Johnny Cash Country music has grown into one of the largest sectors of American entertainment, but none of its superstars will ever attain the mythic aura of Johnny Cash, who has died of complications from diabetes at 71
During the 1970s and 80s, Cash found himself out of favour in country music's hometown of Nashville. Yet he had, as his step-daughter Carlene Carter put it, "built that town in a lot of ways". It took the hip hop/heavy metal entrepreneur Rick Rubin to appreciate how much Cash still had to offer. Rubin invited Cash to make an album on his American record label. The result, 1994's American Recordings, featured just Cash, his acoustic guitar and that great booming baritone voice, playing songs by Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and Kris Kristofferson alongside strong material of his own.
Forty years after he had begun his career with Sun Records in Memphis, Cash had returned to renew his claim to being a great singer and an American legend.
He was born in Kingsland, Arkansas, and remembered, when he was three, the family moving to Dyess Colony on the Mississippi delta in 1935, where his father, Ray, worked on a federal land-reclamation scheme. "The entire family, my parents, two brothers and two sisters spent the first night in the truck under a tarpaulin," Cash recalled. "The last thing I remember before going to sleep was my mother beating time on the old Sears-Roebuck guitar, singing What Would You Give In Exchange For Your Soul."
Living by the "Big River" as a child, Cash soaked up work songs, church music, and country & western from radio station WMPS in Memphis, or the broadcasts from Nashville's Grand Ole Opry. Cash got religion when he was 12, and the death of his brother Jack in an accident with a circular saw intensified his faith to the point of fervour.
He graduated from Dyess High School in 1950, headed north to Detroit, and found a job briefly in a car-body factory in Pontiac and then signed up for the United States Air Force. He was posted to Landsberg, West Germany where he began to cut his musical teeth, teaching himself the guitar, trying his hand at songwriting, and playing in a band called the Landsberg Barbarians. "We were terrible," he said later, "but that Lowenbrau beer will make you feel like you're great."
Back in the US he married Vivian Liberto, whom he had met in Texas, and they moved to Memphis. At first, Cash struggled to make a living as an appliance salesman, but then his older brother Roy, also living in Memphis, introduced him to the Tennessee Three - Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant, plus AW "Red" Kernodle on steel guitar.
Cash mounted a persistent campaign to persuade Sam Phillips , who ran Sun Studios in Memphis, to grant them an audition. He finally succumbed in the spring of 1955. It was all too much for an overawed Kernodle, who never turned up, but the remaining three delivered a sparse, vibrant rendition of a brand new Cash song, Hey Porter. Phillips was impressed, dispatched Cash to write a hit single, and by the summer Johnny Cash and the newly-named Tennessee Two had their first hit, Cry, Cry, Cry with Hey Porter on the B side. Classic songs were soon pouring out of Cash. His next release was Folsom Prison Blues, then came I Walk The Line, Big River, Home Of The Blues and Guess Things Happen That Way.
While at Sun, Cash also wrote You're My Baby for Roy Orbison and Get Rhythm for Elvis Presley.
Sun's first album release was Johnny Cash With His Hot And Blue Guitar, but he fell out with the tight-fisted Phillips and moved to Columbia Records and LA in 1958. His first Columbia album, 1959's The Fabulous Johnny Cash, was also his first US album chart entry, reaching number 19. Hit singles were not long in coming, in the shape of Don't Take Your Guns To Town, I Got Stripes, Five Feet High And Rising and The Ballad Of Johnny Yuma.
In January 1960, he played the first of his celebrated prison shows at San Quentin, where one of the inmates yelling him on was Merle Haggard, locked up on a burglary charge.
Scheduled to play up to 300 concerts a year, Cash found himself becoming increasingly dependent on amphetamines, even though he knew they were affecting his work. A tendency to preachiness came to the fore in a string of long-winded "concept" albums such as Ride This Train (1960), Blood, Sweat And Tears (1963) and True West (1965).
Drugs landed him in trouble through bizarre incidents such as driving a tractor into the lake behind his new house in Hendersonville, near Nashville. In 1965 he was jailed for three days after being arrested in El Paso, smuggling amphetamines into the US.
His addiction affected his family life (even though he had sired four daughters, including Rosanne, who would become a respected singer and songwriter), and Vivian divorced him in 1967.
Cash had already met June Carter , who had co-written Ring Of Fire with Merle Kilgore. The Carter clan was one of the legendary dynasties of country music, and during the 1960s, increasingly fascinated by the scope and history of American popular music, Cash often included the Carter Family in his live shows.
They married in 1968, after he had dramatically proposed to her onstage. She devoted herself to the twin pillars in her life, God and Johnny Cash, and was determined to make her husband end his amphetamine addiction.
His 1968 album, Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison, was a huge success and is still widely regarded as one of the finest country records ever made. In June 1969, The Johnny Cash Show began on ABC-TV. Based in Nashville, it pulled in artists from every genre. Among guests were Mahalia Jackson, the Who, Neil Young, Louis Armstrong and Bob Dylan.
Johnny Cash At San Quentin (1969) spawned a monster hit single with the tongue-in-cheek A Boy Named Sue, and the Cash/Carter duet on If I Were A Carpenter enjoyed chart-success and a Grammy. In 1971 Cash recorded the Man In Black album, the title song containing a somewhat melodramatic declaration : "I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down, living in the hopeless, hungry side of town, I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime ..."
Cash was growing into his persona as American icon and beacon of integrity, even if there were those who found the Johnny and June act somewhat overloaded with treacly religiosity. His commanding presence also lent itself to screen appearances. Trivia buffs may recall his minor role in an episode of the 60s Clint Eastwood /Eric Fleming TV western series Rawhide, though he received greater acclaim for his appearance with Kirk Douglas in A Gunfight (1972), and appeared in a string of TV movies.
Columbia's ending of their 28-year relationship in 1986 stands as one of the greatest gaffes ever perpetrated by the record business, and it rankled with Cash. Still, he was rapidly signed by Mercury, with whom he recorded several convincing albums including Johnny Cash Is Coming To Town (1987), Water From The Wells Of Home (1988) and Boom Chicka Boom (1990).
In 1988, Cash underwent double heart bypass surgery in Nashville. That year, the British Red Rhino label issued 'Til Things Are Brighter, featuring young artists covering Cash songs to raise money for Aids research. He was delighted. In 1992, he was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in New York.
In 1993, Cash's gravelly baritone featured on The Wanderer, from U2's Zooropa album, and in 1994 the American Recordings album amounted to a complete reappraisal of the legend of Johnny Cash, and one which found a ready new audience. A second album on the American label, Unchained, was released in November 1996, and found Cash mixing vintage country tunes by Jimmie Rodgers and the Louvin Brothers with "alternative rock" songs from Soundgarden and Beck.
Three more albums for American followed, with 2002's The Man Comes Around in particular earning rapturous critical acclaim for commanding reinventions of Bridge Over Troubled Water, Desperado and Depeche Mode's Personal Jesus.
He was pre-deceased by June last May after she had undergone heartsurgery not long after he had guested on Rosanne's album, Rules Of Travel, singing lyrics which clearly signalled his fragile mortality - "I cannot move mountains now, I can no longer run".
Johnny Cash was a country musician who was too big for country music, and his work as artist, humanitarian, and patron of songs and songwriters will endure indefinitely.
He had one son, John, and four daughters, Rosanne, Kathleen, Cindy and Tara.,
Johnny Cash: born February 26th, 1932; died September 12th.