Johnny Cash

Dyess to Sun

Johnny Cash was born J. R. Cash on 26 February 1932 in Kingsland, Arkansas. In 1935 the family moved to Dyess, a New Deal colony, and in 1944 his brother Jack died after a table-saw accident. Cash joined the US Air Force in 1950 and served until 1954 as a Morse code operator at Landsberg in West Germany, where he formed his first band, the Landsberg Barbarians. There he saw the film Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison, and in 1953 he wrote Folsom Prison Blues.

In 1954 he married Vivian Liberto and moved to Memphis, where he played with the guitarist Luther Perkins and the bassist Marshall Grant. His first Sun recordings came in 1955, among them Hey, Porter and Cry! Cry! Cry!. He cut Folsom Prison Blues at Sun on 30 July 1955, and on 2 April 1956 he recorded I Walk the Line, which reached number one on the country chart. In December 1956 he joined the Million Dollar Quartet jam session at the label. Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar! followed in October 1957, making him the first Sun artist to release an LP. In 1958 he signed with Columbia.

Columbia and the prisons

Ring of Fire, written by June Carter and Merle Kilgore, spent seven weeks at number one on the country chart in 1963 and gave its name to Ring of Fire: The Best of Johnny Cash, his first Gold album. In 1964 he made Bitter Tears, a set of songs about Native Americans, mostly by Peter La Farge. Radio stations rejected it, and Cash took out a full-page Billboard advertisement calling some disc jockeys gutless. In 1965 he was arrested in El Paso with prescription drugs. Its single, The Ballad of Ira Hayes, reached number three on the country chart.

On 13 January 1968 he played two shows at Folsom State Prison in California, and At Folsom Prison became a number one country album. He married June Carter on 1 March 1968. On 24 February 1969 he played San Quentin, where he performed A Boy Named Sue for the first time; At San Quentin went to number one on both the pop and country album charts. His ABC television series, The Johnny Cash Show, ran from June 1969 to March 1971. The single Man in Black arrived in 1971 and explained why he wore black.

Highwaymen and wilderness

The Country Music Hall of Fame took him in 1980, when at 48 he was its youngest living inductee. He recorded for Mercury from 1987 to 1991. In 1985 he joined Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson as the Highwaymen, and in 1986 he made Class of '55 at Sun with Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins. He had a double bypass operation in 1988. In 1992 he entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

American Recordings

In 1994 Rick Rubin produced American Recordings, which put Cash alone with a guitar. It won the 1995 Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. Unchained followed in 1996, made with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and won the 1998 Grammy for Best Country Album. Pitchfork's Kaleb Horton traces it to a February 1993 show in Santa Ana, after which Rubin asked to make an album, and says they had more than thirty songs after three days in Rubin's living room.

American IV: The Man Comes Around came out on 5 November 2002 and held his reading of Trent Reznor's Hurt, whose video shows a frail June Carter Cash. She died on 15 May 2003. Cash died on 12 September 2003 in Nashville, aged 71, of complications from diabetes. He sold more than 90 million records worldwide. The film Walk the Line (2005) told his story, and the Rock Hall's essay calls his tall, black-clad image deeply embedded in the American psyche.