He wrote: “Rarely before Cash had a singer taken vocal pain—not the adolescent shriek of most rock singers, but the abiding ache of a veteran victim—and made it so audible, so immediate, so dark and deep. Rarely, before or since, has a voice also shown the grit to express, endure and outlive that misery. His songs played like confessions on a deathbed or death row, but he delivered them with the plangent stoicism of a world-class poker player dealt a bum hand.

  “That—and his determination to transcend or ignore musical genres—made Cash’s death…an event that provoked a serious sense of loss among people of all ages. Children of the ’50s remember the startle of his first eminence; the one Southern star who was not a rebellious kid but a grownup with cavernous eyes and a voice to match. Kids of the ’60s recall his pop hits, the TV show he was host of for two years and the easy alliances he formed with musicians beyond country’s borders. The X and next generations know his old songs as if they were standards, and his boldly simple later work—especially ‘Hurt’—as emblems of moral and musical purity, an antidote to the glitz and aggression of teen icons. Cash made patriarchal integrity cool.”

  It was bright and warm in Hendersonville on the morning of Monday, September 15, when Cash fans, family members, and friends gathered at the First Baptist Church for a two-hour service that was by turns solemn and cheerful—and laced with music. The casket was adorned with an intricate wreath with roses, figs, potatoes, and cotton on the twig within its weave, a nod to the early days in Dyess.

  The ceremony was preceded by gentle piano versions of spirituals, including the Carter Family standard “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” Larry Gatlin led the mourners in singing “Oh Come, Angel Band.” Emmylou Harris and Sheryl Crow teamed on the hymn “The Old Rugged Cross” and Bob Dylan’s “Every Grain of Sand.”

  Cash’s own voice—that unmistakable, unvarnished baritone—filled the church during a video montage that showed scenes of him through the years, including his TV duet with Dylan and an early version of “I Walk the Line” when the eyes of the darkly handsome young man flashed with vitality. In the narrative, Cash was heard saying he was neither preacher nor prophet, only a “singer of songs.”

  Rosanne spoke movingly about the loss of her father. She said people had approached her to say they couldn’t “imagine a world without Johnny Cash.” Her reply was that she couldn’t begin to imagine a world “without Daddy.”

  After the service, Cash was laid in the ground alongside June’s burial place at Hendersonville Memory Gardens cemetery just off Johnny Cash Parkway. Nearby graves held John’s parents, June’s mother and sisters, and Luther Perkins.

  The wording on John’s tombstone came from Psalm 19:14. It read: “Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer.”

  June’s marker carried these words from Psalm 103: “Bless the LORD, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name.”

  A few feet behind their graves, a bench was later placed linking them even more closely. The words facing their graves read:

  CASH––––CARTER

  I Walk the Line

  —

  Wildwood Flower

  Following the burial, Cash’s son and daughters said a final, private farewell. They rolled his wheelchair, in which he had spent so many anguished hours, from the house to the bluff overlooking Old Hickory Lake. John Carter then picked it up and hurled it into the water below. Cindy, Rosanne, and Tara looked back on the moment as profoundly sad. Kathy found it so painful to part with any piece of her father that she stayed back at the house. John Carter considered the moment liberating—a way of striking back at the menacing symbol of his father’s cruel captivity. He says, “Dad would have loved it.”

  For someone who had worried through much of the 1980s that he had thrown away his legacy, Cash would have been thrilled to see how his music continued to be embraced by fans old and new in the years after his death. As often happens when major recording artists die, there was a big upswing in Cash’s record sales in late 2003, but, unlike with most stars, his music didn’t then fade from public consciousness. He continued to be heard in TV comm
ercials and film soundtracks.

  The most dramatic surge of attention was stirred by director James Mangold’s 2005 film Walk the Line, starring Joaquin Phoenix as Cash and Reese Witherspoon as June. The movie took in $120 million at the box office in the United States and another $67 million around the world. It brought in an additional $125 million in DVD sales in the States alone. The film earned five Academy Award nominations, including a best actress Oscar for Witherspoon. Thanks to the film, a soundtrack album and a Cash retrospective album both became million-copy sellers. When Cash’s fifth Rick Rubin album, the posthumous American V: A Hundred Highways, was released in the summer of 2006, it entered the U.S. sales charts at number one. “Hurt,” meanwhile, was widely acclaimed as the best music video ever made. Johnny Cash was more beloved than ever.

  In the years after Cash’s death, those close to him asked themselves if John—tired of the pain and eager to be reunited with June and his other loved ones—simply gave up on life. Phil Maffetone continues to maintain that Cash did not have to die in 2003, that he could have lived several more productive years if his medication had been brought under control. At the time, he wanted to write an essay about how Cash’s death was symptomatic of a dangerous, growing tendency in the medical profession to overmedicate, but the family had gone through enough heartache. Besides, some suggested, it was possible that their father’s physical issues, after years of hard living, were more severe than any of them realized. Cash’s physician, Dr. Terri Jerkins, said in 2012 that she could not discuss the specifics of Cash’s treatment because of confidentiality laws.