Johnny Cash: The Life, Robert Hilburn, Little, Brown and Company, 688 pages
“Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.”
The signature greeting of one of country music’s most iconic performers was hardly needed to introduce him to his audience. The mileage on his face, the dark garb he wore on his body, and the underdog quality on his vinyl more readily identified Johnny Cash. Robert Hilburn’s Johnny Cash: The Life does little to disabuse the fans of their conflation of the public persona with the private person: the man in black was not sunshine off the stage. But if the new biography describes a man that fans intuitively know even before hitting page one, Hilburn gives readers cause to open the book by explaining why Cash was so dark, drugged, and dour. Johnny Cash makes sense of Johnny Cash.
The defining moment of Cash’s life occurred when he was 12. With a sense of foreboding, he pled in vain for his 14-year-old brother to join him fishing. Brother Jack Cash opted instead to go to the local school’s woodshop to earn extra money for the family. While making fence posts, the older boy’s stomach pressed against a table saw. The Cash family’s eldest son, and golden child, died a week later.
His brother’s death altered Cash’s life in several ways. The sadness left a void unfilled by thousands of pills. It reoriented the father-son relationship. The distant family patriarch, who later killed Johnny’s dog after it had killed several chickens, blamed one son for the other’s death. Johnny, even when arriving at the Grand Old Opry or the White House, never knew fatherly approval. And most significantly, the tragedy prompted the mourning brother to enter a church eight days later and accept Jesus Christ as his savior.
Johnny Cash’s life is a Christian story of redemption.
One of the singer’s best and worst attributes was his generosity, which stemmed in part from his faith and in part from the faith others had put in him. Cash’s struggling family got a second chance through a New Deal project awarding farm land—barely arable farm land, as it happened, for those settling in Dyess, Arkansas—to the Depression’s destitute. John’s mother encouraged his talents when his father scoffed at them. Later, an appliance-store owner provided the struggling singer with a job, loans, and sponsorship of Cash’s 15-minute Memphis radio program.
Once the rescued had the ability to rescue, he himself needed a rescuer. Cash was a sucker. Folsom Prison inmate Glen Sherley, whose “Greystone Chapel” found its way into Cash’s set list in his famous concert at the penal institution, served as the poster child for both the country artist’s activism and his gullibility. “To Cash, Sherley, who was four years younger, was living proof of redemption, which is why he spent months lobbying California prison authorities to grant Sherley a parole,” writes Hilburn, noting that the singer “had met the man for only a few minutes.” Helping to win the release of his very own Hurricane Carter, Cash experienced Sherley’s shiftlessness and psychopathic behavior when he brought the untalented musician on tour. Sherley’s story ended with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Some people are better off stuck in Folsom Prison.
A stint might have done the addicted songsmith some good. From his first pill in 1957 to his last breath in 2003, Cash, despite stints of much celebrated sobriety, relied on pharmaceuticals to the point where his wives, kids, and bandmates couldn’t rely on him. Those caught in the emotional turmoil left in his wake at least escaped the physical abuse he inflicted upon machinery, wildlife, and his own person.
He flipped his camper on a California highway in 1964; crashed June Carter’s Cadillac into a Nashville telephone poll in 1965, leaving several teeth at the scene; drove a tractor off a cliff and into a frigid lake in 1967; and incinerated a Mercedes in 1982 after mindlessly spinning his wheels in a ditch ignited the grass beneath. When he hallucinated a Murphy bed in his English hotel room, he tore apart a wooden wall with his bare hands to get to it. He torched 508 acres of the Los Padres National Forest, killing 49 of the area’s 53 condors and nearly killing himself, too. As he defiantly explained in court, “I don’t care about your damn yellow buzzards.”
The signature greeting of one of country music’s most iconic performers was hardly needed to introduce him to his audience. The mileage on his face, the dark garb he wore on his body, and the underdog quality on his vinyl more readily identified Johnny Cash. Robert Hilburn’s Johnny Cash: The Life does little to disabuse the fans of their conflation of the public persona with the private person: the man in black was not sunshine off the stage. But if the new biography describes a man that fans intuitively know even before hitting page one, Hilburn gives readers cause to open the book by explaining why Cash was so dark, drugged, and dour. Johnny Cash makes sense of Johnny Cash.
The defining moment of Cash’s life occurred when he was 12. With a sense of foreboding, he pled in vain for his 14-year-old brother to join him fishing. Brother Jack Cash opted instead to go to the local school’s woodshop to earn extra money for the family. While making fence posts, the older boy’s stomach pressed against a table saw. The Cash family’s eldest son, and golden child, died a week later.
His brother’s death altered Cash’s life in several ways. The sadness left a void unfilled by thousands of pills. It reoriented the father-son relationship. The distant family patriarch, who later killed Johnny’s dog after it had killed several chickens, blamed one son for the other’s death. Johnny, even when arriving at the Grand Old Opry or the White House, never knew fatherly approval. And most significantly, the tragedy prompted the mourning brother to enter a church eight days later and accept Jesus Christ as his savior.
Johnny Cash’s life is a Christian story of redemption.
One of the singer’s best and worst attributes was his generosity, which stemmed in part from his faith and in part from the faith others had put in him. Cash’s struggling family got a second chance through a New Deal project awarding farm land—barely arable farm land, as it happened, for those settling in Dyess, Arkansas—to the Depression’s destitute. John’s mother encouraged his talents when his father scoffed at them. Later, an appliance-store owner provided the struggling singer with a job, loans, and sponsorship of Cash’s 15-minute Memphis radio program.
Once the rescued had the ability to rescue, he himself needed a rescuer. Cash was a sucker. Folsom Prison inmate Glen Sherley, whose “Greystone Chapel” found its way into Cash’s set list in his famous concert at the penal institution, served as the poster child for both the country artist’s activism and his gullibility. “To Cash, Sherley, who was four years younger, was living proof of redemption, which is why he spent months lobbying California prison authorities to grant Sherley a parole,” writes Hilburn, noting that the singer “had met the man for only a few minutes.” Helping to win the release of his very own Hurricane Carter, Cash experienced Sherley’s shiftlessness and psychopathic behavior when he brought the untalented musician on tour. Sherley’s story ended with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Some people are better off stuck in Folsom Prison.
A stint might have done the addicted songsmith some good. From his first pill in 1957 to his last breath in 2003, Cash, despite stints of much celebrated sobriety, relied on pharmaceuticals to the point where his wives, kids, and bandmates couldn’t rely on him. Those caught in the emotional turmoil left in his wake at least escaped the physical abuse he inflicted upon machinery, wildlife, and his own person.
He flipped his camper on a California highway in 1964; crashed June Carter’s Cadillac into a Nashville telephone poll in 1965, leaving several teeth at the scene; drove a tractor off a cliff and into a frigid lake in 1967; and incinerated a Mercedes in 1982 after mindlessly spinning his wheels in a ditch ignited the grass beneath. When he hallucinated a Murphy bed in his English hotel room, he tore apart a wooden wall with his bare hands to get to it. He torched 508 acres of the Los Padres National Forest, killing 49 of the area’s 53 condors and nearly killing himself, too. As he defiantly explained in court, “I don’t care about your damn yellow buzzards.”
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