After reading Part 1 of this article, it should come as no surprise that Johnny and June Carter Cash’s beloved Lake House has a mystique all its own. Johnny and June lived happily in the house for some 35 years. When they died (four months apart) in 2003, it sat empty for two years before it was sold by the Cash’s son, John Carter Cash, to Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees. As a bevy of contractors worked to meet the Gibbs’ July 4 deadline, the home caught fire and burned to the ground on April 10, 2007. Then Gibbs built a new house on higher ground, keeping the original Cash home foundations as a testament to the memory of Cash. The new house has been sold a few times but the Cash property remains pretty much the same as it was after the fire. Johnny and June had some famous neighbors too: Marty Stuart (Cash’s former son-in-law) and The Oak Ridge Boys’ Richard Sterban among them. After the fire, Sterban reportedly remarked that “perhaps, after all, no one except Johnny and June Carter Cash were meant to live at the lake house.”
So the Cash presence is strong here. While the Johnny Cash story is complicated, Kris Kristofferson wrote of his friend “John” that “He’s a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.” Cash struggled mightily with addictions and the only thing that saved him from himself was June Carter Cash. I can appreciate that. All questions of the Cash Lake House’s demise being tied to the passing of Johnny and June Carter Cash aside, Hickory Lake is no stranger to tragedy in its own right. There is an air of mystery that haunts Old Hickory Lake and extends beyond the charred ruins of the Cash mansion. Roy Orbison once owned a home right next to the Lake House. It burned down, killing two of his three sons. Orbison (1936-1988), was best known for his distinctive, natural lyric baritone voice featuring a range from A2 to G4: higher than the standard baritone range on the high end and not as low on the low end. Orbison’s (a.k.a. The Big O) lyric baritone voice was sweeter and lighter than the average baritone, and he could sing faster songs with more vocal agility than an average baritone. Orbison chose complex compositions and dark emotional ballads conveyed a quiet, desperate vulnerability, which led to his “Lonesome Roy” reputation. (Believe me, Roy Orbison was no boy scout. He was famous for his carousing and womanizing on the road and his conquest numbers could match anyone from Elvis to Wilt Chamberlain, but THAT is another story.) Between 1960 and 1964, 22 of his songs were placed on the Billboard Top Forty, including “Only the Lonely,” “Crying,” and “Oh, Pretty Woman.” Orbison’s trademark stage performance was standing still and solitary, lit by a single spotlight, dressed in black clothes and dark sunglasses which only added an air of mystery to his persona.
While playing a show in Birmingham England on Saturday, September 14, 1968, Orbison received the news that his home in Hendersonville had burned down. This occurred less than two years after the death of his wife Claudette Frady Orbison in a motorcycle accident on June 6, 1966, at the age of 24. It was a tragedy that plunged Orbison so deep into grief that he couldn’t write songs for a year and a half. To make matters worse, Roy received news that his sons Roy Dewayne Orbison, Jr. (age 10) and Anthony King Orbison (age 6) died in the fire. Their baby brother Wesley (age 3) survived. Fire officials stated that the cause of the fire may have been an aerosol can, which possibly contained some kind of lacquer. It was speculated that the boys were playing with a lighter or matches and using the spray can as a makeshift flame thrower when furniture or curtains ignited. The fire spread so quickly that when the boy’s grandparents, Orbie Lee Orbison and Nadine Shultz, opened the door to the room, the resulting blast knocked them to the other side of the house. Even though firefighters responded quickly, the flames were too intense to save the two young boys. By the time Roy made it home, all that was left of the home was the chimney.
Roy moved in with his parents and became a recluse, refusing to see or talk to anyone. When Johnny Cash visited, he found Roy sitting in his room staring at a television with the sound off. Cash told him that he loved him and was there for him. Orbison said he did not know how to cope with his grief. After the fire, Orbison had to start all over again and he could never bear the thought of rebuilding a home on the property. Roy’s parents helped to raise Wesley while his father was on the road and in the studio. In December 1988 just as his star was on the rise again, Orbison spent the night visiting with Wesley, from whom he had been estranged. The two stayed up all night singing together and writing songs. The following day, Roy died of a sudden heart attack at the age of 52.
Eventually, Johnny Cash bought the lot, promising Orbison that he would never build on the site again and insisting “Only good shall grow on this land.” The Cash family planted fruit trees and cultivated an orchard where the Orbison house once stood. It was not unusual to see Johnny Cash, watering can in hand, tending to the saplings during the early years of the orchard. As the fruit trees and grapevines flourished, they were maintained personally by the Cash family and the orchard came to fruition. Several years after Roy’s death, Johnny saw Wesley standing in the orchard on the lot where his brothers died. Cash asked Wesley why he was there. Wesley replied that it comforted him. Together, they gathered fruit from the orchard that Wesley took with him. Soon afterward, John and June gifted the lot to Wesley, who maintains the orchard to this day. It is ironic that years later, like Orbison’s, Cash’s house burnt, leaving only the chimney.
Not only was Johnny’s 1963 song “Ring of Fire” a hit, staying at No. 1 on the country chart for seven weeks and declared the number one greatest country song of all time by Rolling Stone Magazine, it was written by his wife June Carter years before they were married. Tragically, fire remained an unfortunate theme in Cash’s circle. On Saturday, Aug. 3, 1968, his first “Tennessee Three” guitarist, Luther Perkins, fell asleep on the couch in his den with a lit cigarette in his hand. Luther’s home (at 94 Riverwood Drive) was just a little further down the road from Johnny’s. The accidental fire failed to burn the home but Luther suffered burns over half of his body and never regained consciousness. Two days later, he died at Vanderbilt Hospital of burns sustained in that fire. Perkins had bought the lakeside house just two months earlier and had spent the afternoon of the fire installing a television antenna on the roof. When his wife returned home from a poker party at a friend’s house that night, she found the house filled with smoke, and flames in the den and the kitchen, her husband unconscious on the floor. Perkins had called Cash the night of the fire and asked him to come over. Cash, thinking Perkins’ wife was there to take care of him, begged off. Later, Cash would rank Perkins’ death with that of his brother Jack in terms of the impact it made on his life. “Part of me died with Luther,” Johnny said.
Bandmate Marshall Grant, who along with Cash and Perkins, made up the original “Tennessee Three,” wrote in his autobiography I Was There When It Happened, said, “Luther apparently woke up, realized what was happening, and tried to escape, but he was overcome by dense smoke and couldn’t make it to a sliding glass door leading outside. The house itself never caught fire, but there was terrible smoke damage, the likes of which I’ve never seen. They told us at the hospital that if Luther had lived, the doctors probably would have had to amputate his hands, and I don’t think he could have lived with that.” Luther Perkins is buried only yards away from Johnny and June Carter Cash at the Hendersonville Memory Gardens. Bassist Marshall Grant died on August 7, 2011, at the age of 83, in Jonesboro, Arkansas while attending a festival to restore the childhood home of Johnny Cash.
But wait, there’s more. Cash’s longtime friend, Faron Young, known as the ” Hillbilly Heartthrob” for his chart-topping singles “Hello Walls” and “It’s Four in the Morning” has an eerie connection to the Cash property as well. In 1972, Young was famously arrested and charged with assault for spanking a girl in the audience at a concert in Clarksburg, West Virginia, after he claimed she spat on him. Young appeared before a justice of the peace and was fined $24, plus $11 in court costs. Afterward, Young’s life was plagued with bouts of depression and alcoholism. On the night of December 4, 1984, Young fired a pistol into the kitchen ceiling of his Harbor Island home. When he refused to seek help for his alcoholism, Young and his wife Hilda separated, sold their home, and bought individual houses. When asked at the divorce trial if he feared hurting someone by shooting holes into the ceiling, Young answered “Not whatsoever.” The couple divorced after 32 years of marriage in 1986.
Feeling abandoned by fans and the country music industry and in failing health (he was battling emphysema, and had undergone prostate surgery for cancer), Faron Young penned a suicide note specifically enumerating his health and the decline in his career, shot himself on December 9, 1996. Sadly, Faron didn’t die immediately. Hearing the shot, Young’s long time friend and bandmate, Ray Emmett, rushed into the room to find Faron lying in his bed, still alive. Young was rushed to Nashville’s Summit Medical Center where the next day, December 10, 1996, at 1:07 p.m., he died at the age of 64. Faron Young was cremated, and his ashes were spread by his family over Old Hickory Lake at the house of Johnny and June Cash. In a “Country Music Spotlight” interview with Willie Nelson (who wrote Young’s biggest hit “Hello Walls”), Cash said, “He (Faron) was one of my favorite people, he was one day older than me. He requested that his ashes be distributed on Old Hickory Lake and my property. So they came out there with his ashes…and the wind was blowing…So he’s everywhere, he’s all over my place, my yard, my house, my windows, in my sill, on my car, I turned on my windshield wipers the next day and there’s Faron. There he went, back and forth, back and forth, until he was all gone.” So, the next time you’re heading south, take a side trip to Hendersonville and venture over to 200 Caudill Drive, park your car on the side of the road, put your elbows on Johnny Cash’s fence, and dream.
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest books are “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View,” “Irvington Haunts. The Tour Guide,” and “The Mystery of the H.H. Holmes Collection.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
