Every so often, I gather up dozens of these little pop culture trivia bites and store them away hoping to find enough additional information to write an entire article. More often than not, I fail in the attempt. So here, dear reader, is yet another attempt to cobble these trivia bites into an article.
Johnny Cash was born February 26, 1932 in Kingsland, Arkansas. He was an American singer-songwriter, actor, and author who was considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. Although most remember him as a country singer, his songs and sound encompass other genres like rock and roll, rockabilly, blues, folk, and gospel. Need proof? Then go and visit the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the Gospel Music Hall of Fame — you’ll find Johnny Cash in all three.
Now, grab on, hold on tight and let me immerse you in all things Johnny Cash. His parents christened him “J.R. Cash” because they could not agree between the names “John” and “Ray.” When he enlisted in the Air Force, they wouldn’t let him use initials as his name, so Cash gave his name as “John R. Cash.” When J.R. was just 5 years old, his dad shot his pet dog for eating the table scraps meant for the hogs. While a child working alongside his family in the cotton fields of Arkansas, Cash used to eat young cotton buds, despite his mother’s warnings that they would give him bellyaches.
His family’s economic and personal struggles during the Great Depression would go on to inspire many of his songs. J.R., 12 years old at the time, was very close to his older brother, Jack. In May 1944, Jack was pulled into a whirling head saw in the mill where he worked and was almost cut in two. Jack suffered for over a week before dying at age 15. Johnny, his mother, and Jack himself, all had premonitions and a sense of foreboding about that day. Their mother begged Jack to skip work and go fishing with his little brother, but Jack insisted on working, as the family needed the money. Cash often spoke of the horrible guilt he felt over this incident. On his deathbed, Jack said he had visions of heaven and angels. Decades later, Cash spoke of looking forward to meeting his brother in heaven. After this tragedy, Johnny started smoking, which undoubtedly contributed to his deep voice.
Cash enlisted in the United States Air Force on July 7, 1950. While in the Air Force, Cash traveled to London for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953. He bought his first guitar in Germany for 20 deutschemarks or about $5 American. While in the service, Cash wrote stories under the pen name “Johnny Dollar.” During his Cold War stint in the Air Force, Cash learned to translate Russian Morse code. He was the first radio operator to pick up the news of the death of Joseph Stalin on March 5, 1953. Ironically, although he was a country boy serving in the U.S. Air Force, Cash suffered from a dread fear of flying as well as a lifetime fear of snakes. He took only one voice lesson, after which the teacher advised him not to let anyone ever change the way he sang.
After leaving the Air Force on July 3, 1954, Cash moved to Memphis, where he sold appliances door-to-door while enrolled in a class to become a radio DJ at Keegan’s School of Industry. Cash’s all-black attire became his trademark lucky color after he wore a black t-shirt and jeans to his first public performance, with the Tennessee Two, playing for a group of elderly ladies in a church basement. The scar on the right side of Cash’s face was from a botched surgical procedure while he was in the Air Force.
Johnny Cash met Vivian Liberto at a roller-skating rink in San Antonio in the summer of 1951 and it was pretty much love at first sight. Johnny was 21 and Vivian, a Catholic schoolgirl heading into her senior year, was just 17. That spark grew brighter during the three years of Johnny’s overseas service, during which he deluged her with love letters urging her to marry him, all of which were curiously written in green ink. The two were married on August 7, 1954, one month after his discharge, at St. Ann’s Catholic church in San Antonio.
Cash eventually worked up the courage to visit the Sun Records studio, hoping to audition for Sam Phillips (the man who discovered Elvis Presley) and get a recording contract. After singing mostly gospel songs, Phillips told him that he didn’t record gospel music any longer. Legend claims that Phillips told Cash to “go home and sin, then come back with a song I can sell.” After that first rejection, Cash reportedly camped out day after day on the steps of the recording studio until he convinced Phillips to listen to his songs.
In 1955, Cash made his first rockabilly recordings at Sun, “Hey Porter” and “Cry! Cry! Cry!,” which were released in late June and met with success on the country hit parade (it earned Johnny his first royalty check for $2.41). On July 30 he returned to Sun studios to record “Folsom Prison Blues,” which hit the Top 10. His next release, “I Walk the Line,” (a song about his bride Vivian whose title was suggested by Carl Perkins) rose to Number 1 and crossed over to the pop charts. Cash later returned the favor by sharing a story with Perkins from his Air Force days about an airman who used to tell Cash not to step on his blue suede shoes. During his first two years of touring, Cash clocked over 100,000 miles of road travel.
On December 4, 1956, in what had to be one of the most amazing events in the history of music, Elvis Presley dropped in on Phillips while Carl Perkins was in the studio cutting new tracks, with Jerry Lee Lewis backing him on piano. Cash was also in the studio and the four started an impromptu jam session. Phillips left the tapes running and the recordings became known as the “Million Dollar Quartet” session. Roy Orbison was a Sun records signee at the time too and it was only fate that kept him from the studio that day. Cash later said that he was the one farthest from the microphone and he sang in a higher pitch to blend in with Elvis.
Elvis talked about that session with Johnny Cash in a December 3, 1956 interview: “I never had a better time than yesterday afternoon when I dropped into Sam Phillips’ place. It was what you might call a barrelhouse of fun. Carl Perkins was in a recording session… Johnny Cash dropped in. Jerry Lee Lewis was there too, and then I stopped by… I headed for the piano and did a Fats Domino impersonation of Blueberry Hill. The joint was really rocking before we got through.” From that day on, Elvis reportedly played Johnny Cash songs on the jukebox at every tour stop throughout the 1950s. Cash repaid the favor by flaunting a killer Elvis impersonation in his early shows.
From that moment on, Cash’s legend and outlaw image grew by leaps and bounds. Though he was never in prison, Cash served a total of seven nights in jail for minor incidents. Perhaps the most noteworthy was his arrest for “picking flowers after curfew” in Starkville, Mississippi. During that one-night incarceration, Cash broke his toe trying to kick out the bars of his jail cell. Once, on tour in the late 1950s, Cash and his band members bought 500 baby chickens and released a hundred of them on each floor of their hotel. At another hotel, they flushed cherry bombs down the toilet and blew the plumbing out. Cash once stuck a bowie knife into a hotel room’s reproduction of the Mona Lisa that didn’t meet his standards. In short, Johnny Cash was bad to the bone.
Like Elvis Presley before him, Johnny Cash was a big star, and he had outgrown Sun Records. In 1958 he signed with Columbia Records and moved his growing family to Los Angeles. As his career was taking off, Cash started drinking heavily. He also became addicted to amphetamines and barbiturates. When Johnny Carson moved to New York to start The Tonight Show in 1962, Cash bought Carson’s house in Encino. By now, Johnny was on the road 250 days of the year and his addiction was so bad that he bought a camper to use for his amphetamine binges in the desert. He named the camper “Jesse James” and spray-painted the windows black so he could sleep during daylight hours, “but also because I just liked to spray-paint things black.”
In June 1965, while high on pep pills, Cash’s truck and camper caught fire due to an overheated wheel bearing and an oil leak from Jesse James, triggering a forest fire that burned several hundred acres in Los Padres National Forest in California. Firefighters called in air tanker drops to extinguish the blaze, which raged for the better part of a week. The fire destroyed 508 acres, burned the foliage off three mountains and killed all but 9 of the refuge’s 53 endangered condors.
When the judge asked Cash if he started the fire, Johnny said, “I didn’t do it, my truck did, and it’s dead, so you can’t question it.” Cash was unrepentant and claimed, “I don’t care about your damn yellow buzzards.” The federal government sued him and was awarded $125,172, nearly a million dollars in today’s money. Cash loved to tell friends that he was the only person ever sued by the government for starting a forest fire, and he was right.
By now, Cash clearly was out of control. Later in that same summer of 1965, he was banned from the Grand Ole Opry after deliberately smashing the stage footlights with a microphone stand during a performance. The same night Cash got fired from the Grand Ole Opry, he crashed June Carter’s Cadillac into an electrical pole. And in October 1965 he made national news when he was arrested in El Paso for smuggling hundreds of pills across the border from Juarez. His self-destructive amphetamine fueled antics were now hurting his career and destroying his marriage.
By all accounts, Johnny Cash loved Vivian Cash. However, according to the Man in Black himself in his 2003 autobiography, “By the time we left Memphis for California . . . we had three daughters and a marriage in bad trouble.” Along with his addiction to pep pills, Johnny was hooked on the excitement of life on the road. At a show in Dallas in December of 1961, Johnny welcomed a new member, June Carter, to the cast of his touring “Johnny Cash Show.” June, of the famous Carter Family, was country-music royalty, born and bred, and — unlike Vivian — she was fully committed to the life of a touring performer. Despite his love for Vivian, when Johnny first met June in 1956 (after being introduced to her by Elvis Presley), he introduced himself by saying “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash and I’m going to marry you someday.” That prophetic statement would soon save his life.
Next Week: Johnny Cash, Part 2
Al Hunter is the author of “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Indiana National Road” and “Haunted Irvington” book series. Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
