In contrast to much of the Music City talent, Cash was writing his own material, which was influenced by his youth in Dyess Colony, Ark., spent working with sharecroppers, adhering to his mother’s faith in the Pentecostal Church of God and enduring floods, droughts and WWII.
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The Nashville sound, by the second half of the 1950s, was full of lush strings and love songs created to attract a more cosmopolitan audience. The Man in Black image was soon crafted, and by the time he made his debut at the Grand Ole Opry in 1957, Cash was a sharp contrast to up-and-coming country ballad singers such as Eddy Arnold, Jim Reeves and Jimmy Dean. 1 and his first crossover hit on the pop charts, where it reached No. In 1956, “I Walk the Line” became his first country No. 14 on the country chart and led to a year’s stint on the Louisiana Hayride and a tour of the U.S. It was released on a single with “Cry, Cry, Cry” under the name Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two. He auditioned as a gospel singer, but Phillips was looking for something more commercial and Cash played his composition “Hey Porter,” recording it March 22, 1955. Through his brother Roy, also a musician, he was introduced to Sam Phillips, the founder of Sun Records, where Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis would get their starts. Cash also played music with a trio that featured guitarist Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant that appeared on Memphis radio station KWEM. He studied radio announcing at a broadcasting school and, to make ends meet, he sold appliances door to door. He had enlisted in the Air Force and worked as a cryptographer more importantly, he had bought a guitar and started performing with an informal group called the Landsberg Barbarians.Īfter being discharged in 1954, he settled in Memphis, marrying his first wife Vivian Leberto, by whom he had three daughters, one of whom is singer Rosanne Cash. His first hit, “Folsom Prison Blues” was written while Cash, born in Kingsland, Ark., was stationed in Germany during the Korean War. In a garden full of weeds - the oak tree.” “He showed me his house, his ranch, his zoo, his faith, his musicianship,” U2’s Bono said on the band’s Web site. His importance has been acknowledged by artists ranging from Neil Young and Bob Dylan to Garth Brooks to Justin Timberlake. He sang about real life, whether in the Dust Bowl, a church or behind prison walls, releasing more than 130 albums. In his more than 1,000 compositions, he wrote about coal miners, sharecroppers, soldiers, barkeeps, convicts, families, cowboys and, of course, himself, without making heroes out of any of them. In between those two phases that defined his career, he used his baritone-bass voice to pioneer a branch of country music concerning people on the lower end of the economic spectrum, a continuation of the work of Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers.
In his 1955 recording of “Folsom Prison Blues,” he sang what may very well be the darkest, remorse-free line ever sung in a top 10 hit: “I shot a man in Reno/Just to watch him die.” The key figure blazing the trail in writing songs about the underbelly of humanity, Cash found a kindred spirit in those composers.
His career spanned five decades, beginning with his spare and dark recordings made for Memphis’ Sun Records and concluding with him covering brooding music written by modern rock artists such as Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, Nick Lowe, Sting and Tom Waits. He was unable to attend the MTV Video Music Awards ceremony in August because he was hospitalized in Nashville with a stomach ailment. He had been in and out of the hospital regularly the last several years, suffering from Shy-Drager, an illness similar to Parkinson’s disease that attacks the nervous system and affects muscle control. Cash, who performed for presidents and prisoners, died at Baptist Hospital in Nashville, just four months after the death of his wife June Carter Cash.
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