by Steve Turner
Cash's utter faithfulness to this girl he barely knew astonished most of his colleagues who thought that military service was synonymous with excess and wild oats. Some of them felt that his devotion to Vivian contributed to his feeling of restlessness. "He was in love," says Rich Collins. "He saw faithfulness to her as a big factor in his life. If you put together his music, his love of socializing in small groups back at the barracks rather than drinking and picking up girls, and his loyalty to this woman, you can see why he probably didn't see the military as opportunity-making as a lot of us did. He was marking time until he could come back home and marry."
Cash flew back to America from Germany and went to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, where he received his honorable discharge on July 3, 1954. This was the same day that a guitarist in Memphis, Scotty Moore, called a hopeful young singer, Elvis Aaron Presley, and invited him to audition for Sam Phillips at Sun Records. Musical revolution was in the air.
4
Walking the Line
ACCORDING TO HIS BIOGRAPHER Christopher Wren, after his discharge Cash took an American Airlines flight back to Memphis, where he was met by his family and Vivian Liberto. According to Marshall Grant, who was working at the time as a mechanic at Automobile Sales at 309 Union, Cash arrived home by Greyhound bus and was met only by his brother Roy. Marshall, who worked alongside Roy, can remember that the bus was delayed by two hours.
"When they came back I looked up and saw them coming through this big overhead door," says Marshall. "I had a car up on a lift and was working on the back of it. They walked straight to me down the aisle and Roy said, 'Marshall, this is my brother J. R. that I told you about. J. R., this is Marshall Grant.' He said, 'Hi,' we shook hands and his next words were, I hear you do a little pickin'?' I said, 'Very little.' He sort of laughed and said, 'Me too!'"
Marshall found Cash very easy to talk to and attributed this to the fact that he was so much like Roy, who he'd now known for three years. He also knew Ray and Carrie Cash and had become a close family friend. After talking for a bit, Marshall took him across the shop to meet another mechanic who enjoyed locker-room pickin'—Luther Perkins, a poker-faced preacher's kid from Mississippi. The three men spoke for about fifteen minutes, promising to get together soon with their guitars.
Whichever way he traveled back from New Jersey, Cash undisputedly met Marshall and Luther when he got to Memphis. They delayed the pickin' session a few weeks though, because Cash was due to marry Vivian on August 7, 1954. Tom Liberto had finally relented and agreed—with a few conditions—to give Cash his daughter's hand. Not only would the couple have to wait at least four weeks before walking down the aisle, but Cash would undergo Catholic instruction to guarantee that any future children would be raised in the Catholic faith. Had Cash not complied, Vivian would have been excommunicated.
That gave Cash four weeks to find a job and a suitable apartment. He wrote to Orville Rigdon, inviting him to be his best man. "I was broke at the time," remembers Rigdon. "I couldn't go." He then tried Ben Perea, but he had already enrolled in a college course and couldn't get the time off. In the end, the role went to his brother Roy.
Roy introduced his brother to a friend in the Memphis Police Department, thinking that Cash's work in the USAF Security Service would qualify him for police work. Cash discussed the possibility but soon realized that law enforcement wasn't his calling. The police officer in turn referred him to George Bates, president of the Home Equipment Company at 2529 Summer Avenue. Cash went to see Bates and was offered a job selling washing machines, refrigerators, and ornamental irons door-to-door.
While Cash knew this job wasn't a calling, it would pay the rent. He didn't have the slick false cheerfulness so often associated with the profession and, even worse, once he realized that a prospective client clearly didn't need or couldn't afford what he was offering, he would politely pack his catalogues and move on. The only good things about the job were that he set his own hours and traveling by car meant he could listen to all the latest record releases on the radio. The profusion of experimental music coming out of Memphis in July 1954 revolutionized twentieth-century popular music. People schooled in white church music, country, and pop were blending their sounds with the blues and gospel, creating a new hybrid called rock-'n'-roll. The day after Cash arrived back in Memphis, Elvis had recorded his first single, "That's All Right (Mama)" in a studio a few yards away from Automobile Sales with Scotty Moore and bass player Bill Black. Three days later it was being played on Dewey Phillips's late-night radio show Red Hot and Blue. Anyone living in Memphis at this time was getting a foretaste of a music style that would very soon sweep the world.
One of Cash's service buddies, Tom Weaver, had worked as an announcer on WMCA, a radio station in Corinth, Mississippi, and suggested Cash look up his former boss, John Bell, when he returned to the States. Because of their technical skills, radio operators often found it easy to get work in electronics, radio, and television. Since Corinth was only eighty miles due east of Memphis, one morning Cash decided to drive over to cold call on Bell, hoping for the offer of a position.
"So one day this big, tall, gangly kid comes in," recalls Bell. "He was very inarticulate, but he wanted me to give him a job as an announcer, maybe as an apprentice. I had to be as kind as I could, but I told him that he'd never make it in this business as an announcer. Back in those days radio was quite straitlaced. It wasn't as relaxed and down-home as it is now, and you had to be able to work controls as you spoke. He talked in a patois. He didn't use good English. I told him that he should go to a school where he could be trained. I suggested that he go to Keegan's in Memphis."
Keegan's School of Broadcasting, at 207 Madison Avenue, offered basic instruction in radio production, complete with a certificate at the end of the course. The curriculum focused on scripting commercials, developing a presence at the microphone, and managing the desk. Students learned how to operate on air in the mock studio. Taking advantage of the GI Bill, Cash signed up for a part-time course, studying two mornings a week for ten months.
Being a radio presenter, especially a disc jockey, was a recognized way of getting into the music industry. It was a small step from playing other people's songs on disc to performing your own. Jim Reeves, for example, started as a news reader on KGRI in Henderson, Texas, then became an announcer on KWKH in Shreveport, Louisiana, before starting his recording career. The best known disc jockeys in Memphis became local celebrities who went on to write newspaper columns, promote concerts, manage artists, and cut records.
"His first priority though was to get married to Vivian Liberto," says Marshall Grant. "And he did it. He didn't have any money so I loaned him fifty dollars and he went off to San Antonio." Cash married Vivian at St. Ann's Catholic Church on August 7,1954, in the midst of a Texas heat wave. She wore traditional white lace, and, with sweat popping off his brow, he stood beside her in his military uniform (he couldn't afford a suit). Her uncle, the priest from New Orleans, officiated Following the reception on the Cascade Terrace of the St. Anthony Hotel, the couple headed back through the Ozarks to Memphis, stopping to spend their honeymoon night at a hotel in Palestine, Texas.
By September 1954 the Cashes had set up house in a small, two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a building on Eastmoreland Avenue. They had a private bathroom but shared the third-floor kitchen with the other tenants. The rent was fifty-five dollars a month. Cash's lingering memory of it was only as "hot and horrible," with no space for musical gatherings. Any guitar pull would either have to be at Luther and Birdie Perkins's home on Nathan Avenue or Marshall and Etta Grant's on Nakomis Avenue.
Though both four years older than Cash, Luther and Marshall shared with him a country upbringing, an enjoyment of music, and a love of practical jokes. Marshall, raised in Flats, North Carolina, grew up picking cotton. Although born in Memphis, Luther had grown up in Como, Mississippi. And like Cash they were both Southern Baptists whose first choice of songs invariably included the gospel
numbers of Ira and Charlie Louvin, the Statesmen Quartet, and the Blackwood Brothers, all of whom coincidentally lived in Memphis.
"When we started playing, most of what we did was gospel," says Marshall. "That's what we all liked. John would sing and I would sing harmony with him. Luther didn't sing very much. Even though John has said that he wrote a song or two in Germany, he didn't bring any of them along with him. The only other stuff we did was some Ernest Tubb and some Hank Snow. In fact, when Roy had told me about his brother, he had said that he sang just like Hank Snow."
The three musicians jelled right from the start, and within weeks they dropped the three-rhythm-guitar line in favor of lead guitar, rhythm, and bass. Thinking ahead about playing on the radio or even making a record, they reasoned that three acoustic guitars all playing rhythm would not impress a producer. They needed more depth and breadth to their sound and elected Luther to play lead on a borrowed electric Fender. They also agreed that Cash should stick with rhythm guitar since he did most of the singing. Marshall bought a secondhand stand-up bass for twenty-five dollars.
This division of labor and their limited playing ability produced a unique group sound. Luther's caution on the lead guitar led him to play slowly, one note at a time. To eliminate the ringing made when playing too loud, he removed the metal plate and would deaden the strings with the palm of his right hand. Cash fed paper through his strings to make his rhythm playing sound like brushes on a snare drum. Marshall, meanwhile, didn't know how to tune a bass fiddle. He asked Gene Steele, a friend who played in a band, to find out from his bass player how to do it. Steele came back from a gig with a crude pencil drawing of a guitar neck and handwritten instructions.
"The bass didn't have frets, so when we had tuned it, we still didn't know the position of the notes," says Marshall. "So I had to ask Luther to give me an A, and I'd go up and down all four strings until I'd found every A note, and where I found them I'd stick a piece of tape. Then I did the same thing for B, C, E, F, and G. My bass was full of tape when we got through and we all just stood there and laughed and laughed!"
"Then, jokingly, I suggested that we play something. Luther said, In what key?' I said, I don't know. Let me look at this thing a minute. E looks pretty good but . . . don't change no chords on me!' So they started a rhythm in E, and I started slapping the strings. So there was Luther with the palm of his hand laying on his strings and John with his old awkward style of guitar playing and me hitting the same notes as Luther. We didn't necessarily like the way we sounded because we wanted to sound like people with records."
Missing documentary evidence and fading fifty-year-old memories make it hard to pin down the precise chronology of what happened next. Everyone agrees that after about four months of these informal picking sessions, they played their first public performance in a Memphis church. Marshall can't remember how the invitation came to them, but Cash once said that neighbors of either Marshall or Luther heard them practicing and asked if they would be willing to play at their church.
Marshall is sure that the church was on the corner of Cooper Street and Young Avenue. In a 1970 interview, he specifically mentioned Galloway United Methodist Church, which was (and still is) at this junction south of Union Avenue. They disagree, however, on the nature of the concert. In his books, Cash claimed that they played as part of a Sunday evening service, but Marshall remembers it as a midweek event, not in the main church itself, and attended only by a few elderly ladies.
Two parishioners, still members of the church, claim to remember the event. Gerry Stewart says they played in the nave of the church and probably drew over seventy people. Allen Caldwell, on the other hand, recalls a basement performance that attracted no more than forty. They agree that it was part of a church fund drive. "I was the one who asked him to come," says Caldwell. "We had a good time. There were a lot of young people in attendance and several adults from the class. I remember that he was kind of bashful in those days. We thanked him for what he'd done and he said, It's nothing. I'm glad to do something for Galloway.'"
Marshall agrees they played in the basement but reckons that the audience had ten old ladies at most. "We set up in a little room that was maybe sixteen feet square. The ladies had the chairs circled about in the back of the room and we set up close to a place where Luther could plug his amplifier in. It took us no more than three our four minutes to set up and then we played everything we knew for them. It lasted for about twenty minutes I guess."
Their next public performance was a fund-raiser held at a Bob's Barbecue on Summer Avenue for Ralph Johnson, a local powerboat racer and friend of Marshall who'd been injured in a collision while racing at Hot Springs, Arkansas. A group of Johnson's racing buddies organized the event to help him pay the hospital bills he couldn't afford.
The band actually got paid for their third public showing. The Hurst Motor Company, situated next to Automobile Sales, gave them fifty dollars to spend a Saturday afternoon cruising Union Avenue on the back of a flatbed truck. "We didn't have a current for Luther, and so both he and John played rhythm while I played bass," says Marshall. "We were on the move all the time. Nobody paid any attention to us. Nobody knew who we were. We laughed about it. But we got paid."
Cash had his mind set on making a record. He had heard of Sun Records on Union Avenue, whose owner, Sam Phillips, had recently been getting a lot of publicity as Elvis Presley's producer. On September 9,1954, he'd even seen Elvis perform on the back of a truck for the grand opening of Katz Drug Store on Lamar Avenue and spoke with him after the show. Elvis invited Cash to the Eagle's Nest, a ballroom on Highway 78, where WHHM D. J. Sleepy-Eyed John promoted rock-'n'-roll nights. That night, Cash later said, he spoke to Scotty Moore, who suggested that he give Sun Records a call.
Either way, by late 1954 Cash had contacted Sam Phillips at the studio and asked for an audition. The stories vary about the way in which he approached Phillips. In one version he phoned Phillips to tell him that he was a gospel singer and was told that Sun had no place for him since they'd always failed with gospel. In another, he got the same response but only after arriving at the studio with Luther and Marshall and playing a gospel selection. In Cash: The Autobiography he goes solo to the first audition, where he played songs by Hank Snow and Jimmie Rodgers along with his own compositions "Belshazar" and "Hey! Porter." In Man in Black, Marshall and Luther play together songs by Hank Snow, Jimmie Rodgers, and Ernest Tubb, as well as Cash's compositions "Belshazar," "Hey! Porter," and "Folsom Prison Blues."
The archives of Sun Records detail two early sessions and, significantly, the first, dated only as "late 1954," features Cash alone. During it he recorded "Wide Open Road," "You're My Baby," "My Treasure," and "Show Me the Green"—the first three songs his own compositions and the last one unattributed. The second session, dated March 22, 1955, features Cash with Luther and Marshall playing "Hey! Porter," "Folsom Prison Blues," "Wide Open Road," and Clarence Snow's "My Two Timin' Woman."
All the accounts agree that Cash, Luther, and Marshall played for Phillips either in late 1954 or early 1955 and that at least part of the session was taped. To boost their sound, they took along with them A. W. "Red" Kernodle, another mechanic from Automobile Sales who sometimes sat in with them on steel guitar. Already in his midthirties and unconfident as a musician, Kernodle panicked and couldn't tune his guitar. "He was shaking all over," remembers Marshall. "He was sitting in a chair with this little guitar on his lap and both he and Luther were plugged into this amplifier. He stood up, laid his guitar down in the chair, and said, I'm going back to work. I can't do nothing but hold you guys up. You might make something, but I'm too nervous.' I told him that he should hang around a bit and get over it, but he wouldn't listen. So he just turned and walked out."
They did manage, though, to impress Phillips. He could see that Cash was someone who would only sing songs that he believed in. He had integrity. "The mere fact that he never sang one song (at the audition) that was written by another person gave
me a clue that this was a man who had a message," Phillips later said. (Though it should be noted that Cash had, in fact, performed songs written by others.) He felt that Cash had chosen the basic musical lineup "so that the fundamentals of his message would ring forth without being inundated with pretty music."
Marshall recalls that the trio's unusual, ragged sound intrigued Phillips. "Thank God we didn't achieve a polished sound before we went to see Sam Phillips because, if we had gone up there and been real professional and had sounded like those people in Nashville, he would have sent us home. We just played the only way we knew how, and he later said that he had never heard anything like it. With the blend of John's voice everything fell into place. It wasn't that we put it there. It just happened."
"Hey! Porter" was the first of Cash's songs that Phillips thought had potential as a single. Although written in Germany, he hadn't rehearsed it with Marshall and Luther, and it required a lot of shaping. The lyrics focused on returning to the South and contained hints of themes that would preoccupy Cash throughout his career: home, trains, movement, America. "We had to work that one up," says Marshall. "You have to remember that we were two mechanics and an appliance salesman at the time and we were not professional musicians. So it took us some time to work this thing up, to get it to a point where we felt it was the way we wanted it to be."
When they recorded it, they seemed unsure whether to sound like Elvis or Hank Williams, and the guitars sound tentative and indistinct. By July 30, 1955, Cash had found his natural bass-baritone voice and the elements of the boom-chicka- boom sound had fallen into place—with Luther's flat-handed muting of the strings adding the "chicka" and Marshall's heavily slapped bass supplying the "boom." When Phillips asked for a flip side, they suggested the 1920s hymn "I Was There When It Happened," but Phillips didn't want gospel tunes tucked away on the backs of his singles. He told them to write a new song—something that would contrast with "Hey! Porter"—a love song or a tearjerker.