"Hello, I'm Johnny Cash."
Other folks might need announcers and a big build up and a light show. Johnny Cash just needed to say hello and introduce himself.
By the time Johnny Cash died last week in Nashville he'd been a whole lot of things, but he'd been Johnny Cash through all of them. His friend, Kris Kristofferson once wrote a song about him that's been quoted a lot, "he's a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction," and that's only partly right.
For one thing, Johnny Cash didn't walk, he strode. Everything he did was big, good and bad. He had style and charisma, not the electric charisma of Elvis, but a solid, dogged, unmovable kind of charisma. Johnny Cash was a whole lot of things wrapped up together. Here's some more of Kristofferson's song.
"He's a poet, he's a picker, he's a prophet, he's a pusher
He's a pilgrim and a preacher and a problem when he's stoned."
Johnny Cash was all of that twined together. He was a man who understood and loved the Gospel in Gospel music, and a man who almost destroyed himself and his God-given talent with drugs and alcohol.
He was born in 1932 in Kingsland, Arkansas, but his family soon moved to Dyess, a cooperative colony for Depression?era farmers that was sponsored by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. Effectively, the Cashes were sharecroppers for the government.
Both the work and the times were hard. Cash's father worked at whatever would bring in money, including cutting timber. One day, Johnny watched his older brother, Jack, die after a table saw accident. That and the hard work and the poverty may have lent that dark tone to everything Johnny Cash did, he certainly never forgot them.
When he got out of high school, the first thing Johnny did was what every young person from Dyess did. He left. First he went to Detroit where he worked at Fisher Body for less than a month. Then he hitchhiked back home and joined the Air Force.
He learned guitar in Air Force and formed a band that played around the base. When he was discharged, in 1954, he went home, married a girl he'd met during basic training and headed to Memphis to make his mark. It didn't take long.
His first single, "Hey, Porter," was impressive, but never made the charts. The next release, "Cry, Cry, Cry," in 1955, did better, peaking at number 14 on the Billboard Chart. In 1956, "I Walk the Line," went to number one and stayed on the chart for 43 weeks. Johnny Cash was on his way.
The next years were a time of great professional success and a lot of that "walking contradiction." Cash got to play at the Grand Ole Opry in 1956, then he got kicked out after a scene where he broke out the footlights at Ryman Auditorium with a microphone stand.
He drank too much. He was doing more than 200 concert dates a year and he started taking amphetamines to stay up. Then he had to start taking tranquilizers to come down. As Cash put it, "I started taking the pills and soon the pills started taking me."
The hits kept coming even though his marriage and personal life were falling apart. The tour schedule went up to 300 shows a year. So did the drug use, and the trashing of hotel rooms. He was once fined almost $100,000 for starting a forest fire while he was high.
Then came the cave. It was 1967 and Cash's professional life was at a high point, but his personal life was a wreck. Exactly what happened depends on which story you choose, but the basic facts are pretty straightforward.
Johnny Cash went into a deep cavern near his home in Tennessee. He may have planned to die there, but he didn't. When he came out the first thing he did was kick his heroin habit. June Carter helped him through that time. A year later they were married.
Without June Carter, Johnny Cash might have ended up like another Sun Studios alumnus, Elvis Presley. Elvis died of an overdose in a bathroom, in a house filled up with his entourage. Elvis may have had lots of folks who went with him everywhere and even helped him get his drugs, but Johnny Cash had June Carter.
It was a great match. June Carter gave Cash a lot. She understood the life he led, because she'd grown up in it as a member of country music's legendary Carter Family. And she had a deep faith in God that anchored her and anchored him.
In 1969, ABC offered Johnny Cash a television show. That show was a marvel. There was good country music to be sure, and there were guests like Merle Haggard, who'd once sat in the front row at one of Cash's prison concerts. But there were also guests like Bob Dylan, and Neil Young and Louis Armstrong.
Johnny Cash became the youngest living inductee to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1980, but by then the country music stations weren't that interested in playing his songs. Country music had moved to a newer, slicker era.
Johnny Cash could do almost anything musically except slick. It stuck in his throat. He didn't fit well in the world of over-produced sort-of-pop-kinda-country-sorta-rock that country music has sort of turned into. So he stayed with what he liked and what he thought was right.
In 1985 he got together with old friends, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson to form the Highwaymen. They released three albums and scored one number 1 hit.
In the 1990s Cash and rock and rap producer Rick Rubin found each other. The result was a series of albums on Rubin's American label. The albums are an amazing collection of covers and collaborations that venture into musical territory where you would think an old country and rock star would fear to tread.
In 2003 Cash received nominations for six MTV Video Music Awards. They were for the video of his cover of the Nine Inch Nails song, "Hurt." The video only received one award, for Best Cinematography, but Cash received accolades from just about everyone including Justin Timberlake and Snoop Doggy Dogg. It's not the kind of praise a 71-year-old country star is supposed to get.
When you look back at Johnny Cash's life and career, you see that he did all kinds of things that he wasn't supposed to do. He wasn't supposed to learn guitar in the service, get discharged and have a number one hit two years later, but he did.
He wasn't supposed to speak out on issues that made people uncomfortable and still succeed, but he did. He wasn't supposed to squander so many great opportunities, but he did. And he wasn't supposed to recover and keep developing, but he did that, too.
Johnny Cash may have looked like a walking contradiction, but that was from the outside. On the inside he was all of a piece, a single bolt of cloth with an amazing pattern. Audiences stretched across almost half a century responded to his genuineness, and his care for people in pain and stuck in the hard life.
His music may have disappeared from the airways for a while, but it never disappeared from the tape decks and record players of the people who loved it and him. It may disappear from the airways again, after a brief flurry of "death notice" play, but it will still be on those tape decks, and now on CD mixes and MP3 players because so many of us know that we're in for something good and true when a performance begins with, "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash."
