The story of Johnny Cash

A cotton farm in Dyess

The story begins in Kingsland, Arkansas, on the twenty sixth of February 1932, when Carrie and Ray Cash had the fourth of their seven children. His mother wanted to call him John and his father wanted Ray, so they settled on the initials J.R. and left it at that. In March 1935, when J.R. was three, the family moved to Dyess, a brand new farming colony set up under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal to give poor families land they might one day own. The Cashes were given twenty acres and a small house known as farm number 266. From the age of five he was out in the cotton fields with the rest of the family, and they sang while they worked.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Life in Dyess was hard. In 1937 the Mississippi and Ohio rivers flooded, and the family had to leave the farm until the water went down, a memory he later turned into the song Five Feet High and Rising. What they did have was music. His mother played guitar and taught him chords, the church filled his ears with gospel, and at night the radio brought in the Grand Ole Opry and the powerful stations broadcasting from across the Mexican border. As a boy he had a high tenor voice, and it only dropped into that famous deep register as a teenager. In high school he was already singing on KLCN, a local radio station in Blytheville.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The defining tragedy of his childhood came in May 1944. His older brother Jack, the brother he was closest to, was working at a sawmill to bring in money for the family when he fell into an unguarded table saw. He died of his injuries about a week later. Cash later wrote that his mother, Jack and he himself all had a bad feeling that morning, and that his mother begged Jack to go fishing with J.R. instead. Jack went to work because the family needed the pay. Cash carried guilt about that day for the rest of his life and said he looked forward to meeting his brother again in heaven. That same year he was baptized in the Tyronza River.[1] [2] [3] [4]

J.R. graduated from Dyess High School in 1950 and, like a lot of young Southerners, headed north for factory work. He took a job at a car body plant in Pontiac, Michigan, but it did not last. On the seventh of July 1950, just after the Korean War began, he enlisted in the United States Air Force. There was one small problem on day one. The Air Force would not accept initials as a first name, so J.R. Cash signed up as John R. Cash. After basic training in San Antonio, Texas, he was trained as a radio operator, a job that would take him a long way from the cotton fields of Arkansas.[1] [2] [3]

From Landsberg to Sun Records

While he was still in basic training, on the eighteenth of July 1951, Cash met a seventeen year old Italian American girl named Vivian Liberto at a roller skating rink in San Antonio. They had three weeks together before he was shipped off to West Germany, and for the next three years they wrote each other hundreds of letters. Cash was posted to Landsberg in Bavaria, where he worked as a Morse code operator intercepting Soviet army radio traffic. He bought a cheap guitar, taught himself to play, and formed his first band, the Landsberg Barbarians. He admitted later that they were terrible and mostly played until a fight broke out or they were thrown out.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Germany gave him his first great song. In 1953 his unit watched a prison film called Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison, and it set him writing about a man behind bars listening to the trains go by. He was honorably discharged as a staff sergeant on the third of July 1954, and on the seventh of August he married Vivian at St. Ann's Catholic Church in San Antonio, with her uncle, a priest, saying the Mass. The newlyweds settled in Memphis. Cash sold appliances door to door and took classes to become a radio announcer. His older brother Roy worked at a car dealership there and introduced him to two mechanics who liked to play, Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Perkins, Grant and a steel guitar player named Red Kernodle started jamming with Cash in the evenings. None of them were trained musicians. Grant marked the notes on the neck of his new double bass with strips of tape. Their plan was to be a gospel group, but when they finally got an audition with Sam Phillips at Sun Records, Phillips told them gospel did not sell. Kernodle was so nervous he walked out and never came back. The remaining three offered a Cash song called Hey Porter, and Phillips told Cash to come back with something more commercial. He went home and wrote Cry Cry Cry overnight. Released in June 1955 as Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two, a name Phillips gave them, the single sold more than one hundred thousand copies across the South.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The hits came quickly after that. Folsom Prison Blues was recorded at Sun on the thirtieth of July 1955 and reached number four on the country chart. Then came I Walk the Line, cut on the second of April 1956. It became his first country number one, crossed over to the pop top twenty and sold more than two million copies. Cash toured with Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins, and in 1957 he became the first Sun artist to release a long playing album. But he was unhappy. Phillips paid him a three percent royalty rather than the usual five and still refused to let him record gospel. In 1958 he signed with Columbia Records, though Sun kept releasing his leftover recordings until 1964.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Hollywood dreams and the first pills

The road was where the trouble started. On a long drive to a show in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1957, other members of the touring party passed around amphetamines to stay awake, and Cash took his first ones. A bottle of a hundred cost less than ten dollars, and soon the pills mattered to him as much as his guitar. In the summer of 1958 he moved Vivian and their three little girls to California, hoping for a film career, and bought a house in Encino that had belonged to Johnny Carson. His first Columbia single, Don't Take Your Guns to Town, went to number one on the country chart. His film debut, a low budget crime picture called Five Minutes to Live, did far less well.[1] [2] [3] [4]

It was in these years that Cash began playing for prisoners. Inmates loved Folsom Prison Blues and wrote asking him to come and play, and his first prison show was at Huntsville in Texas in 1957. On New Year's Day 1958 he played San Quentin in California. He had lost his voice the night before, but he chewed gum, acted cocky with the guards and won the room anyway. Sitting in the crowd was a young inmate named Merle Haggard, who later said Cash did everything the prisoners wished they could do. Haggard walked out of prison determined to make music, and years later Cash encouraged him to tell his audience the truth about his past.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1960 a Canadian promoter from London, Ontario, named Saul Holiff became Cash's manager, and in 1961 he brought June Carter into the touring show. June was country music royalty, the daughter of Maybelle Carter of the original Carter Family, and a gifted comic performer. Both of them were married to other people, and over the following years they fell into an affair. In 1961 Cash moved his family again, to a remote hilltop above Casitas Springs, where Vivian was often left alone with the children. In 1963 he recorded Ring of Fire, a song June had written with Merle Kilgore and her sister Anita had already cut. Cash added mariachi horns he said came to him in a dream, and it spent seven weeks at number one.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In 1964 Cash made one of the bravest records of his career. Bitter Tears was a concept album about the treatment of Native Americans, built largely on songs by the folk writer Peter La Farge. Its single, The Ballad of Ira Hayes, told of a Pima marine who helped raise the flag on Iwo Jima and died forgotten. Many radio stations would not play it. Cash answered with a full page advertisement in Billboard on the twenty second of August 1964, asking disc jockeys where their guts were, and he mailed out more than a thousand copies himself. The song climbed to number three. The same year he publicly defended the young Bob Dylan, and in 1966 the Seneca Nation's Turtle Clan adopted him.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Running wild, 1965 to 1967

By 1965 the pills were running his life. At the Grand Ole Opry he smashed the stage footlights with a microphone stand. On the eleventh of May he was arrested in Starkville, Mississippi, after wandering onto private property late at night to pick flowers. He was also charged with public drunkenness, kicked his cell door so hard he broke a toe, and paid a thirty six dollar fine. In June he drove his camper into the Los Padres National Forest with his nephew Damon Fielder. A fire started beside the camper and burned five hundred and eight acres, driving off forty nine of the refuge's fifty three endangered California condors. The federal government sued him and won over one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars. Cash eventually settled for eighty two thousand and one dollars.[1] [2] [3]

Worse followed in October 1965. After a show in Dallas, Cash flew to El Paso and sent a taxi driver across the border into Juárez to buy pills. Narcotics officers had been watching the driver meet a known heroin dealer, and they pulled Cash off his flight home. In his guitar case and luggage they found six hundred and eighty eight Dexedrine capsules and four hundred and seventy five tranquilizer tablets. They kept asking where the heroin was. There was none, and because the pills were prescription drugs he avoided prison, spending a night in jail and later receiving a suspended sentence and a fine. Newspapers across America printed the photograph of him leaving court in handcuffs and dark glasses.[1] [2]

That arrest opened an ugly new front. Vivian had flown to El Paso to stand beside him, and a grainy news photo of the couple was seized on by a white supremacist paper called The Thunderbolt, published by the Klansman J.B. Stoner. It claimed Vivian was Black and called his children mongrels. Hate mail and death threats followed, and there were calls for a boycott of his records in the South. Saul Holiff fought back, gathering her marriage certificate and school records, and Cash threatened to sue. Vivian hated that the racists were answered at all. Worn down by the drugs, the touring, his affairs and his closeness to June, she filed for divorce in 1966.[1] [2] [3]

Cash moved to Nashville and for a time shared an apartment with Waylon Jennings, who was just as hooked on amphetamines. In 1967, after a car accident in Walker County, Georgia, police found him carrying a bag of pills. He tried to bribe a deputy, who refused, and he spent the night in the jail at LaFayette. In the morning Sheriff Ralph Jones released him after a long talk about the danger he was in and the talent he was wasting. Cash said that talk helped save him. June, her mother Maybelle and her father Ezra moved into his house for a month to help him get clean.[1] [2] [3]

Folsom, June and San Quentin

A new Columbia producer, Bob Johnston, finally backed the idea Cash had been pushing for years, a live album inside a prison. Folsom answered first. On the twelfth of January 1968, while the band rehearsed at a Sacramento motel, Governor Ronald Reagan dropped in to wish them well. That night a preacher friend handed Cash a tape of a song called Greystone Chapel, written by a Folsom inmate named Glen Sherley. Cash learned it overnight. On the thirteenth of January, after Carl Perkins and the Statler Brothers had warmed up the crowd, he walked out and said the words that opened every show, hello, I'm Johnny Cash. He played two sets that day and closed both with Sherley's song, with Sherley himself in the audience.[1] [2] [3]

A month later, on the twenty second of February 1968, Cash proposed to June Carter onstage at a concert in London, Ontario. She said yes, and they married on the first of March in Franklin, Kentucky, with the songwriter Merle Kilgore as best man. At Folsom Prison came out in May. After Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June, some stations stopped playing the single because of its famous line about shooting a man, and Columbia had it edited against Cash's wishes. The single still reached number one on the country chart and the album went to number thirteen on the pop chart. It turned his career around. As Cash put it, that is where things really got started for him again.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The joy did not last the summer. In the early hours of the third of August 1968, Luther Perkins came home from fishing and fell asleep in his living room at Hendersonville, apparently with a lit cigarette. The house caught fire and he died two days later. The man whose simple, chugging guitar had created the Johnny Cash sound was forty. Carl Perkins stepped in on lead guitar, and in September, at a show in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a young fan named Bob Wootton offered to fill in and played every song perfectly. He got the job. In October, accepting the Country Music Association award for Album of the Year for Folsom, Cash ended his speech by thanking Luther Perkins, especially.[1] [2] [3]

On the twenty fourth of February 1969 Cash did it again at San Quentin, this time with a British television crew filming. He debuted a bitter new song named after the prison and played it twice, and his producer later said that one word from Cash could have started a riot. He also tried out a comic Shel Silverstein song he had only just been given, A Boy Named Sue, reading the words off a sheet while the band made up the backing. It went to number two on the pop chart, held off only by the Rolling Stones' Honky Tonk Women, and the album went to number one. In 1969 Cash sold six and a half million albums, more than the Beatles.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Television, faith and the Man in Black

The prison albums earned Cash his own network television show. The Johnny Cash Show ran on ABC from the seventh of June 1969 to the thirty first of March 1971, taped at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. The very first episode featured Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. Over fifty eight episodes Cash booked an astonishing range of guests, from Louis Armstrong and Ray Charles to Neil Young, James Taylor, Derek and the Dominos and Linda Ronstadt, making her first television appearance. A regular segment brought in old country legends rarely seen on network television. The show reached number seventeen in the ratings, but it was cancelled in the so called rural purge, when networks dropped shows with country audiences.[1] [2]

Cash used the show to fight for the music he believed in. When he performed Kris Kristofferson's Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down, network executives wanted him to change a line about wishing he was stoned. He refused and sang it as written. His version went to number one and won Song of the Year at the Country Music Association awards in 1970. He had already sung a duet with Dylan on Nashville Skyline and written the album's liner notes, which won a Grammy. In 1971, after talking with students at Vanderbilt University, he premiered a new song on the show called Man in Black, explaining that he wore black for the poor and hungry, for prisoners, for people betrayed by age or drugs, and in mourning for the lives lost in Vietnam.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the third of March 1970 June gave birth to their only child together, John Carter Cash. Marshall Grant believed it was the birth of his son that finally pushed Cash to give up the pills, for a while at least. That April Cash played the White House. President Nixon's office asked for Merle Haggard's Okie from Muskogee and a song mocking welfare recipients called Welfare Cadillac. Cash declined both, saying he did not know them, and sang The Ballad of Ira Hayes and his own song What Is Truth instead. Nixon joked in his introduction that one thing he had learned about Johnny Cash was that you do not tell him what to sing.[1] [2] [3]

Faith became the other pillar of his life. On the ninth of May 1971 Cash answered the altar call at Evangel Temple in Nashville, and he became close friends with the evangelist Billy Graham, appearing at his crusades for decades. He filmed a movie about the life of Jesus on location in Israel, Gospel Road, released in 1973, with June playing Mary Magdalene. His first autobiography, Man in Black, came out in 1975 and sold more than a million copies. Later in the decade he and June completed a Bible college course and made a pilgrimage to Israel, and he was ordained as a minister and officiated at his daughter's wedding. In 1976 he was grand marshal of the Bicentennial parade in Washington.[1] [2] [3]

Wilderness years

By the mid seventies the hits were drying up. Saul Holiff quit as manager in 1973, and Cash made commercials for Amoco and STP at the height of the energy crisis, which did not help his image. He had one last country number one in 1976 with One Piece at a Time, a comic tale of a car worker building a Cadillac from stolen parts, and a line in it gave the name to the music genre psychobilly. In 1977 he started using amphetamines again. The decade also brought a death that shadowed him. Glen Sherley, the Folsom inmate whose song he had made famous, was released in 1971 and met at the gates by Cash himself.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Cash took Sherley on the road and gave him a job at his publishing company, but freedom proved too hard. Marshall Grant said Sherley was so nervous onstage he could barely sing, loved to fight, and one day calmly told Grant he would like to cut him open with a butcher knife. Cash let him go. Sherley drifted into drink and drugs and ended up living in the cab of a truck while working on a cattle ranch. In May 1978, high on drugs, he shot a man. Two days later, on the eleventh of May, he took his own life at his brother's house in California. He was forty two, and Cash paid for the funeral.[1] [2]

In 1980, at forty eight, Cash became the youngest living person elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame, which he called his greatest professional honor. That same year, amid his drug problems, he fired Marshall Grant after twenty six years. Grant then discovered money meant for his and Luther Perkins's retirement was gone, and he sued Cash for wrongful dismissal and embezzlement. Luther's daughters filed their own suit. Both cases were settled out of court, and the name the Tennessee Three was retired. The two old friends eventually made peace, and Cash wrote in 1997 that firing Grant was one of his great regrets. Grant went on to manage the Statler Brothers.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 1983 an ostrich on his farm attacked him and tore open his stomach, and the painkillers he was given sent him straight back into addiction. He came close to dying from internal bleeding, and that year he checked into the Betty Ford Clinic. He stayed clean for several years but relapsed, and went through treatment again in 1989 and for a final time in 1992. His career was sagging too. In 1984 he recorded a novelty single called The Chicken in Black, and in 1986 Columbia ended a relationship of twenty eight years. A short spell at Mercury Records followed, and in 1988 he had double heart bypass surgery in the same hospital where Waylon Jennings was recovering.[1] [2] [3]

Even in the lean years Cash was never short of old friends. In 1981 he found himself in Stuttgart, Germany, at the same time as his Sun labelmates Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, and the three walked onstage together, a night released as The Survivors. In 1985 he joined Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson in a supergroup later known as the Highwaymen. Their first single, the Jimmy Webb song Highwayman, went to number one on the country chart, and they made three albums together by 1995. Around the same time he went back to Sun Studio in Memphis with Perkins, Lewis and Roy Orbison to record Class of '55, a salute to the day in 1956 when Elvis had joined them around the piano.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Rick Rubin resurrection

Much of Nashville had stopped listening. Marty Stuart, who played in his band in the eighties, said they were reduced to shows for elderly audiences while the industry treated Cash like a fossil, and friends said he felt ignored and depressed. The first sign of change came from Britain. In 1988 Marc Riley, formerly of the Fall, and Jon Langford of the Mekons made a tribute album of his songs by indie artists called Til Things Are Brighter, raising money for an AIDS charity. Cash loved it and called it a morale booster, and Rosanne said it left him feeling validated. In 1993 U2 had him sing The Wanderer on their album Zooropa. That year he also cut a batch of songwriting demos that would sit on a shelf for three decades.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Rick Rubin, the producer behind the Beastie Boys, Run DMC and Slayer, saw Cash perform at Bob Dylan's thirtieth anniversary concert in 1992 and decided the industry had written him off unfairly. He offered Cash a deal on his label, American Recordings, best known for rap and heavy metal. Cash was skeptical, but Rubin promised him complete freedom and suggested something he had never done, a record of just his voice and guitar. They recorded at Cash's cabin in Tennessee and at Rubin's home in Los Angeles, with a couple of songs caught live at the Viper Room. There were new songs written for him by Tom Waits and Glenn Danzig, and old murder ballads he had sung decades earlier.[1] [2] [3]

American Recordings came out on the twenty sixth of April 1994, and critics were stunned. It won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album, and that summer Cash played the Glastonbury Festival in England, which he called one of the high points of his career. A whole new audience of young rock fans discovered him. Two years later came Unchained, with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as his band and a thundering version of Soundgarden's Rusty Cage. Nashville radio ignored it, but it won the Grammy for Best Country Album. Tom Petty said making it was the best work his band ever did. Cash later told his biographer that Rubin made him feel he might have a legacy after all.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

His body was failing, though. On the twenty fifth of October 1997, onstage in Flint, Michigan, he nearly collapsed and told the audience he had Parkinson's disease. Doctors then diagnosed Shy Drager syndrome, a form of multiple system atrophy, and told him he might have eighteen months. The diagnosis was later changed again, to autonomic neuropathy linked to diabetes. He gave up touring, and in 1998 severe pneumonia damaged his lungs. He had also broken his jaw during dental surgery and it never properly healed, leaving him in constant pain. In 2000 he released American III: Solitary Man, with covers of Tom Petty's I Won't Back Down and U2's One, his weakened voice audible on every track.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rubin then played him a song by Nine Inch Nails called Hurt, about addiction and regret. Cash recorded it for American IV: The Man Comes Around, released on the fifth of November 2002. By then he had lost most of his sight and sessions were broken up by hospital stays. Trent Reznor admitted he thought the idea sounded gimmicky, until he saw the video. Director Mark Romanek filmed it in February 2003 at the closed and decaying House of Cash museum, mixing old footage with the frail seventy year old at home and June watching him. Reznor said he was moved to tears and that the song was no longer his. The video won a Grammy and became one of the most celebrated ever made.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Losing June, and the last songs

In April 2003 June was diagnosed with a leaking heart valve. She had surgery on the seventh of May, complications followed, and she died on the fifteenth of May 2003 at the age of seventy three. They had been married for thirty five years. At her funeral in Hendersonville, her stepdaughter Rosanne said that if being a wife were a corporation, June would have been its chief executive. Cash told Al Gore that losing her was the worst pain he had ever felt. Yet he refused to stop. He told Rick Rubin to keep him working, because he believed he would die if he had nothing to do. He booked a recording session for three days after she died.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In a wheelchair, nearly blind, he kept recording, often at his home in Virginia, and completed around sixty songs in the last four months of his life. On the fifth of July 2003 he made his final public appearance at the Carter Family Fold, near June's family home in Virginia. Before singing Ring of Fire he read a short statement he had written about June, saying her spirit was with him that night and thanking God for her. His last recordings were made on the twenty first of August 2003. They included Like the 309, the last song he wrote, and a Carter Family song called Engine 143 for a tribute album his son was producing.[1] [2]

Johnny Cash died at about two in the morning on the twelfth of September 2003 at Baptist Hospital in Nashville, of complications from diabetes. He was seventy one, and it was less than four months after June. Rosanne and John Carter Cash were with him. At the funeral at First Baptist Church in Hendersonville, Kris Kristofferson called him the best of America, and something of a holy terror too. Al Gore joked that if it had been up to Johnny Cash he would have been president. Emmylou Harris and Sheryl Crow sang, and on his coffin lay a wreath woven with cotton. He was buried beside June at Hendersonville Memory Gardens.[1] [2] [3]

The losses kept coming. On the twenty fourth of October 2003, June's daughter Rosie Nix Adams, Cash's stepdaughter, was found dead with the bluegrass fiddler Jimmy Campbell on a bus converted into a camper in Montgomery County, Tennessee. Police first called the deaths suspicious, but they were ruled accidental carbon monoxide poisoning from propane heaters. She was forty five. Rosanne said later that Rosie never really got free of drugs. Vivian Liberto died on the twenty fourth of May 2005 of complications from lung cancer, on Rosanne's fiftieth birthday. Earlier that year Saul Holiff, his manager from the sixties, had taken his own life in British Columbia.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The long shadow of the Man in Black

In November 2005 Hollywood told his story in Walk the Line, with Joaquin Phoenix as Cash and Reese Witherspoon as June. Both sang their own parts, and Phoenix lowered his voice by an octave with a coach. Johnny and June had approved the casting shortly before they died. Witherspoon won the Oscar for Best Actress. Rosanne found watching it painful, saying the actors were nothing like her parents even if the scenes were familiar. Vivian's side of the story arrived in 2007 in her posthumous memoir, I Walked the Line, built from the letters she and Cash wrote while he was in Germany. The film only covered his life up to 1968.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The music kept coming too. American V: A Hundred Highways, released on the fourth of July 2006, went to number one on the Billboard album chart, his first number one album since San Quentin thirty seven years earlier. American VI followed in 2010. In 2012 John Carter Cash found forgotten tapes from the early eighties in the family vault, released in 2014 as Out Among the Stars. Then on the twenty eighth of June 2024 came Songwriter, eleven songs from the 1993 demos, finished by musicians who had played with him, including Marty Stuart and the bassist Dave Roe, with Waylon Jennings's original backing vocals kept and guests including the Black Keys.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

His homes became places of pilgrimage. The lakeside house in Hendersonville where he and June lived from 1968 was sold to Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees, and it burned to the ground during renovations on the tenth of April 2007. The Johnny Cash Museum opened in downtown Nashville in 2013. Arkansas State University bought his boyhood home in Dyess and restored it with the help of his brother Tommy and sister Joanne, opening it to the public in August 2014. Marshall Grant died on the seventh of August 2011 in Jonesboro, Arkansas, where he had gone for a festival raising money to restore that house.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Cash sold more than ninety million records. He is one of very few artists in the Country Music, Rock and Roll and Gospel Music Halls of Fame, and he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999. On the twenty fourth of September 2024 a statue of him by the Little Rock sculptor Kevin Kresse was installed in the National Statuary Hall at the United States Capitol, making him the first musician honored there. That same month his younger brother Tommy died at eighty four, and Kris Kristofferson died two weeks later, leaving Willie Nelson as the last Highwayman. As of 2026, his songs still turn up everywhere from football terraces to film soundtracks.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around Johnny Cash

Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. They met backstage at the Grand Ole Opry in the fifties while both were married to others, and after she joined his show in 1961 their affair helped end both marriages. June, with her parents, stood by him through the worst of the pills, famously flushing his drugs away. He proposed onstage in 1968, they married that March, and they won two Grammys for duets. She died in May 2003 and he followed four months later.[1] [2] [3]

Johnny Cash and Vivian Liberto. They met at a San Antonio skating rink in 1951 and courted mostly by letter for three years before marrying in 1954. She raised four daughters, Rosanne, Kathy, Cindy and Tara, largely alone in California while he toured and fell into addiction and his affair with June. She endured racist attacks after the 1965 El Paso arrest, filed for divorce in 1966, and married a Ventura policeman, Dick Distin, in 1968.[1] [2] [3]

Johnny Cash and Luther Perkins. A mechanic from Mississippi, Perkins bought a battered Fender guitar and invented the muted, chugging boom chicka boom sound that defined Cash's records. Laconic onstage and the butt of Cash's jokes, he also shared his pill habit. He died after a house fire in August 1968, and Cash dedicated his first big award to him. In 1980 Luther's daughters sued Cash over missing retirement money, a case later settled.[1] [2]

Johnny Cash and Marshall Grant. The self taught bassist of the Tennessee Two was also Cash's road manager for twenty six years, a teetotaller trying to hold the tours together while Cash spiraled. Rosanne called him a solid rock. Cash fired him in 1980, and Grant sued over embezzled retirement funds before the case was settled. They reconciled, and Grant played with him one final time in 1999. He died in 2011.[1] [2] [3]

Johnny Cash and Sam Phillips. The founder of Sun Records turned down Cash's gospel songs at his audition but saw something in the stripped down trio, naming them Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two and producing his first hits. The relationship soured over money and control. Phillips paid him a lower royalty than usual, still refused gospel, and Cash felt the label favored Jerry Lee Lewis. He left for Columbia in 1958.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Johnny Cash and Saul Holiff. A promoter from London, Ontario, Holiff managed Cash from 1960 to 1973 through his most chaotic years. He brought June Carter into the show, fought the Klan campaign against Vivian, and negotiated the settlement over Folsom Prison Blues with Gordon Jenkins. Their partnership was famously stormy, the subject of his son's documentary My Father and the Man in Black. He took his own life in 2005.[1] [2] [3]

Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. Before they had ever met, Cash wrote to a folk magazine in 1964 telling Dylan's critics to shut up and let him sing, and Dylan said the letter meant the world to him. They met at Newport that summer, sang together on Nashville Skyline and on the first episode of The Johnny Cash Show, and wrote Wanted Man together. After Cash died, Dylan called him the North Star.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson. Kristofferson was a janitor at Columbia's Nashville studio who pitched Cash every song he wrote. Cash eventually took him to the Newport Folk Festival, put him on his television show and made Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down a number one, which let Kristofferson quit his day job. They later rode together in the Highwaymen, and Kristofferson prayed at his funeral.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings. In the mid sixties the two shared a Nashville apartment and a punishing amphetamine habit, both trapped on a grueling touring circuit. Decades later they were bandmates in the Highwaymen. In 1988 Cash was visiting Jennings after a heart attack when Jennings urged him to get his own heart checked, and Cash ended up having bypass surgery in the same hospital.[1] [2] [3]

Johnny Cash and Rick Rubin. The bearded producer of rap and metal records signed Cash in the early nineties when no major label wanted him, and over a decade they made six albums in the American series. Rubin chose many of the covers, including Hurt, and kept him working after June died because Cash said he would die without it. Rubin said he could not listen to the final tapes for two years.[1] [2] [3]

Johnny Cash and Rosanne Cash. His eldest daughter grew up anxious in California during his worst addiction years and joined his road show after high school, where he handed her a list of one hundred essential songs. She became a country star herself and later recorded an album from that list. They grew closest in his last five years, and she was at his bedside when he died.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Johnny Cash and Glen Sherley. Cash made the Folsom inmate's Greystone Chapel the climax of the famous 1968 concert, then helped win his release and met him at the prison gates in 1971. But the band grew frightened of Sherley's temper and threats, and Cash let him go. In 1978, after shooting a man, Sherley took his own life, and Cash paid for his funeral.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Johnny Cash

• Sam Phillips, not his parents, came up with the name Johnny. He was born J.R., became John R. Cash because the Air Force would not accept initials, and Sun Records boss Sam Phillips rechristened him Johnny for his first single in 1955.[1] [2]
• In the Air Force, Cash was said to be among the first Americans to hear that Stalin had died. As a Morse code operator intercepting Soviet transmissions in West Germany, he reportedly picked up the news of Joseph Stalin's death in 1953. His daughter said he told the story many times.[1]
• The odd chords of I Walk the Line came from a tape played backwards. In Germany, Cash heard guitar runs playing in reverse on his tape recorder, and that strange sound inspired the song's unusual chord changes.[1]
• He hummed before each verse of I Walk the Line to find his note. The song changes key between verses, so Cash hummed the new starting note each time. He once told a TV audience he did it simply to get his pitch.[1]
• With no drummer at Sun, Cash threaded paper under his guitar strings to fake a snare. He slid a folded dollar bill or piece of paper through the strings to get a scratchy percussive sound. That Martin guitar, bill still in place, is in the Johnny Cash Museum.[1] [2]
• Cash gave Carl Perkins the idea for Blue Suede Shoes. According to biographer Robert Hilburn, the idea came from the flashy clothes of a Black Air Force colleague Cash knew in Germany, and he passed it on to Perkins.[1]
• Get Rhythm was meant for Elvis Presley. Cash wrote it for Elvis, but when Sam Phillips sold Presley's contract to RCA, he kept the song and put it on the flip side of I Walk the Line.[1] [2]
• Folsom Prison Blues cost Cash about seventy five thousand dollars. Its melody and opening lines closely followed Gordon Jenkins's 1953 song Crescent City Blues. Jenkins was not credited, and in the early seventies Cash paid him a settlement of around seventy five thousand dollars.[1] [2] [3]
• As a boy, Cash felt sorry for Frankenstein's monster. He was fascinated by the original Frankenstein film and saw the creature as someone made of bad parts but trying to do good.[1]
• Keith Richards came to an early sixties Cash show mainly to watch Luther Perkins. Cash recalled that at a show on a US base in Britain, Richards was not interested in him at all. Luther was the one he could not wait to see.[1]
• Luther Perkins's hobbies included knitting. The deadpan guitarist behind the boom chicka boom sound listed knitting and fishing as his pastimes, and at his death he was planning to give Kris Kristofferson his first publishing break.[1]
• Marshall Grant marked the notes on his first bass with tape. None of the Tennessee Two were trained. Grant stuck tape on the neck of his double bass, and joked that their famous sound was there in the first eight bars and they spent years trying to lose it.[1]
• Marshall Grant accidentally carried a gun into Folsom Prison. A smoking prop pistol used in a stage gag was in his bass case. He spotted it inside and quietly handed it to a guard, who locked it up until the show was over.[1]
• Ronald Reagan visited the band's rehearsal the night before Folsom. The then governor of California was at the same Sacramento motel for a dinner speech and stopped by to wish the musicians well.[1]
• Bob Wootton got his job by walking out of the audience. When Cash's band was stranded by an airline delay in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in September 1968, the fan asked to fill in, played every song perfectly and was hired within days.[1] [2]
• Cash gave his shoes to a teenage cellmate after the Starkville arrest. Leaving jail the next morning, he handed his shoes to a fifteen year old picked up for drunkenness and said they were a souvenir from Johnny Cash. In 2007 the sheriff symbolically pardoned him.[1]
• His prison camper was named Jesse, after the outlaw Jesse James. It was the camper Cash was driving when the 1965 Los Padres forest fire broke out.[1]
• Texas students rescued a Cash concert cancelled after his drug arrest. When Texas A and M called off his show in 1965, more than two thousand students signed petitions and moved the concert to an off campus club.[1]
• A Boy Named Sue may have been inspired by a real male lawyer named Sue. Sue K. Hicks, a Tennessee attorney named after his mother, was a prosecutor in the Scopes trial. Cash later sent him signed albums.[1]
• For a while Cash changed the ending of A Boy Named Sue to mention his baby son. After John Carter Cash was born, he sang that if he ever had a son he would name him John Carter Cash. With the Highwaymen he swapped in Waylon, Willie or Kris.[1] [2]
• Linda Ronstadt made her first TV appearance on The Johnny Cash Show. The show also hosted Louis Armstrong just eight months before his death, plus Joni Mitchell, Derek and the Dominos and Stevie Wonder.[1] [2]
• Cash's liner notes for Dylan's Nashville Skyline won a Grammy. Besides singing Girl from the North Country with Dylan on the album, Cash wrote its sleeve notes, which took the Grammy for Best Album Notes.[1] [2]
• The word psychobilly comes from a Johnny Cash song. One Piece at a Time, his 1976 hit about a Cadillac built from stolen parts, describes a psychobilly Cadillac, and the rockabilly subgenre took its name from it.[1]
• Merle Kilgore wanted to license Ring of Fire for a hemorrhoid cream advert. The co writer suggested it in 2004 and used to jokingly dedicate the song to the makers of Preparation H. June's heirs refused.[1]
• His black Martin guitar was signed by the singing cowboy Gene Autry. Cash also recorded a 1978 song called Who Is Gene Autry, and he plays that signed guitar in the video for Hurt.[1]
• In hospital in his last years, Cash checked in under the name Malcolm. He believed his family descended from King Malcolm IV of Scotland, having traced the Cash name to Fife, which he visited at least three times.[1]
• A black tarantula found near Folsom Prison is named after him. Biologists described Aphonopelma johnnycashi in 2016. The males are almost entirely black, and the researcher who named it has a Johnny Cash tattoo.[1] [2]
• Old US Navy all black winter uniforms were nicknamed Johnny Cashes. Sailors gave the black shirt, tie and trousers his name.[1]
• Cash voiced a spirit coyote on The Simpsons. He played the Space Coyote who guides Homer on a peyote fueled quest in a 1997 episode, and archive audio of him was reused in a 2015 video game.[1]
• He recorded the entire New Testament and wrote a novel about Saint Paul. His only novel, Man in White, appeared in 1986, and in 1990 he recorded a reading of the whole New Testament.[1]
• He was the oldest artist ever nominated for an MTV Video Music Award. Hurt got six nominations in 2003. Justin Timberlake, winning Best Male Video, told the audience Cash deserved it more.[1] [2]
• British voters picked Cash's Hurt as the second greatest cover of all time. In a 2014 BBC Music poll it came second only to the Pet Shop Boys' Always on My Mind.[1] [2]
• Liverpool football fans adopted Ring of Fire in 2005. They began singing it in the run up to that year's Champions League final. In Britain the song got its airplay boost from a Levi's advert in the nineties.[1]
• Tom Petty found Johnny and June sitting on a Hollywood bus bench. During the Unchained sessions the couple sat at a bus stop across from the studio just to meet people, which Petty said summed him up.[1]
• Cash used to bring Luther Perkins a cigarette at his grave every December. Marty Stuart recalled lying on the grave with Cash, smoking and teasing Luther for resting while they were out on tour.[1]
• After saying a beautiful grace at dinner, Cash told Bono he sure missed the drugs. Bono recalled the joke at Cash's home. He took it as Cash's way of showing he had not become a holy Joe, and could never be self righteous.[1]
• Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis once stole a television set from a hotel wall. Lewis recalled that Cash wanted the little set for his wife, and Lewis helped him take it down because he saw no reason Cash should not have it.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.