The man who walked the line

He was born J. R. Cash — just the initials, nothing more — on February 26, 1932, in Kingsland, Arkansas, the fourth of seven children born to Carrie and Ray Cash, poor cotton farmers. The name was a compromise: his mother wanted John, his father wanted Ray, so the birth certificate carried neither. In March 1935, when he was three years old, the family moved to Dyess, Arkansas, a New Deal farming colony built during the Great Depression to give struggling families land they might one day own. From the age of five he worked the cotton fields beside his family, singing as they picked, and the twin soundtracks of his childhood were gospel music and the radio. A flood that swept through Dyess became the song “Five Feet High and Rising”; the Depression-era hardship gave him a lifelong sympathy for the poor and working class that would run through a thousand songs. The defining wound of his childhood came in 1944, when his older brother Jack — the brother he was closest to — was nearly cut in two by an unguarded table saw at work. Jack was fifteen years old. He died of his wounds a week later. Their mother had urged Jack to skip work that day and go fishing with his little brother; Jack insisted on going in, because the family needed the money. Cash carried the guilt for the rest of his life, and spoke often of looking forward to meeting his brother in heaven.

After high school — where he sang on a local Arkansas radio station — Cash enlisted in the United States Air Force on July 7, 1950, just after the Korean War began. Basic training at Lackland Air Force Base and technical training at Brooks Air Force Base, both in San Antonio, Texas, were followed by an assignment that sounds like a spy novel: the 12th Radio Squadron Mobile of the Air Force Security Service at Landsberg, West Germany, where he worked as a Morse code operator intercepting Soviet Army transmissions. He was reportedly among the first Americans to learn of Joseph Stalin’s death, picking the news up out of the air in code. It was in Germany that he bought his first guitar and formed his first band, a ragtag group of airmen called the Landsberg Barbarians. He was honorably discharged on July 3, 1954, as a staff sergeant. One bureaucratic detail changed his name forever: the Air Force did not permit initials as a first name, so J. R. Cash became John R. Cash on his papers. A year later, signing with Sun Records, he would become Johnny Cash.

In 1954 Cash moved to Memphis, Tennessee, selling appliances by day and studying to be a radio announcer, and playing at night with guitarist Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant — two mechanics his older brother Roy had introduced him to, who became the Tennessee Two. He worked up the courage to audition at Sun Records, where Sam Phillips first heard him sing mostly gospel songs and sent him away to come back with something he could sell. Cash returned with originals in a stark new rockabilly style, and in 1955 he cut his first Sun recordings, “Hey Porter” and “Cry! Cry! Cry!”, released that June to a warm reception on the country charts. “Folsom Prison Blues” made the country top five; then “I Walk the Line” — written as a pledge of devotion to his young wife Vivian — went to number one on the country chart and crossed into the pop top twenty. In 1957 he became the first Sun artist to release a long-playing album. But he felt constrained by the small label’s three-percent royalty, and with Elvis gone and Phillips’s attention drifting toward Jerry Lee Lewis, Cash left in 1958 for a lucrative contract with Columbia Records, where “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town” became one of his first big hits.

The 1960s made him a legend and nearly killed him. As his fame grew he sank into amphetamines and barbiturates, using stimulants to survive a brutal touring schedule and sedatives to come down from it. Touring with the Carter Family, he fell ever deeper into an impossible love for June Carter — both of them married to other people — and out of that fire came “Ring of Fire,” written by June with Merle Kilgore, its mariachi horns arriving, Cash always insisted, in a dream. It spent seven weeks at number one on the country chart in 1963. The arrests piled up — seven jail stays, all for misdemeanors, never more than a night each — including an October 1965 bust in El Paso, Texas, where a narcotics squad found hundreds of pills hidden inside his guitar case. The turning point came in 1967 in LaFayette, Georgia, where a sheriff’s long talk about wasted potential helped him decide to get clean; June, Maybelle and Ezra Carter moved into his house for a month to help him through it. On February 22, 1968, he proposed to June onstage at a concert in London, Ontario. They married a week later, on March 1, in Franklin, Kentucky. Earlier that year, on January 13, 1968, he had walked into Folsom Prison with his band and recorded the live album that reignited his career — At Folsom Prison went to number one on the country album chart. At San Quentin followed in 1969, with “A Boy Named Sue” reaching number one on the country chart and number two on the pop chart, and from June 1969 to March 1971 he hosted his own ABC television show from the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. In 1969 he sold 6.5 million albums — more than the Beatles.

The 1970s brought the “Man in Black” image into full focus — the black suits, and his explanation that he wore black for the poor and hungry, for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime, for those betrayed by age or drugs — but the hits began to thin. He acted on television, published his autobiography Man in Black in 1975, and in the mid-1980s toured and recorded as one of the Highwaymen alongside Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson. After Columbia dropped him he spent an unsuccessful stretch with Mercury Records from 1987 to 1991, and by the early 1990s the industry had written him off. Then producer Rick Rubin — famous for rap and hard rock — offered him a contract with American Recordings, and in 1994 Cash recorded the album American Recordings in his own living room, accompanied only by his Martin Dreadnought guitar. It won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album and began the most remarkable comeback of his life: new young audiences, a triumphant appearance at Glastonbury, and Unchained (1996), which won the Best Country Album Grammy in 1998. American IV: The Man Comes Around arrived in 2002, carrying his devastating cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt.” Then the losses came. June died on May 15, 2003, at seventy-three, after complications from heart surgery. Cash played his final concert on July 5, 2003, at the Carter Family Fold in Virginia — and kept recording until August 21. On September 12, 2003, less than four months after June, he died in a Nashville hospital of complications from diabetes. He was seventy-one.

The numbers only begin to tell it: thirteen Grammy Awards, induction into the Country Music, Rock and Roll and Gospel Music Halls of Fame, more than ninety million records sold, over a thousand songs written, and the 2005 biopic Walk the Line that introduced him to a new century. Bob Dylan called him “the North Star; you could guide your ship by him.” But the truer measure is the voice itself — that deep, calm bass-baritone, unhurried and certain, singing about sorrow, moral tribulation and redemption as if he had lived every word, because he had. This collection follows ten records from 1955 to 2002: the Sun singles that invented the boom-chicka-boom, the prison albums, the duets with June, the outlaw summit of the Highwaymen, and the farewell recorded by a dying man in his living room. Listen for the arc — a young man promising to walk the line, an old man wondering what he had become. It is the same voice. That is the miracle of it.

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