Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain

by Grand Ole Opry

  Bass player Marshall Grant recalled being told by an Opry manager, “Get him out of here, and don’t bring him back.” Johnny later reported that he was told, “We can’t use you on the show anymore, John.”

  That wasn’t the end of his adventures that night. As he recalled in Cash: The Autobiography, Johnny borrowed June’s brand-new Cadillac and, fueled by alcohol as well as pills, sped out into a blinding electrical storm with torrential rain. He hit a utility pole head-on, breaking his nose and teeth on the steering wheel. He was worried about telling June that he’d wrecked her car. He didn’t have to. One of the investigating police officers was Rip Nix, her husband.

  June and Rip divorced in 1966. At the end of his tour that year, Johnny moved back to Nashville, taking an apartment in the suburb of Madison with fellow drug user Waylon Jennings as his roommate. Once a week, June and Maybelle would come over to clean up the “bachelor pad.” Accepting Johnny’s decision to leave her, Vivian filed for divorce in California.

  On the road, June and Marshall Grant struggled to keep Johnny clean and sober. Finally at the end of her rope, June told Johnny that the 1967 tour with him would be her last—this despite the fact that the couple then had their giant hit duet, “Jackson,” and that Helen, Anita, and Maybelle were now also part of the troupe. Desperate to hold on to June, Johnny agreed to quit his habit.

  He’d bought a house on Old Hickory Lake, north of Nashville. In it, with the help of a team headed by June, her parents, and psychiatrist Nat Winston, he went through thirty days of agonizing withdrawal from drugs in the fall of 1967. But throughout the next twenty years, he had many relapses. Johnny was later in rehab at the Betty Ford Clinic three times as well as several times at similar facilities in Texas and Tennessee.

  Vivian’s divorce was finalized in January 1968, and that month the troupe went “behind the walls” to perform and record Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison. A month later, in London, Ontario, Johnny proposed to June onstage. “Let’s go on with the show,” she said. “Say yes!” yelled the crowd. She did. Johnny Cash and June Carter were married on March 1, 1968. Mindful of her two failed marriages, June decided to shelve her own ambitions to live in Johnny’s shadow.

  “I wanted to have a marriage. I wanted to be the best mother I could be. I worked with him, but I had sense enough to walk just a little ways behind him.”

  Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison sold more than three million copies. In 1969 it was followed by the even rowdier Live at San Quentin, which featured the smash hit “A Boy Named Sue.” These career milestones led to the creation of The Johnny Cash Show on the ABC network in 1969–1971. The series cemented its star’s status as an American icon.

  “I think it’s the best show that’s ever been done, for all types of music,” said June. “And he absolutely represented every field.”

  In addition to all the major country stars of the day—Merle Haggard, Charley Pride, Eddy Arnold, and the like—Johnny invited a wide variety of artists from other genres on to the show. As a result, Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Joe Tex, and others received significant national attention during the crucial early days of their careers. Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Eric Clapton, Roy Orbison, and dozens more superstars appeared, as well as the newcomers. And despite the network’s reluctance, Johnny insisted the series be taped at the Ryman Auditorium, the home of the Grand Ole Opry.

  “The network had all these rules,” Johnny reported, “but I had my own. I wanted some real American artists on there, some people with some backbone, some grit. They made a big deal out of [leftist folk singer] Pete Seeger for a while, but they finally said okay. I had Bob Dylan on the first show. We had Neil Diamond, Mahalia Jackson, Creedence Clearwater Revival. The things that I asked for, the network didn’t give a hoot about, as far as their ratings were concerned. But I did it, because I wanted something credible on the show.”

  June missed part of the 1970 season. She gave birth to the couple’s son John Carter Cash that year. Perhaps because of Maybelle’s exposure on the series, The Carter Family was belatedly inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame that year as well.

  Johnny Cash continued to triumph on the country charts throughout the 1970s with “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” “Man in Black,” “One Piece at a Time,” and other successes. Another flurry of hits occurred when he teamed up with Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson in the 1980s as The Highwaymen.

  He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1980 and entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. His late-career “victory lap” that made him hip with young rock fans came about via the strikingly raw, emotional discs American Recordings (1994), Unchained (1996), Solitary Man (2000), and The Man Comes Around (2002).

  Over the years, he continued to visit the Opry stage. In fact, today there is a dressing room at the Ryman dedicated to him.

  When June issued her Grammy-winning comeback CD Press On in 1999, she returned to the Grand Ole Opry to premiere its tunes.

  “I felt so good,” she said. “It was like being back on the Opry. They were that kind to me. I can’t believe how many people care.”

  Said Opry star Emmylou Harris that night, “I live for moments like this.”

  As they entered their senior years, Johnny and June looked back at their amazing life together. As Johnny’s daughter Rosanne observed, they were “soul mates.”

  “John is one of those rare people,” said June. “I’ve seen two or three of these people in my lifetime. Elvis was one of them. But John has always had more—the word might be ‘presence’ or ‘charisma’ or whatever you want to call it—so when he walks into a room, the whole atmosphere in that room changes. They become as big as the room. They become bigger than life.

  “God puts his hand on some people and says, ‘You can be Johnny Cash.’”

  He gave her the credit: “What June did for me was lift me when I was weak, encourage me when I was discouraged, and love me when I felt alone and unlovable. She is the greatest woman I have ever known. Nobody else, except my mother, comes close.

  “The big thing about the music in my life is we shared it. We have a strong marriage. We share the road and the bedroom. We share backstage and onstage. We share the music, the freedom, and the emotion and the joy of it, the pain and the sadness of it.

  “She’s not only a lady that I’ve shared a lot with, she is the person responsible for me still being alive. She came along at a time in my life when I was going to self-destruct. She helped bring me back.”

  June Carter Cash died on May 15, 2003, at age seventy-three. Her husband joined her four months later. During those last months, he sobbed in anguish for her night after night. He picked up the telephone and pretended to talk to her. When his daughter Cindy and his sister Reba took him to see June’s grave, he called to her, “I’m coming, baby, I’m coming.”

  Johnny Cash died on September 12, 2003, at age seventy-one. An all-star tribute concert in his honor took place on November 10, 2003, at the place where he met his soul mate, the Ryman Auditorium.

  2

  The Stringbean Murders

  Even today, it is almost unbearably painful to recall.

  The Grand Ole Opry comedian and banjo player David “Stringbean” Akeman was beloved by millions, thanks to his Opry appearances as well as his droll segments on TV’s wildly popular Hee Haw.

  On November 10, 1973, knowing that many old-time country performers kept their cash at home rather than in banks, two men broke into Stringbean’s house. Finding no money, they turned on the radio to listen to him performing on the Opry that night, drank beer, smoked cigarettes, and waited to rob him in person.

  Stringbean and his wife Estelle lived simply but always had a new Cadillac, paid for in cash. Estelle always drove, since Stringbean had never learned how. Once she’d even chauffeured him on a 15,000-mile tour through thirty-seven states and five Canadian provinces. After packing his costume, his banjo, and the gun he always carried into their
Caddy’s trunk, they left the Ryman Auditorium at 10:40 that night.

  Less than an hour later, both were dead.

  Stringbean, fifty-seven, was a hunter and an excellent shot. When he encountered the intruders, he drew his gun and fired, but was shot. Estelle, who was parking the car, heard the shots and began to run. The murderer chased her down. He fired at her back. She fell to her knees, begged for her life, and screamed before he shot her execution style.

  Around 6:00 the next morning, fellow Opry star Grandpa Jones, who lived nearby, came by to pick up his buddy for a planned hunting expedition.

  “As I drove up the lane, I thought I saw a coat lying about seventy-five yards out in front of the house,” Grandpa recalled in his 1984 autobiography. “When I got closer, I saw it was a person. I stopped the car and went over. It was Estelle; she had been shot in the back and in the head. I felt her, and she was cold.

  “I rushed to their little house and hollered for String. His banjo that he had played the night before was sitting on its side on the little front porch. I opened the screen; the other door was already open. String was lying in front of the fireplace, shot in the chest. . . . This was one of the worst things I have ever witnessed.”

  The heinous slayings gripped the hearts of the Grand Ole Opry cast and shocked the entire city of Nashville.

  “In my travels since String’s death, I’ve been asked thousands of questions about him,” Grandpa wrote. “Each person always tells me how much they miss him. There’s no way I can tell them what it feels like to lose a friend like String.”

  Like many of his generation, David Akeman didn’t just perform country, he was country. Born on June 17, 1916, he grew up in poverty in the hills of Jackson County, Kentucky. That area is known for producing many excellent old-time banjo stylists, and David’s father was one of them. Using a shoebox and thread, little David built his first homemade instrument at age seven. When he was fourteen, he traded two prize chickens he had raised to acquire a real banjo.

  “I used to imitate my Dad’s banjo pickin’ when I was little,” Stringbean recalled. “And then, when I was fourteen, he taught me to play a real banjo. I learned the old-time mountain pickin’ from him, and there’s nothing that can match it.”

  The family was so poor that the boy was often sent into the woods to throw rocks at birds and kill them to be boiled for dinner. The experience of such need and want never left him. Having also lived through the Great Depression as a teenager, he was tight with a dollar throughout his life, always believing his next payday would be his last. Even after his Hee Haw checks had made him more than financially comfortable, he continued to hunt for ginseng in the Tennessee countryside, selling the plants’ roots. He also sold costume jewelry out of a fishing tackle box backstage at the Opry to pick up extra cash.

  His first job performing was on Lexington’s WLAP in 1935–1938, which he landed after winning an amateur contest sponsored by country star Asa Martin. During one broadcast, the star forgot his name, glanced over at the lanky, 6-foot 2-inch youngster, and called him “String Beans.” During another show, the banjo player was pressed into service as a comic and discovered he was a natural at it.

  On paper, it reads like a corny old joke. But Stringbean’s deadpan, laconic delivery made everything sound hilarious—“A drunk man and a lady were arguing. The drunk said, ‘You are the ugliest woman I ever seen.’ The lady said, ‘You are the drunkest man I ever saw.’ The drunk said, ‘Yes, but tomorrow I’ll be sober, and there’ll be no change in you.’”

  Stringbean honed his act as an itinerant radio barn-dance performer, with stays at WBT, in Charlotte, North Carolina (1938–1939), and WBIG, in Greenville, North Carolina (1939–1941). He also worked as a semiprofessional baseball player. At the time, Grand Ole Opry star Bill Monroe promoted his shows with his Blue Grass Boys band via sandlot games in the various towns they played. He spotted Stringbean, who was a pitcher, and recruited him for his team. Only later did the bandleader realize that Stringbean played banjo.

  And so, as a member of the Blue Grass Boys, Stringbean came to the Grand Ole Opry in 1942. While in the group, he played on such classic recordings as “Footprints in the Snow,” “True Life Blues,” “Goodbye Old Pal,” and “Kentucky Waltz.”

  Cousin Wilbur (Wesbrooks) was the bass player in the Blue Grass Boys when Stringbean was a member. The two worked up “double comedy” routines to add variety to the band’s shows. One bit revolved around the two men being competitive farmers. The punch line was that Stringbean’s crops were better because they were grown in the town where the band was playing that night.

  “And he could never remember the name of the town where we were,” recalled Cousin Wilbur. “We’d get the audience to laughing, and he’d ask me out of the corner of his mouth, ‘What’s the name of this town?’ I’d tell him. . . . So we hit a town in Arkansas, and I really fixed Stringbean up that night. We like to tore that audience to pieces! The name of the town was Rector, Arkansas. And Stringbean says, ‘What’s the name of this town?’ out of the corner of his mouth. So I told him it was Rectum, Arkansas.

  “That’s what Stringbean up and said, ‘Rectum, Arkansas. Right here, folks, in Rectum.’ And he like to wrecked the audience. They must have laughed for fifteen minutes. And I got so tickled that Stringbean got broke up, and he was not supposed to laugh. . . . I looked backstage, and there was Bill Monroe and Honey Wiles—Honey was a great big fat guy—and they were backstage . . . lying on the ground just holding their stomachs—dying laughing. I’ll tell you right now, we really tore that audience apart, and all I had to do the rest of the show was just ask Stringbean, ‘What did you say the name of the town was where your farm was?’

  “He would play the deadpan part, and I would play the kind of smart alecky part, you know. We worked together for two years. And he was a fine feller. And we never had a cross word the whole time.”

  As a bandleader, Bill Monroe was a notoriously strict taskmaster, a contrast to the laid-back, lackadaisical Stringbean. In late 1945, String decided to form a duo act with fellow Opry singer and humorist Lew Childre, “The Boy from Alabam.” His replacement in the Blue Grass Boys was Earl Scruggs, the man whose revolutionary banjo playing paved the way for the creation of the style we now know as bluegrass music.

  By this time, Stringbean’s costume consisted of an extra-long nightshirt, pants that buckled at his knees, and a small gray felt hat. He topped it all off with a molasses-mouth delivery and a hangdog facial expression. With his permanently bewildered visage and Chaplinesque demeanor, people smiled at the very sight of him. “The Boy from Alabam” and “Stringbean, the Kentucky Wonder,” as he was billed, worked together for three years, after which Stringbean became a solo entertainer on the Grand Ole Opry. He appeared on Red Foley’s NBC-broadcast portion of the show for several years.

  “A man who plays the five-string banjo has got it made,” he would drawl to delighted Opry audiences. “It never interferes with any of the pleasures of his life.”

  Veteran Opry star Uncle Dave Macon took Stringbean under his wing, teaching him banjo tunes and gags. At his death in 1952, the old man willed the younger performer one of his banjos. String played it on his Uncle Dave Macon tribute album of 1963.

  “Uncle Dave was the greatest entertainer I’ve ever known,” Stringbean said. “He would play to an audience forty-five minutes and then have to go back for seven or eight encores. It takes a hoss to do that.”

  When Grandpa Jones and his wife Ramona arrived at the Opry in 1946, Stringbean and Estelle became their closest friends. The couples bought a 143-acre farm together with two houses near Ridgetop, Tennessee, at the northern edge of Davidson County. By choice, Stringbean and Estelle lived in the smaller house, a three-room red cottage heated by a fireplace. All four of them loved to hunt and fish, and Grandpa recalled that Stringbean could imitate a quail’s whistle so perfectly that any nearby birds would answer him. Offstage, Stringbean was a man of few words who cherished his solit
ude in the countryside.

  “Stringbean really only liked two kinds of people,” Ramona Jones remembered, “real country people from the Opry, and other sportsmen, hunters and fishermen.”

  “Anyplace you’d see Grandpa, you’d see String,” recalled Hee Haw producer Sam Lovullo. “They played banjo duets on the show, and whenever String was scheduled to be on, he’d come into my office with a pipe sticking out of his mouth and say, ‘Hey, boss, I got a letter from home . . .’ which I always found hilarious.

  “One day I said, ‘String, tell you what. You don’t need any makeup, just be in the studio at three. I’ll put the gang there, you read one of those letters and we’ll see how it works.’ That’s how he became a regular on Hee Haw [in 1969].”

  This recurring bit began with Stringbean announcing that he had a letter “close to my heart, my heart, my heart,” touching first his chest pocket, then various other pockets until he found it in his rear-end pocket. Another of his features on the show had him as a sad-sack “scarecrow” delivering his self-deprecating one-liners in a cornfield with a puppet crow.

  Despite his Opry popularity, Stringbean didn’t begin recording solo albums until the 1960s. His most popular tunes included “Chewing Gum,” “I Wonder Where Wanda Went,” “Run, Rabbit, Run,” “I’m the Man That Rode the Mule Around the World,” “Hot Corn, Cold Corn,” and “Y’all Come.”

  At the time of his death, he was at the peak of his popularity. His appearances on the highly rated CBS TV series and folk musicians’ newfound regard for his old-time playing style and repertoire had led to bookings on college campuses as well as at county fairs.

  “Kids are goin’ for it now,” the star observed to an interviewer backstage at his last Opry broadcast. “They know more about the old tunes than I do, and I’ve been playin’ ’em all my life. They dig up the history of them old songs—where they came from—the old folk songs. I don’t know where they get it all.”