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Onstage, Johnny Cash likes to joke about his daughter Rosanne's recording of "Tennessee Flat Top Box": "She played it for me and I said, 'That's real pretty, honey. And I want to thank you for recording it.' And she said 'Why?' And I said, 'Because I wrote it.' "
It gets a big laugh, but Cash isn't joking.
"No, she didn't know I wrote it," he says. "She sure didn't, but that's alright. I've made her listen to a lot of my old songs since then."
There's plenty to listen to: since starting out on Sam Phillips's legendary Sun label with "Cry! Cry! Cry!" 33 years ago Cash has recorded something like 1,500 songs. He's played with everybody from Elvis Presley to Elvis Costello. He once hosted the country's top-rated TV show. And he's still out there on the road, sometimes with his wife, June Carter Cash and the Carter Family, most recently on a college junket with longtime friend Waylon Jennings, backed by Jessi Colter and June. Although the familiar jet-black mane has silvered some and the craggy face is perhaps more wrinkled, Johnny Cash is still a little bigger than life, especially onstage, where he sounds like... well, like Johnny Cash. Nobody's ever sounded quite like him.
Cash's story is quintessentially American: after finishing high school in Dyness, Arkansas, he went into the Air Force for four years, spending much of his time intercepting Russian air-to-ground transmissions. (He also had a black friend in the service who was inordinately fond of wearing blue suede shoes; more on that later.) "In the meantime, I was learning to play guitar," Cash says. "I couldn't afford a guitar as a kid; I never had one. My mother had one when I was very small, but it was very cheap and it didn't last. My dad was a cotton farmer. We didn't have but 20 acres of land; we were very poor. We farmed with mules — I plowed with mules when I was a boy, and picked cotton by hand. Every afternoon after school I'd go directly to the fields and pick cotton till after dark. So I grew up on the cotton farm and music is what carried me through it all. That radio and the stations that I listened to: the Memphis stations, and Chicago, and WJJD and WLW-New Orleans, XEJ-Ft. Worth, the Mexican stations that played country music."
When Cash was 12, a hillbilly show — Smilin' Eddie Hill and the Louvin Brothers — came to town. "I walked two-and-a-half miles to go to the show and I stood out by the car in the dark and watched them load up their instruments afterwards. I wanted an autograph really bad but I was too embarrassed to get it." When he was 14, he went to Memphis to see their show again—"and, from that moment on, I knew that was what I wanted to do."
And he returned to Memphis to do it, finding himself in some interesting company at Sun Records: Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis. Together they made up Sun's million-dollar quartet, back in the limelight these days since Charly Records released the longer version of their storied session. Only thing is, some people don't think Cash is on the record. "People don't think I am, but I am," he says. "See, it was a Carl Perkins session — Carl asked me to come and I was the first of the four to show up. I sat and listened to Carl, watched him record. Elvis came in and Carl stopped the session and Elvis sat down at the piano. Elvis had recorded 'Blue Moon Of Kentucky' and I started challenging him to sing Bill Monroe songs and Louvin Brothers songs. When I was a kid, before my voice dropped, I'd sing the real high part—I'd sing tenor. And I was singing those high parts on the Bill Monroe songs and Louvin Brothers songs on the quartet. And there are a lot more of them that are not on the album. You don't hear my voice—I hear it myself when I've listened to it a couple times, but I don't sound like Johnny Cash, 'cause I'm not singing the low part. Elvis was singing the bass and I was singing really high, but I was so far away from the mike that you hardly ever hear me. But I was there for the whole thing."
In fact, Cash and Elvis had a lot in common: they not only shared a record label, they had the same manager (Bob Neal, in Elvis's pre-Colonel Tom days) and often played on the same bill. Shortly after the release of "Cry! Cry! Cry!" Elvis hired Cash to open for him, paying him $75 for his first show. Johnny went on to open throughout Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas. "I've never been on a show with Elvis that every person backstage wasn't standing in the aisles watching every move he made," Cash reminisces. And, later on, Elvis asked Cash to write him a song.
" 'Blue Suede Shoes' was my idea," Cash explains, relating the tale of his Air Force friend. "We was doing a show in Amory, Mississippi, and Carl (Perkins) said 'I need a hit record bad.' " Cash told Perkins the blue suede shoe story and even threw in the song's intro, but turned down co-writing credits.
"Elvis had 'Blue Suede Shoes' and he knew I had something to do with writing it," says Cash. "He asked me to write him a song, so I wrote 'Get Rhythm' and I went down and told Sam I had this song for Elvis and I'd like to put it down." Cash and Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant—the Tennessee Two of his early years—did record the song. "Then Sam said, 'Well, I have some news for you — Elvis is now with RCA-Victor and he can't have that song.' And I said, 'But I wrote it for him, he asked me to.' Sam said, 'No, I wanna release it by you; that's a hit.' As it happened, it was the other side of 'I Walk The Line' and it didn't get much play."
As it also happened, Cash wasn't long for Sun, either: he was soon signed to Columbia, where he went on to be known primarily as a country artist. "Y'know, Elvis and I both begged Sam Phillips to let us record gospel music," Cash explains. "That's where we were both comin' from. I asked Sam to let us record 'Strange Things Happening Every Day' and 'Then It Rained' and 'Don't Take Everybody To Be Your Friend' — the black gospel things of Sister Rosetta (Tharpe) — and Sam said, 'I can't sell gospel music, I gotta sell secular records.' He said we can't afford to spend our money trying to promote 'em. I said alright, but I told Sam I'd go to a company that'd let me do it. And my contract was about to run out with Sun and I decided to go with Columbia 'cause they promised me I could record anything I wanted."
Cash's increasing country acceptance led him to Nashville and the Grand Ole Opry — where he'd been earlier. Elvis had been there, too. "They wanted me on the Grand Ole Opry," he recalls. "The people did, but the manager of the Opry didn't. I went in to see him and 'Folsom Prison Blues' was in the Top Five — my agent took me up there and I had on a black shirt and pants and sideburns down to here and my hair was slicked, you know how we wore it then. He kept me waiting for about two hours sitting in that office. Finally he motioned for me to come in — he's sitting back there with a cee-gar, leaning back in his chair — and he looked at me, looked through me. He said, 'And what makes you think you belong in the Grand Ole Opry?' I called on that inner strength and peace and finally I said, 'Well, I got a record that's in the top sellers charts in Billboard and I think the fans would like to hear me sing it.' He looked at me for a minute and said, 'Dressed like you are?' I said, 'Well, this is what I wear.' At the time, they were wearing rhinestones and spangles and cowboy hats and shiny boots and all that on the Grand Ole Opry — some of them still are — but I said this is what I wear. He said, 'What you wanna dress like Elvis for?' And I said, 'I'm not dressin' like Elvis; I don't know what Elvis is wearin', I'm wearin' what is right for me.' He said, 'All you Memphis rockabillies look alike.' " Cash did play the Opry, doing "Folsom Prison Blues" and "Hey Porter" — and nine encores. It was also the last time Elvis Presley played the Grand Ole Opry.
"They wouldn't let him take drums on-stage and they said some very unkind things about him. I remember one singer — and I won't give his name because he's dead now — Elvis walked by, and I started talking to him because he didn't know anybody there. I mean, there were some people he idolized: the Louvin Brothers, Bill Monroe, he idolized some of these people. But this one country singer walked by and said 'goddamn nigger singer' and kept walkin'. I turned to Elvis and looked and the tears were runnin' off his chin. He dropped his head and said, 'I gotta go.' I walked him to the door and said, 'Where you goin'?' He said 'I've gotta get out of here and I'll never be back.' "
Cash, though, returned to the Opry in 1958 — "By then, I was Johnny Cash, country star," he laughs — but bolted when he was unwilling to play 26 Saturday nights yearly, a demand of the Opry. He moved to California, where he lived for seven years. Towards the end of the '60s, his star was ascending again, culminating with his multi-platinum At Folsom Prison and At San Quentin live albums and his ABC-TV variety show, one of the greatest American media offerings ever: although an established country star, Cash regularly brought musicians from other genres — particularly rock 'n' roll — onto the show.
"ABC had a big meeting; they wanted to sign me up for a year," Cash recalls. "So I said, I gotta be who I am and I've gotta work with people I feel comfortable around, people I can relate to. And I'm not going to go Hollywood on you — I'm not going to use Hollywood people unless they can sing a good country song. They said, 'Who do you want for your guests?,' and I thought I'd check 'em out. I said — the first name I gave 'em was Pete Seeger (laughs). Said 'I want Pete Seeger — he's a good American folk singer and writer and I wanna work with him.' So, reluctantly, they said OK, and they asked who else. I said Bob Dylan. They said, 'You can't get him. Bob Dylan won't do TV.' I said, well I'll ask, and they put him on the list. And I started naming all these people I wanted to work with: I said Rambling Jack Elliot, and they said, 'Who's that?' I said, 'a guy I want to sing with.' "
Whatever it was, The Johnny Cash Show probably wasn't what the execs had conceived. The show featured the Who, Joni Mitchell, Kenny Rogers & The First Edition, Neil Young, Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor and Ray Charles, among others. Even Bob Dylan, who — it turned out — would do TV under the right conditions.
"Our relationship started through the mail," Cash recalls. "I got a letter from Bob Dylan — it was a long rambling letter and he said something like, 'Man, when I was growing up there was Johnny Cash and Hank Williams, that's all. He's gone, but I wanna meet you.' " The two exchanged a few more letters before meeting at the Newport Folk Festival. From there, Dylan invited Cash to his home in Woodstock, where they jammed all night long. Dylan's Nashville Skyline album soon followed.
"He stayed at my house, he and Sara and the kids," says Cash. "But he was scared to death of television. I said, 'You don't have to do it but I would really like to have you on the show.' So (laughs) it was kind of funny — they had the craziest, ugliest set for him — it was a shack, it looked like a country shack that they let down with wires behind him. And when they put that set out there he said, 'Am I gonna have to stand in front of that?' I said 'Not if you don't want to.' So I made them take the set away and asked him what he wanted and he said 'Nothing — just black.' So that's the way we did it." Cash pauses, reflecting. "I think his appearance on my show may still be an embarrassment to him."
Not so the Nashville Skyline album, though. He had a lot of fun doing that," Cash agrees. Oddly, Cash got a Grammy for the LP — more specifically, for the LP's liner notes. "The fact that it was a Bob Dylan album had a lot to do with it, I think," he dryly notes. The two haven't hung out much since their celebrated collaboration on "Girl From The North Country": "I think Bob equated me with televangelism," says Cash. "He was wrong about that, but I had that feeling. I saw him backstage at the Grammys in Hollywood and he said something to me about the television evangelists and I didn't quite understand what he was trying to say. Him being smart, y'know — I think he was trying to strike up a conversation, but there were a lot of people around and we couldn't really talk. He's really very shy and very hard to get into a conversation."
When asked whether he lost credibility with the "country people" during that period — a period when Cash was doing overtly sociological songs like "The Man In Black" and "What Is Truth," he answers, "I hope so! I hope I did. I don't care, I was doing what I wanted to do." In fact, both songs were written for a campus special when ABC was "really grasping at straws, really trying to figure out how to keep Johnny Cash's ratings up." Although Cash claims he was writing a lot of crap during that time, both hold up surprisingly well, even though "every line to 'The Man In Black' was an answer to a question a reporter had asked me about something." The pragmatic reason advocated by June Carter Cash — that black clothes show less dirt and wrinkles when on the road — wasn't widely discussed.
* * *
Johnny Cash in 1988: now 56 years old, Cash has weathered any number of bouts, including a drying-out period at the Betty Ford clinic four years ago. He's a devout Christian — his fictional account of St. Paul's life, The Man In White, is distributed by his good friend Billy Graham. And Cash still doesn't lack for musical collaborators. The first song he recorded for his PolyGram debut album, Johnny Cash Is Coming To Town, was Elvis Costello's "The Big Light."
"I got this King Of America album in advance from a disc jockey in Ohio who knew Elvis," says Cash. "He'd underlined 'The Big Light' and said this song is for you." When Cash played with the Carter Family in London recently, Costello was in the audience with Nick Lowe, and Declan joined him for a live version of "Big Light," while Lowe came in on "Get Rhythm." Cash's life has been like that: this past Christmas, he worked up a song with Tom T. Hall and Paul McCartney in Jamaica.
"It's really weird, but of all the people I've sat and swapped songs with in my entire life, I've swapped songs more hours with Paul McCartney than with anybody," he muses. "This past Christmas, we sang till about one a.m. under a full moon, sitting on the front porch, doing a song called 'Moon Over Jamaica.' When we left, he insisted that we stay with them when we come to England or Scotland and he said he'd love to record with me. I said, 'You've got to be kidding; you don't record with people like me.' And he said, 'Yeah, I do. You're the first person I've ever asked to record with me.' I said, 'You've recorded with Carl Perkins and all them other people,' and he said, 'Yeah, but they asked me. I'm asking you.' "
Despite this — despite his enormous contribution to popular music — Cash is clear-eyed, if a bit negative about what's going on. "Let's be realistic," he says. "Look who sells records: Springsteen and Mellencamp, they sell records. I don't sell records, not compared to what they do." He says his favorite Springsteen album, by far, is Nebraska, and that his music hasn't had any impact on Mellencamp at all, as best as he can tell. He's recorded two of Springsteen's songs: "Johnny 99" and "Highway Patrolman" and says this: "Born In The U.S.A. was alright, but the Nebraska album, when he really gets down to it, gets down to earth and puts his heart into it, that's where he's at for me."
So where does Johnny Cash fit in nowadays?
"Well, you've got the record companies and media hype and they're all hyping the young people," Johnny says. "I dunno, maybe my day of recognition will come around. I don't know. I really don't know how much impact my music has had on anybody. Really.
"Y'know what I did? I went and bought two Ry Cooder albums, 'cause Ry Cooder recorded 'Get Rhythm' and 'Hey Porter.' And I love the way these people do my sounds. I listen to that and I say, 'Damn, I wish I'd've done it that way.' "
Not me.
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