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One gets the distinct impression that when Johnny Cash first lays eyes on St. Peter, he’ll have a guitar slung around his neck and will be looking for a microphone. The Man in Black never seemed satisfied with any kind of retirement plan—and we are all the ben- eficiaries of his work ethic. “So many times, when there would be something I’d have to do that I didn’t have my heart in, I’d say, ‘All I ever wanted to do was play my guitar and sing a simple song,’” Cash said. “And that’s still all I want to do.”^1
His 2002 release, The Man Comes Around , embodied the jagged and prophetic sound that has marked his career—and testified to the fact that, at age seventy, he still had more grit and bang than all the newfangled pop stars combined. One of the surprising hits on the album was Cash’s rendition of “Hurt” written by dark and brooding Trent Reznor of the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails. I hurt myself today/ To see if I still feel/ I focus on the pain/ The only thing that’s real , Cash sang. The needle tears a hole/ The old familiar sting/ Try to kill it all away/ But I remember everything —a poignant reminder of his dark years in the 1960s. “I think ‘Hurt’ is the best anti-drug song I ever heard,” Cash said. “It’s a song about a man’s pain and what we’re capable of doing to ourselves and the
JOHNNY CASH
MAN IN BLACK
By Steve Beard
possibility that we don’t have to do that anymore. I could relate to that from the very beginning.”^2 He said, “I would have written something like that in the ’60s, if I had been that good.”^3
When the video for the song was released, it became a fascinating crossover hit, being played on MTV, VH-1, and CMT. Director Mark Romanek spliced together one of the most vivid and moving visual portraits of Cash’s illustrative career. Footage was gleaned from his early years, prison concerts, walking through the Holy Land, and hopping a boxcar. Cash was shown sitting behind a piano as well as strumming his guitar in his all-so-familiar black apparel.
Interspersed throughout the video was the backdrop of the famous House of Cash museum in Tennessee—sitting in disrepair, having never fully recuperated from flood damage. The museum served as a metaphor for Cash’s physical condition—weak, willing, and in pain. Cash was seated behind a grand table spread generously with meat and fish. With trembling hand, he poured a glass of red wine over the food as he sang, You could have it all/ My empire of dirt/ I will let you down/ I will make you hurt.
The face of Jesus appears; first, as a portrait, and later footage is taken from Gospel Road , a movie on the life of Christ that Cash pro- duced with his own finances in the 1970s. As the nails are driven in the hands of his Savior, a concert audience cheers with glee.
Never before in the history of music videos has there been such a rattling reminder of youth, aging, and the sometimes agonizing trek through the twilight years. “Mortality is a very unusual topic for this medium,” Romanek said. “But I ascribe most of the power to the Johnny Cash-ness of it all.”^4
Trent Reznor was in the studio with Zach de la Rocha, the former lead singer of Rage Against the Machine, when he received the video. “By the end I was really on the verge of tears,” Reznor said.
“At the end of it, there was just dead silence. There was, like, this moist clearing of our throats and then, ‘Uh, okay, let’s get some coffee.’”^5
Cash’s producer Rick Rubin cried when he saw it for the first time. “I spoke to (U2 singer) Bono and he compared what Johnny is do- ing now to what Elvis Presley did in the 1950s,” Rubin said. “Then, Elvis represented a new youth culture and it shocked and terrified everyone because culture wasn’t about youth before him. Now we live in a youth culture and Johnny Cash is showing the experience of a much older generation. It’s just as radical.”^6
Life, death, drugs, Jesus, pain, joy, disappointment, and success were all wrapped together in that video—the essential elements of Johnny Cash’s career and life’s work. “Life isn’t just for living, it’s for singing about,” he wrote in the liner notes for his 1977 album The Rambler. “Loneliness is real, the pain of loss is real, the fulfill- ment of love is real, the thrill of adventure is real, and to put it in the song lyrics and sing about it—after all, isn’t that what a country singer-writer is supposed to do, write and sing of reality?”
The title track, “The Man Comes Around,” has been widely herald- ed as one of Cash’s greatest songs. Seven years ago in Nottingham, England, he had a dream where he found himself in Buckingham Palace in the presence of Queen Elizabeth, who was sitting on the floor. She looked at him and said, “Johnny Cash, you’re just like a thorn tree in a whirlwind.”
The dream slipped his mind for a few years, but then it began to vividly haunt him. Stumped by the peculiar phrase, he finally ran across the word “whirlwind” in the Bible, leading him on a lengthy hunt through concordances and reference books. He ended up going on an extensive study of Judgment Day and the Book of Revelation.
fact that he writes songs the man on the street—or perhaps more appropriately, the guy hanging out in the alley—can relate to. He loves prisoners, the working man, and the welfare mother—those found on the outskirts. “Those are my heroes: the poor, the down- trodden, the sick, the disenfranchised,” Cash said. “Ain’t no end to street people. There’s no end to the people of the margins. There’s no end to the people who can relate to that.”^12
His songwriting repertoire includes tales of injustice and stories of redemption. His recent three-album collection is titled Love God Murder. What you see is what you get with Cash. He is as cool as Siberian steel. When he sings, you can almost taste the hillbilly moonshine, smell the sulfur of a smoking gun, and feel the drops of blood off the thorny crown of a crucified Christ.
CAN YOU HEAR THE ANGELS SING?
Cash was brought up as a Depression-era Arkansas farm boy. His family scraped at twenty acres of government-granted land, de- pending on soil and sweat to eek out a living. He had Baptist blood racing through his veins and the echoes of Pentecostal fire and brimstone preaching reverberating through his soul. He came from a white trash culture that depended on the white light of religion.
“The first preachers I heard at a Pentecostal church in Dyness, Arkansas, scared me,” Cash wrote in the liner notes of his album Unchained. “The talk about sin and death and eternal hell without redemption, made a mark on me. At four, I’d peep out of the win- dow of our farmhouse at night, and if, in the distance, I saw a grass fire or a forest fire, I knew hell was almost here.” That deep sense of everlasting accountability was etched deep into the soul of Cash.
The young Cash loved music, especially hearing his mother Carrie singing gospel songs in the cotton fields or hearing her strum her
guitar and singing “What Would You Give In Exchange for Your Soul?” by the Monroe Brothers. “The music in the Pentecostal churches in the early years was wonderful. They were more liberal with the musical instruments used,” Cash recalled. “I learned to sit through the scary sermons, just to hear the music; mandolins, fid- dles, bass, banjo, and flattop guitars. Hell might be on the horizon, but the wonderful gospel-spiritual songs carried me above it.”^13
While Jewish boys reach their age of religious responsibility at thirteen for their bar mitzvah, Baptist boys in Cash’s family had to make the decision at twelve. Once the time had come, he already knew that he had reached “the age of moral and spiritual account- ability. So while the congregation sang the invitational hymn, ‘Just As I Am,’ I walked down the aisle of the church and accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.”^14
Only a few months after that experience at the altar, he was con- fronted with the horrible death of his older brother Jack. While he was cutting fence posts, one got tangled up in the swinging saw and jerked him into it, cutting him severely. Jack was rushed to the hospital, but there wasn’t much that could be done. His mother and father were on their knees praying when Jack awoke and asked, “Why is everybody crying over me? Mama, don’t cry over me. Did you see the river?”
“No, I didn’t, son,” Carrie replied.
“Well, I thought I was going toward the fire, but I’m headed in the other direction now, mama. I was going down a river, and there was fire on one side and heaven on the other. I was crying, ‘God, I’m supposed to go to heaven. Don’t you remember? Don’t take me to the fi re.’ All of a sudden I turned, and now, mama, can you hear the angels singing?”
“No, son, I can’t hear it.”
Jack began to squeeze her hand and said, “But mama, you’ve got to hear it.” The tears began to fall from his eyes as he said, “Mama, listen to the angels. I’m going there, mama.” The family at his bed- side listened with stunned attention.
“What a beautiful city,” he said. “And the angels singing. Oh, mama, I wish you could hear the angels singing.” Those were Jack’s last words before he died.^15
“It was like a burden had been lifted from all of us,” remembered Cash, “and it wasn’t just the eight-day burden of fighting for Jack’s life. Rather, we watched him die in such bliss and glory that it was like we were almost happy because of the way we saw him go. We saw in our mind’s eye what he was seeing—a vision of heaven.”^16
That vision would be long lingering in his psyche and spirit. “The memory of Jack’s death, his vision of heaven, the effect his life had on the lives of others, and the image of Christ he projected have been more of an inspiration to me, I suppose, than anything else that has ever come to me through any man,” he would say.^17
WALKIN’ THE LINE
Cash’s launch into fame and notoriety began while he was still in his twenties. He began recording for the now legendary Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee—a creative convergence of pop, country, and rhythm and blues. Sun was a virtual Cape Canaveral of rockabilly stars, launching names such as Elvis Presley (“That’s All Right, Momma”), Carl Perkins (“Blue Suede Shoes”), Jerry Lee Lewis (“Great Balls of Fire”), Roy Orbison (“Ooby Dooby”), and Cash (“I Walk the Line”) into music history.
Cash describes the Sun years as “heady times.” He recalls one par- ticular tour he took with Lewis, Perkins, and Presley (once dubbed
the Million Dollar Quartet). The four of them were in a car when Lewis started preaching to them about how they were all going to hell (he was fresh out of Bible school).
Cash asked him, “Well, what about you?”
Lewis said, “Well I’m going to hell too. We’re all out here doing the devil’s work.”
“I’m not doing the devil’s work,” Cash said. “I’m doing it by the grace of God because it’s what I want to do.”^18 As a matter of fact, one of the reasons Cash left Sun in 1958 was to have the freedom to record gospel songs.
WRESTLING WITH DEMONS
Cash began popping pills as his success began to blossom in 1958. At fi rst, he looked upon them as a divine gift. “I honestly thought it was a blessing—a gift from God.”^19 But it did not take him long to realize that he was deceiving himself and that the drugs were charms of the devil, luring him deeper into retreat mode from unresolved issues in his life. “Drugs were an escape for me, a crutch—a substitute for what I now feel. I was looking for a spiritual high to put myself above my problems,” he recalled, “and I guess I was running from a lot of things. I was running from family, I was running from God, and from everything I knew I should be doing but wasn’t.” The times were tough. “I wound up living from high to high, and the highs got higher—but the lows got lower. So low, sometimes, that I realized I was at the bottom, and that if I didn’t stop I would die.”^20 He almost did—many times.
His first marriage crumbled under the weight of his manic touring schedule and an ever-increasing hunger for amphetamines. When he would come home, Cash argued with his wife, got stoned, and
Legendary country guitarist and songwriter Merle Travis said, “I’m amused by him as a pet coon. I’m impressed with him like a snake behind glass. He’s that unique to me … Even though he’s a kalei- doscope of a thousand different ideas, he’s a straight line. There ain’t no twilight and there ain’t no dusk to Johnny Cash. He’s like a sunny day, or he’s completely dark.”^27
Cash’s reputation as a rebel grew even more legendary when he was banned from the Grand Ole Opry after smashing all the footlights with his mike stand in 1965. He wrapped June Carter’s Cadillac around a utility pole—totaling the car, breaking his nose, and knocking out four of his teeth. Cash also accidentally burned down more than five hundred acres of national forest in California (he was fined $85,000). And then, there was the time when he got busted for smuggling 475 Equanil and 688 Dexedrine tablets across the Mexican border.
Amazingly, the Carters were there for him even in his most self- destructive state, opening their home and hearts to him like he was one of the family. “You know when he’d come to the house, he’d come starved,” Maybelle said. “I’d always see he got something to eat, and if his clothes needed washing, I’d see to that, because John did a lot for me. We had to stick by him. His people weren’t here. He was alone.”^28
Eventually Cash bought a mansion in Hendersonville, Tennessee, just outside Nashville. He would get the pills by the hundreds and hide them around the house in socks, between boards in the floor, and in the ceiling tiles. The Carters would spend hours searching the house for his hidden stashes.
A defi ning moment for Cash occurred in October 1967 when he had been arrested for the seventh time and woke up behind bars in Lafayette, Georgia. Apparently, he had been out pounding on someone’s front door after having wrecked his Jeep in the woods
of north Georgia. The next day, Sheriff Ralph Jones released the singer and said, “Here’s your money—and here’s your dope … Now get out of here and go kill yourself.” Cash was startled. “What? What do you mean , ‘go kill myself?’”
The sheriff told him, “You got the power to do it and you’re trying to, so go ahead and finish the job. You don’t have far to go.” Cash responded, “I don’t want to kill myself.” Unrelenting, Jones said, “Of course you do. You almost did. When we brought you in here I called a doctor and he gave you a shot and put you to sleep. But he said you evidently want to kill yourself, so there’s your dope—go ahead and do it.” The sheriff’s disappointment and indignation stung even more when he said, “My wife and I have every record you have made, and it broke my heart when they brought you in here.”^29
Cash returned home feeling depressed and defeated. “By early Oc- tober 1967, I’d had enough,” he recalled. “I hadn’t slept or eaten in days and there was nothing left of me.”^30 He tried to end his life by crawling into the Nickajack Cave on the Tennessee River in hopes of getting lost and dying. He crawled for several hours until his flashlight went out and he was trapped in the darkness, left to con- template. “I was as far from God as I have ever been. My separation from Him, the deepest and most ravaging of the various kinds of loneliness I’d felt over the years, seemed finally complete. It wasn’t. I thought I’d left Him, but He hadn’t left me. I felt something very powerful start to happen to me, a sensation of utter peace, clarity, and sobriety.”^31
Although he didn’t hear an audible voice, he sensed the presence of God. “There in the Nickajack Cave I became conscious of a very clear, simple idea: I was not in charge of my destiny.” Cash began crawling in the deep darkness of the cave’s belly. “I started crawl- ing in whatever direction suggested itself, feeling ahead with my hands to guard against plunging over some precipice … I began to
see light, and finally I saw the opening of the cave.”^32 Like the biblical character Jonah many thousands of years ago, Cash emerged from the belly of the beast after tumultuous soul- searching. He told June he wanted to kick the pills. Psychiatrist Nat Winston, then Tennessee’s commissioner of mental health, was summoned, and he began to meet with Cash. He told Johnny that he would help save his life if Cash really wanted to save it.
Winston showed up every day for a counseling session at 5: P.M. when he got off of work. “John,” he said, “I’m a doctor, I’m a psychiatrist, and I’ve seen a lot of people in the shape you’re in. And frankly, I don’t think there is much chance for you. I’ve never known of anyone as far gone as you are to really whip it. Only you can do it, and it would be a lot easier if you let God help you.”^33
Despite his best intentions to get clean, Cash continued to stash pills around the house. The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak. Less than a week into detox, Winston came out to the house and asked him how he was doing. Cash said he was doing great. The doctor knew better and said, “No, you’re not. You’re lying.” He asked Cash where the pills were. “You want to flush them,” Win- ston asked, “or do you want me to just leave and you keep taking them?” The pills were flushed. 34
Maybelle, Eck, and June moved into the Hendersonville man- sion. They circled around Cash’s bed and began to pray. He went through withdrawals for weeks, suffering nightmares and tortur- ous stomach cramps. When he was not sleeping, he was tearing up the place looking for drugs. This episode of breaking the addiction took thirty-two days.
“My liberation from drug addiction wasn’t permanent,” he wrote in his 1997 autobiography Cash. “Though I never regressed to spending years at a time on amphetamines, I’ve used mood-alter- ing drugs for periods of varying length at various times since 1967:
amphetamines, sleeping pills, and prescription painkillers.”^35 Looking back on those difficult years in the 1960s, Cash said that the drugs “devastated me physically and emotionally—and spiritu- ally. That last one hurt so much: to put myself in such a low state that I couldn’t communicate with God. There’s no lonelier place to be. I was separated from God, and I wasn’t even trying to call on him. I knew that there was no line of communication. But he came back. And I came back.”^36
The degree of freedom that Johnny has enjoyed is attributed to God, June, Maybelle, and Eck Carter. Nevertheless, Cash admitted, at age 70, that the demons still lurk. “They don’t come knocking on a regular basis. They just kind of hold their distance. I could invite them in: the sex demon, the drug demon. But I don’t. They’re very sinister. You got to watch ’em. They’ll sneak up on you. All of a sudden there’ll be a beautiful little Percodan laying there, and you’ll want it.”^37
RING OF FIRE
Standing by his side in the worst of times was June Carter. When they met for the first time backstage at the Grand Ole Opry in the late 1950s, June was singing backup for Elvis. “I want to meet you. I’m Johnny Cash,” said the tall, lanky Man in Black. She responded by saying, “Well, I ought to know who you are. Elvis can’t even tune his guitar unless he goes, Everybody knows where you go when the sun goes down .” It was a line from one of Cash’s first hits, “Cry, Cry, Cry.” During their tour, Elvis would drag June along as he popped coins in the jukeboxes throughout the South to hear Cash’s songs.
As Cash grew closer to the Carter Family, his heart was thumping for June. On the road, she was the one who had diligently tried so hard to keep him off the drugs. They fell in love while they were
Sides Now,’ Graham Nash sang ‘Marrakesh Express,’ and Shel Silverstein sang ‘A Boy Named Sue’—all in the same night.”^44 Of course, Cash performed “A Boy Named Sue” as a fluke (at the insis- tence of June) for the album Live at San Quentin , released in 1969.
The prison albums were some of Cash’s most successful work. Merle Haggard remembered, “I was in the prison band in San Quentin when I first saw Johnny Cash. I was impressed with his ability to take fi ve thousand convicts and steal the show away from a bunch of strippers. That’s pretty hard to do.”^45 Cash has long been identified with men behind bars ever since he wrote “Folsom Prison Blues” (which he was inspired to write after watching a doc- umentary on the prison while he was in the Air Force in Germany).
“My biggest selling albums have always been the prison albums,” he said. “I think there’s a little bit of criminal in all of us. Every- body’s done something they don’t want anybody to know about. Maybe that’s where it comes from.”^46 He recalled the time when an inmate at the Tennessee State Prison told him, “I believe I can make it another five years. I know somebody out there cares, cares enough to come in here and sing for us.”^47 Cash walked a paradoxi- cal line as he played in prisons and identified with the inmates, while at the same time supporting organizations that assisted families of slain police officers. This same irony was evident in his performing for American troops while simultaneously protesting the Vietnam War.
Cash’s popularity served as a springboard to his own network tele- vision variety program, The Johnny Cash Show (1969-1971), which he used to host vastly diverse musical talents such as Bob Dylan, Louis Armstrong, Pete Seeger, Linda Ronstadt, Mahalia Jackson, and The Who.
Cash ruffl ed feathers when he made a public profession of his Christian faith on his television show. “It wasn’t something I was
driven to do by an urge to convert anybody or spread the word of the Lord; I did it because people kept asking me where I stood, in interviews and letters to the network, and I thought I ought to make it clear that yes, I was a Christian.” Cash sang gospel songs on the show because they were an indispensable part of who he was. While he was introducing one of his gospel songs, he said, “I am a Christian.” This simple statement brought a rebuke from his ABC producer, telling him that he should not be talking about God and Jesus on network television.
Cash told him, “You’re producing the wrong man here, because gospel music—and the word ‘Gospel’ means ‘the good news about Jesus Christ’—is part of what I am and part of what I do. I don’t cram anything down people’s throats, but neither do I make any apologies for it, and in a song introduction, I have to tell it like it is.” He made it clear that he was not going to back down, and if they didn’t like it, they could always edit it out. “They never did edit me that way,” he recalled, “and I never made any big fuss with them about it after that; I just went on doing what I was doing.”^48
Cash has always loved and taken gospel music very seriously. “I don’t preach to people. I don’t ever push it on anybody, and I wouldn’t sing a gospel song on any show if I didn’t think the peo- ple would enjoy it,” he said. “They seem to enjoy those as much or more than anything else. It’s not that I’m proselytizing. I’m not out there tryin’ to convince people, just to spread a little good news.”^49
Cash has always allowed faith to play as big a part in his music as it plays in his own personal life—no more, no less. In 1971, Cash released The Holy Land , an album inspired by a pilgrimage to Is- rael. Two years later, he produced The Gospel Road , an album and motion picture that he produced in the Holy Land based on the life of Jesus. The film was inspired by a dream that his wife had in the late 1960s of Cash standing on a mountaintop in the Holy Land talking about Jesus. He was also inspired by a conversation he had
with Billy Graham a few years later, during which the evangelist complained that young Americans were forsaking church atten- dance because they couldn’t relate to the music. Graham said that the latest thing that young people were hearing those days was songs such as “Bringing in the Sheaves” and “How Great Thou Art”—not exactly the kind of tunes that inspired the younger gen- eration.
The movie was released through the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. “I’m not looking to make money on this,” Cash told the New York Times regarding the movie. “This is my expression of faith.”^50
Cash has also had a lifelong intellectual curiosity with ancient history, culture, and religion. He read Lloyd C. Douglas’ The Robe , a fictional account about a Roman solider who won Christ’s robe after his crucifixion, as well as T.B. Costain’s The Silver Chalice , about a young man who is asked to create a silver chalice with the likeness of Jesus. Both of these books, though fictional, fed into Cash’s interest to the apostolic time period.
Back when he lived with the Carters before he married June, John- ny and Eck used to read writings by Flavius Josephus, the prolific Jewish historian (A.D. 37-101). They also worked through texts by Pliny the Elder (died A.D. 79), a Roman nobleman and historian, and Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), the British author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. “We spent hours and hours talking about those books,” Cash said. “On Sundays, we’d sit and talk about the Bible. I never asked him why he never went to church, and he never asked me. That was our church, right there— those books, those walls, those conversations.”^51
In 1986, Cash wrote Man in White , a novel about the conversion of the Apostle Paul, using his extensive research of the history and culture of the New Testament era. He was annoyed when novelist
Barry Hannah called Man in White a “highly literary effort” in Spin magazine and also said, “off the top I’d guess Cash didn’t write it at all.”^52
Cash had worked hard to integrate his faith with his talents, but at the very core, he really just wanted to be in righteous stand- ing with “The Man upstairs.” Cash said there are three different kinds of believers. “There’s preaching Christians, church-playing Christians, and there’s practicing Christians—and I’m trying very hard to be a practicing Christian,” he said. “If you take the words of Jesus literally and apply them to your everyday life, you discover that the greatest fulfillment you’ll ever find really does lie in giving. And that’s why I do things like prison concerts. Compared to that, projects like the television series I did, for example, have very little meaning for me.”^53
Long before the slogan WWJD became a popular bracelet, the question of “what would Jesus do?” was the theme of a book called In His Steps , written in 1896 by Charles M. Sheldon. Cash read the book in the 1970s, and it had an effect on the kinds of questions he had to ask himself. In a 1979 interview, Cash described what hap- pens when a congregation tried to respond to the book’s message: “They started putting their Christianity into action,” he observed. “Stopped separating themselves in their beautiful white sepul- cher of a church from the poor people, the hungry people in the slums and the ghettos.” This is the vision of Christianity that Cash relished, and it is the one that caused him frustration when he did not see it fulfilled. “Like I say, the churches are full, but the slums and the ghettos are still full, and for the most part, the churches and the needy haven’t quite gotten together yet,” he believed. “And until more people in the Church realize the real needs of the people, and go out rather than going in ... I mean, to go into church is great, but to go out and put it all into action, that’s where it’s all at. And I haven’t seen a lot of action.”^54
tic crusades—never allowing himself to be too easily pigeonholed by the holy or the heathen.
“Johnny Cash doesn’t sing to the damned, he sings with the damned, and sometimes you feel he might prefer their company,” wrote Bono on the liner notes of Cash’s God collection. “Johnny Cash is a righteous dude, and he keeps righteous company with June Carter Cash and the Carter Family, but it’s the ‘outlaw’ in him we love … the ‘thief’ who would break and enter your heart, and leave you with a nagging question, ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’”
Cash is destined to remain a spiritual enigma who fears only two things in life: God and drugs. He is one part outlaw and one part Old Testament prophet who sings about murder and Judgment Day on the same album. “I believe what I say, but that don’t necessar- ily make me right,” he said. “There’s nothing hypocritical about it. There is a spiritual side to me that goes real deep, but I confess right up front that I’m the biggest sinner of them all.”^61
His momma used to tell him, “God has his hand on you. Never ignore the gift.” Thank the Lord he didn’t.
- Anthony DeCurtis, “Johnny Cash Won’t Back Down,” Rolling Stone , October 26, 2000.
- Quoted on JohnnyCashMusic.com.
- Brian Mansfield, “Johnny Cash Puts a ‘Hurt’ on Video,” USA Today , January 31, 2003.
- Mark Binelli, “Johnny Cash Makes ‘em Hurt,” Rolling Stone , February, 20 2003.
- Ibid.
- “‘Man in Black’ at age 70 is new MTV star,” Associated Press, February 17, 2003.
- Luke Torn, “Still Keeping His Eyes Wide Open,” Wall Street Journal , November 15, 2002.
- Andrew Dansby, “Cash Comes Around this Fall,” Rolling Stone , May 31, 2002.
- Jason Fine, “A Day In the Life of Johnny Cash,” Rolling Stone , December 12, 2002.
- Billboard , March 30, 2002
- Bono, God, Columbia/American/Legacy, liner notes.
- Bill Friskics-Warren, “The Man in Black and White and Every Shade in Between,” No Depres sion , November-December 2002.
- Johnny Cash, Unchained, (American Recordings), liner notes.
- Ibid.
- Johnny Cash, Man in Black, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan 1975), 47-48.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Bill Friskics-Warren, “The Man in Black and White and Every Shade in Between,” No Depres sion , November-December 2002.
- Interview with CNN’s Larry King Live , November 26, 2002.
- Larry Linderman, “Penthouse Interview: Johnny Cash,” Penthouse , August 1975.
- Peter McCabe and Jack Killion, “Interview with Johnny Cash,” Country Music , May 1973.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Mark Zwonitzer with Charles Hirshberg, Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? The Carter Fam ily and Their Legacy in American Music, (New York: Simon & Schuster 2002), 358.
- Anthony DeCurtis, “Johnny Cash Won’t Back Down,” Rolling Stone , October 26, 2000.
- Mark Zwonitzer with Charles Hirshberg, Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? The Carter Fam ily and Their Legacy in American Music, (New York: Simon & Schuster 2002), 345.
- Ibid.
- Ibid. As well as Larry Linderman, “Penthouse Interview: Johnny Cash,” Penthouse , August
- Johnny Cash with Patrick Carr, Cash , (New York: Harper/San Francisco, 1997), 170-171.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Interview with CNN’s Larry King Live , November 26, 2002.
- Johnny Cash with Patrick Carr, Cash , (New York: Harper/San Francisco, 1997), 174.
- Anthony DeCurtis, “Johnny Cash Won’t Back Down,” Rolling Stone , October 26, 2000.
- Jason Fine, “A Day In the Life of Johnny Cash,” Rolling Stone , December 12, 2002.
- Mark Zwonitzer with Charles Hirshberg, Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? The Carter Fam ily and Their Legacy in American Music, (New York: Simon & Schuster 2002), 358.
- Anthony DeCurtis, “Johnny Cash Won’t Back Down,” Rolling Stone , October 26, 2000.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Dorothy Gallagher, “Johnny Cash: ‘I’m Growing, I’m Changing, I’m Becoming,’” Redbook , August 1971.
- Anthony DeCurtis, “Johnny Cash Won’t Back Down,” Rolling Stone , October 26, 2000.
- Mark Zwonitzer with Charles Hirshberg, Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? The Carter Fam ily and Their Legacy in American Music, (New York: Simon & Schuster 2002), 358.
- Merle Haggard, The Essential Johnny Cash , Columbia/Legacy, liner notes.
- Richard Skanse, “The Man in Black Turns Seventy,” Rolling Stone , February 21, 2002.
- Peter McCabe and Jack Killion, “Interview with Johnny Cash,” Country Music , May 1973.
- Johnny Cash with Patrick Carr, Cash, (New York: Harper/San Francisco, 1997), 274-275.
- Bill DeYoung, “Talk Talk: American Music Legend, Johnny Cash,” Goldmine , July 19, 1996.
- George Vescsey, “Cash’s ‘Gospel Road’ Film is Renaissance for Him,” New York Times , December 13, 1973.
- Mark Zwonitzer with Charles Hirshberg, Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? The Carter Fam ily and Their Legacy in American Music (New York: Simon & Schuster 2002) 358.
- Nick Tosches, “Chordless in Gaza: The Second Coming of John R. Cash,” Journal of Country Music , 17, no. 3, 1995.
- Peter McCabe and Jack Killion, “Interview with Johnny Cash,” Country Music , May 1973.
- Patrick Carr, Johnny Cash’s Freedom, Country Music, April 1979.
- Bill Friskics-Warren, “The Man in Black and White and Every Shade in Between,” No Depres sion , November-December 2002.
- Anthony DeCurtis, “Johnny Cash Won’t Back Down,” Rolling Stone , October 26, 2000.
- Bill Friskics-Warren, “The Man in Black and White and Every Shade in Between,” No Depres sion , November-December 2002.
- Anthony DeCurtis, “Johnny Cash Won’t Back Down,” Rolling Stone , October 26, 2000.
- Janice Dunn, “Q&A with Johnny Cash,” Rolling Stone , June 30, 1994.
- Johnny Cash with Patrick Carr, Cash (New York: Harper/San Francisco, 1997) 281.
- Jason Fine, “A Day In the Life of Johnny Cash,” Rolling Stone , December 12, 2002.
JOHNNY CASH
