Musician and actor, born in Kingsland, Arkansas, USA. A singer, guitarist, and songwriter, he was born into a poor cotton-farming family and became one of the greatest stars of country music. He began writing songs while serving in the air force (19504), and worked as a door-to-door salesman before recording his first hits for Sun Records, I Walk the Line and Folsom Prison Blues in 1956. He appeared regularly on the Louisiana Hayride and Grand Ole Opry radio broadcasts in the early 1960s. In 1960 he performed the first of many free jailhouse shows in San Quentin Prison, and his collaborations with Bob Dylan in that decade underlined his interest in counter-culture ideas in music. In 1968 he married June Carter (19292003), a member of the famous first family of country and folk music, and the next year began hosting his own television programme, The Johnny Cash Show, and also appeared in many dramatic film and television roles. Despite recurrent ill health, he continued both to perform and to appear in films into the 1990s. He was inducted into the Country Music Association (CMA) Hall of Fame in 1980, and was posthumously honoured at the CMA annual awards in 2003, winning best album for American IV, best single, and best video. A biopic of his life, Walk the Line (2005), starring Joaquin Phoenix, won a Golden Globe for best musical film at the 2006 awards. An album released in 2006, American V: A Hundred Highways, draws on his last recorded sessions.
| Johnny Cash | ||
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Johnny Cash in 1969 |
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| Background information | ||
| Born | February 26, 1932, Kingsland, Arkansas, USA | |
| Died | September 12, 2003, Nashville, Tennessee, USA | |
| Genre(s) |
Country Blues Rock 'n' Roll Folk |
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| Website | www.johnnycash.com | |
Johnny Cash (born J.R. Cash was the husband of country singer and songwriter June Carter Cash.
Cash was known for his deep and distinctive voice, the boom-chick-a-boom or "freight train" sound of his Tennessee Three backing band, and his dark clothing and demeanor, which earned him the nickname "The Man in Black." He started all his concerts with the simple introduction "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash."
Much of Cash's music, especially that of his later career, echoed themes of sorrow, moral tribulation and redemption.
He sold over 50 million albums in his nearly 50 year career and is generally recognized as one of the most important musicians in the history of American popular music.
Early life
See also: Johnny Cash family"The Man in Black" was born J. Cash in Kingsland, Arkansas, and raised in Dyess, Arkansas.
Cash's early memories were dominated by gospel music and radio. Cash as his legal name. When he signed for Sun Records in 1955, he took "Johnny" Cash as a stage name.
Early career
After basic training at Lackland Air Force Base and technical training at Brooks Air Force Base, both in San Antonio, Cash was sent to a U.S. Air Force Security Service unit at Landsberg Air Base, Germany.
After his term of service ended, Cash married Vivian Liberto, whom he met while training at Brooks. Cash worked up the courage to visit the Sun Records studio, hoping to garner a recording contract. Cash eventually won over Phillips with new songs delivered in his early frenetic style.
Cash's next record, "Folsom Prison Blues," made the country Top 5, and "I Walk the Line" was No. Following "I Walk the Line" was Johnny Cash's "Home of the Blues," recorded in July 1957. In 1957, Cash became the first Sun artist to release a long-playing album. Although he was Sun's most consistently best-selling and prolific artist at that time, Cash felt constrained by his contract with the small label. The following year, Cash left the label to sign a lucrative offer with Columbia Records, where his single "Don't Take Your Guns to Town" would become one of his biggest hits.
Cash's first child, a daughter, Rosanne, was born in 1955.
Drug addiction
As his career was taking off in the early 1960s, Cash began drinking heavily and became addicted to amphetamines and barbiturates. For a brief time, Cash shared an apartment in Nashville with Waylon Jennings, himself heavily addicted to amphetamines. Cash used the uppers to stay awake during tours. The song was written by June Carter and Merle Kilgore and originally performed by Carter's sister, but the signature mariachi-style horn arrangement was provided by Cash, who says it came to him in a dream. The song describes the personal hell Carter went through as she wrestled with her forbidden love for Cash (they were both married to other people at the time) and as she dealt with Cash's personal "ring of fire" (drug dependency and alcoholism).
Cash sometimes spoke of his erratic, drug-induced behavior with some degree of bemused detachment. When the judge asked Cash why he did it, Cash said in his then-flippant style, "I didn't do it, my truck did, and it's dead so you can't question it." The fire in Los Padres National Forest in California in June 1965 was started by a defective exhaust on Johnny Cash's camper. To this date, Johnny Cash is the only person ever sued by the government for starting a forest fire. (This incident gave the spark for the song "Starkville City Jail", which he spoke about on his live At San Quentin prison album.)
The mid-1960s saw Cash release a number of concept albums, including Ballads Of The True West (1965), an experimental double record mixing authentic frontier songs with Cash's spoken narration;
"Folsom Prison Blues"
While an airman in West Germany, Cash saw the B-movie Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison (1951), which inspired him to write an early draft of one of his most famous songs, "Folsom Prison Blues".
Cash felt great compassion for prisoners. These performances led to a pair of highly successful live albums, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison (1968) and Johnny Cash at San Quentin (1969).
The Folsom Prison record was introduced by a powerful rendition of his classic "Folsom Prison Blues," while the San Quentin record included the crossover hit single "A Boy Named Sue," a Shel Silverstein-penned novelty song that reached No.
Apart from his performances at Folsom Prison and San Quentin, and various other U.S. correctional facilities, Cash also performed at Österåkeranstalten (The Österåker Prison) north of Stockholm, Sweden in 1972. Between the songs Cash can be heard speaking Swedish which was greatly appreciated by the inmates.
After he quit using drugs in the early 1970s, Cash rediscovered his Christian faith, taking an "altar call" in Evangel Temple, a small church in the Nashville area. Cash chose this church over many other larger, celebrity churches in the Nashville area because he said he was just another man there, and not a celebrity.
"The Man in Black"
From 1969 to 1971, Cash starred in his own television show on the ABC network. Cash had been an early supporter of Dylan even before they had met, but they became friends while they were neighbors in the late 1960s in Woodstock, New York. Cash was enthusiastic about reintroducing the reclusive Dylan to his audience. Cash also sang a duet with Dylan on Dylan's country album Nashville Skyline, and also wrote the album's Grammy-winning liner notes. Another artist who received a major career boost from The Johnny Cash Show was songwriter Kris Kristofferson. During a live performance of Kristofferson's "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down", Cash made headlines when he refused to change the lyrics to suit network executives, singing the song with its controversial references to marijuana intact: "On the Sunday morning sidewalks / Wishin', Lord, that I was stoned." In 1971, Cash wrote the song "Man in Black" to help explain his dress code: "I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down, / Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town, / I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime, / But is there because he's a victim of the times."
In the mid-'70s, Cash's popularity and hit songs began to decline, but his autobiography (the first of two), titled Man in Black, was published in 1975 and sold 1.3 million copies. His friendship with Billy Graham led to the production of a movie about the life of Jesus, The Gospel Road, which Cash co-wrote and narrated. He was probably closest with Jimmy Carter, who was actually a very close friend (but not related to his wife, June Carter Cash).
When invited to perform at the White House for the first time in 1972, President Richard Nixon's office requested that he play "Okie from Muskogee" (a Merle Haggard song that negatively portrays youthful drug users and war protesters) and "Welfare Cadillac" (a Guy Drake song that derides the integrity of welfare recipients). Cash declined to play either song and instead played a series of his own more left-leaning, politically-charged songs, including "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" (about a brave Native-American World War II veteran, one of the men memorialized on the famous photograph "Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima" who was racially mistreated upon his return to Arizona), "Man in Black" and "What is Truth?"
Highwaymen
In 1980, Cash became the Country Music Hall of Fame's youngest living inductee at age 48, but during the 1980s his records failed to make a major impact on the country charts, though he continued to tour successfully.
During this period, Cash appeared as an actor in a number of television films. Cash won fine reviews for his work in this film that called attention to adult illiteracy. In 1983, Cash also appeared as a heroic sheriff in Murder In Coweta County, which co-starred Andy Griffith as his nemesis. Cash had tried for years to make the film, which would win him acclaim. (Coincidentally, in 1974 Cash starred as a country-singer/killer in a Columbo movie, "Swan Song.")
Cash relapsed into addiction after a serious stomach injury in 1983 caused by a bizarre incident in which he was kicked and critically wounded by an ostrich he kept on his farm.
At another hospital visit in 1988, this time to watch over Waylon Jennings (who was recovering from a heart attack), Jennings suggested that Cash have himself checked into the hospital for his own heart condition. Doctors recommended preventive heart surgery, and Cash underwent double bypass surgery in the same hospital. Both recovered, although Cash refused to use any prescription painkillers, fearing a relapse into dependency. Cash later claimed that during his operation, he had what is called a "near death experience".
Cash's recording career and his general relationship with the Nashville establishment was at an all-time low in the 1980s. So, in a real-life scenario reminiscent of the Mel Brooks movie The Producers, Cash recorded an intentionally awful song, a self-parody. Nevertheless, he was hoping to kill the relationship with the label before they did, and it was not long after "Chicken in Black" that Columbia and Cash parted ways.
In 1986, Cash returned to Sun Studios in Memphis to team up with Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins to create the album, Class of '55. He later telephoned Cash and brought him in to join the others.
In 1986, Cash published his only novel, Man in White, a book about Saul and his conversion to become the Apostle Paul.
American Recordings
After Columbia Records dropped Cash from his recording contract, he had a short and unsuccessful stint with Mercury Records from 1987 to 1991 (see Johnny Cash discography).
In 1991, Cash sang lead vocals on a cover version of "Man In Black" for punk band One Bad Pig's album, "I Scream Sunday." Although he was no longer sought after by major labels, Cash was approached by producer Rick Rubin and offered a contract with Rubin's American Recordings label, better known for rap and hard rock than for country music. Cash wrote that his reception at the 1994 Glastonbury Festival was one of the highlights of his career. Cash and his wife appeared on a number of episodes of the popular television series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman starring Jane Seymour. The actress thought so highly of Cash that she later named one of her twin sons after him. In 1996, Cash released a sequel, Unchained, and enlisted the accompaniment of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, which won a Grammy for Best Country Album. In 1997, Cash believing he did not explain enough of himself in his 1975 autobiography Man in Black wrote another autobiography entitled Cash: The Autobiography.
Sickness and death
In 1997, Cash was diagnosed with the neurodegenerative disease Shy-Drager syndrome, a diagnosis that was later altered to autonomic neuropathy associated with diabetes. His illness forced Cash to curtail his touring. The albums American III: Solitary Man (2000) and American IV: The Man Comes Around (2002) contained Cash's response to his illness in the form of songs of a slightly more somber tone than the first two American albums.
June Carter Cash died of complications following heart valve replacement surgery on May 15, 2003 at the age of 73. June had told Cash to keep working, so he continued to record, and even performed a couple of surprise shows at the Carter Family Fold outside Bristol, Virginia. At the June 21, 2003 concert, before singing "Ring of Fire", Cash read a statement about his late wife that he had written shortly before taking the stage.
Less than four months after his wife's death, Johnny Cash died at the age of 71 due to complications from diabetes, which resulted in respiratory failure, while hospitalized at Baptist Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee.
On May 24, 2005, Rosanne Cash's birthday, Vivian, his first wife and mother to Rosanne, died from surgery to remove a lung.
In June of 2005, his lakeside home on Caudill Drive in Hendersonville, Tennessee, went up for sale by the Cash estate. The listing agent was Cash's younger brother Tommy.
One of Johnny Cash's final collaborations with producer Rick Rubin, entitled American V: A Hundred Highways, was released posthumously on July 4, 2006. The vocal parts of the track were recorded before Cash's death, but the instruments were not recorded until about 2005.
Legacy
From his early days as a pioneer of rockabilly and rock and roll in the 1950s, to his decades as an international representative of country music, to his resurgence to fame as both a living legend and an alternative country icon in the 1990s, Cash has influenced countless artists and left a body of work matched only by the greatest artists of his time. Upon his death, Cash was revered by many of the greatest popular musicians of his time. According to the (extensive) liner notes for Unearthed:
Cash nurtured and defended artists on the fringes of what was acceptable in country music, even while serving as the country music establishment's most visible symbol.
In total, he wrote over a thousand songs and released dozens of albums, a box set, titled Unearthed, was issued posthumously. It included four CDs of unreleased material recorded with Rubin, as well as a "Best of Cash on American" retrospective CD. The Johnny Cash Memorial Fund was founded and contributions can be made here.
In tribute of Cash's passing, country music superstar Gary Allan included the song Nickajack Cave (Johnny Cash's Redemption) on his 2005 album entitled Tough All Over. The song chronicles Cash hitting rock bottom, and subsequently resurrecting his life and career.
For a period of time, there was a museum called the "House of Cash", but it is no longer in operation. Highway 31E, Hendersonville's Main Street, is known as "Johnny Cash Parkway".
Portrayals
Walk the Line, an Academy Award-winning biopic about Johnny Cash's lifetime starring Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash (for which he won the 2006 Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy/Musical), and Reese Witherspoon as June Carter Cash (for which she won the 2006 Best Actress Oscar), was released in the U.S. on November 18, 2005 to considerable commercial success and great critical acclaim. They both performed their own vocals in the film, and Phoenix learned to play guitar for his role as Johnny Cash. Before their deaths in 2003, Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash selected Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon to play their respective parts.
Ring of Fire, a jukebox musical of the Cash oeuvre, debuted on Broadway on March 12, 2006 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, but closed due to harsh critics and disappointing sales on April 30, 2006.
Since before his death, several artists have begun performing in tribute, highlighted by Johnny Combs - the Man in Black, who is known for his vocal resemblance to the Man in Black.
Lists of accomplishments
Cash received multiple Country Music Awards, Grammys, and other awards, in categories ranging from vocal and spoken performances to album notes and videos. For detailed lists of music awards, see Johnny Cash discography
In a career that spanned almost five decades, Cash was the personification of country music to many people around the world, despite his distaste for the Nashville mainstream. Cash was a musician who was not tied to a single genre. and Jimmie Rodgers share the honor with Cash of being in all three.
Cash stated that his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1980 was his greatest professional achievement.
Cash was the father of musicians Rosanne Cash and John Carter Cash, and stepfather to Carlene Carter. See Johnny Cash family
Discography
In over 50 years, hundreds of Johnny Cash singles and albums have been released. (with June Carter Cash) (2000) New York: Sony.
Cash has also published many music books.
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