“Blessed with a deep imagination, he used the gift to express all the various lost causes of the human soul”Dylan wrote after Johnny Cash’s death in 2003. “This is a miraculous and humbling thing. Listen to him and he will always bring you to your senses.”
His voice had the authority of experience, as did his songs. In them he was the man who taught the weeping willow to cry, the lonely figure who wore black for the poor, the ice-cold killer who boasted that he had “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.”.
At Sun Records and later at Columbia – in songs like “I Walk the Line,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Big River,” “Five Feet High and Rising” and “I Still Miss Someone” — he incorporated the language of country , blues and gospel with the emerging snap of rock & roll.
Johnny Cash wrote that Memphis laughed at him like a whore. He bore the burden of temptation, stumbled, did not fall. Only Nashville, a den of sin with subtler, at first glance, more harmless enticements, gradually eroded his resistance like constant drops erode a stone. Saturday night Johnny let himself go, Sunday morning he was ashamed. And the more he drank and turned to drugs, the heavier the penance he imposed on himself. It tore his soul apart.
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“Hello, I’m Johnny Cash”
In his heyday, when he helped shape the face of country music and defied the world, its conscience, singing in black for the poor and outcast, for the weary and burdened, Johnny Cash was a walking contradiction. He suffered because he was heading towards the abyss with his eyes open and was continually accounting for it. “I keep a close watch on this heart of mine,” he sang in the evenings on increasingly larger stages, “I keep my eyes wide open all the time.” And again the following evening. The difficult walk to the microphone, the thunderous applause, the obligatory first words: “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.”
It is not certain whether this is how he introduced himself to Sam Phillips, the Elvis discoverer and owner of Sun Records. This boy was dusty, Phillips remembered with a laugh, not on the outside, oh no. A sparkling clean appearance, the boots polished to a high shine. But he spoke and acted as if he had brought Arkansas with him. Polite, simple, dry as dust.
Born in Kingsland, Arkansas on February 26, 1932 and christened JR Cash, the son of a cotton farmer who had been deprived of his market by the Great Depression and deprived of his land by a devastating drought, “Johnny” (the Air Force later gave him the name) lived out his life early childhood in abject poverty. Roosevelt’s New Deal gave the Cashs a plot of land in the fertile lowlands of the Mississippi Delta as part of a white-only resettlement program.
The first encounter with music
There, in Dyess, just 30 miles upriver from Memphis, Johnny first heard music on the radio. A luxury that the Cashs could only afford periodically and on an hourly basis as long as the batteries lasted.
Until then, Johnny only knew the songs that were sung in the Baptist church. Hymns mostly, and that melancholy singsong of black pickers that wafted from the cotton fields. And of course the familiar folk songs and Christian devotional songs that his mother had sung for as long as he could remember.
But what was coming out of the radio, this fast-paced hillbilly, the plaintive, warning songs of the Louvin Brothers and Roy Acuff’s eerie “Wreck On The Highway”, which made Johnny’s blood run cold in his veins, attracted him irresistibly and wouldn’t let him go .
Tolerated by his father and encouraged by his mother, Johnny spent a lot of time with his guitar. At the age of twelve, he had to witness his much-loved and admired brother Jack, who was two years older than him, die for days after being caught in a saw. That shaped him. And the songs he wrote, mostly outside near the train tracks, where he longingly watched the trains, whose rhythmic, monotonous pounding was reflected in the beat of his guitar, as was the stuttering “tuck-tuck” of the tractors. They were serious songs, tragic stories, set to that motoric “boom-chicka-boom” beat that would become his trademark, refined by Luther Perkins’ perfect reverb, Marshall Grant’s swing and WH Holland’s stoic snare.
An encounter with Johnny Cash
When Sam Phillips sold off his silverware, Cash ended up at Columbia, but was reluctant to make the move to Sony and moved to Mercury in 1986 for five lousy years. ROLLING STONE author Wolfgang Doebling met him for a short interview in Berlin. He wanted to see Checkpoint Charlie, they walked along the wall, Cash muttered dark prophecies, cursed communism and the music business. There was little talk, Doebling named him “Sir”Cash called the journalist “son”. In the evening, on the ICC stage, he was in poor voice, dragged his son, who had little talent, in front of the microphone and gave his wife June Carter a lot of space.
Of course, she was the one who pulled him out of the drug swamp by his hair in 1968, who was with him when he spent weeks climbing the walls in rehab. And who supported him in the last difficult years of the insidious illness that left the spirit intact and the body painfully degenerated.
“We get old and get used to each other. We think alike and read each other’s minds. We know what the other wants without asking.”Cash wrote to June Carter on her birthday in 1994. “Every now and then, like today, I think about it and realize how lucky I am to share my life with the most amazing woman I have ever met.”
Comeback with Rick Rubin
Rick Rubin’s “American Recordings” took Cash back to his roots, to the pre-industrial era, to Arkansas. Johnny Cash returned home as a folk singer, a storyteller, a person with an upright walk. “I stayed true to my music, my family and my fans”he said, “That’s how I want to be remembered.” June went ahead in March and she didn’t have to wait long.
The news of Johnny Cash’s death shocked his fans, but it came as no surprise to those around him, as he had suffered from several serious health problems in the years before his death. At the end of the 1980s he had already undergone knee, heart and jaw operations and was plagued by poor health until his death.
The revenge of lifestyle
The problems were seen by the public and colleagues, including Kris Kristofferson, as his body’s revenge. Revenge for what Johnny Cash had done to him through drugs and alcohol over many years. The symptoms didn’t just cause him great physical pain.
His activities as a musician also suffered. It was the autonomic neuropathy that kept him from touring. This is a disease that is associated with diabetics. The disease was correctly diagnosed in 1997 after its symptoms had previously been incorrectly interpreted as Shy-Drager syndrome, a neurodegenerative disease similar to Parkinson’s disease.
By not touring, Cash concentrated on recording. He also spent more time with June at her Jamaican vacation home, where the sunshine seemed to ease the physical pain. But things got worse when Cash spent a long time in hospital with pneumonia in 1998. The result was permanent damage to the lungs. Despite everything, Johnny Cash continued to work.
The death of June Carter
Working with Rick Rubin, Cash experienced new creative impulses. Singles like “Hurt,” a Nine Inch Nails cover, gave the aging country star renewed artistic relevance shortly after the turn of the millennium, which he clearly enjoyed. However, the joy of the success of “American Recordings” was soon dampened. In May 2003, June Carter died after heart surgery at the age of 73. Given Johnny Cash’s health problems, those around the couple certainly assumed that June would outlive her husband.
June Carter had insisted that Cash should continue working in the event of her death. At all costs. He did so and went into the studio the week after June’s death to record five new songs. He gave Rick Rubin the task of keeping him busy every day, which complied with his client’s request. Even some impromptu performances in front of close friends and family members were part of the grief therapy.
When did Johnny Cash die?
At his last appearance on July 5, 2003 in Carter Family Fold Cash delivered a prepared speech before playing “Ring of Fire.” One of his biggest hits, written by June Carter in 1963 after falling in love with Johnny Cash. “The spirit of June Carter overshadows me tonight with the love she had for me and the love I have for her. We are connected somewhere between here and heaven. I guess she came down from heaven for a quick visit to visit me tonight and give me courage and inspiration like she always has.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqESx05OuCA
Johnny Cash died at 2:00 a.m. on September 12, 2003, of complications from his diabetes at Baptist Hospital in Nashville. He was 71 years old. Less than four months had passed after June’s death when Cash followed his wife. He was buried next to June in the Hendersonville Memorial Gardens, not far from where she lived.