In February 1953, two days after turning twenty-one, he bought Viv an engagement ring and mailed it to her.
Still, he continued to wrestle with the issue of her Catholicism. In a letter that May, he said he had read something “very disgusting and disappointing” in a book about “mixed” marriage. “It’s urging Catholics not to marry Protestants and Protestants not to marry Catholics,” he wrote her. “If my life were going to be like this book says, I’d be in misery all my life living with you. I don’t believe it even though it’s a Catholic publication and I know you wouldn’t.”
With that, the issue passed for a while, and Cash’s letters were back to simple “love and kisses.”
Women, religion, and alcohol weren’t the only issues that Cash grappled with at Landsberg. According to a story that circulated among some of his Landsberg cohorts, John and a couple of friends had drunk too much during a weekend in Augsburg, just northwest of Munich, when Cash saw a black airman walking with a white woman. He yelled at the soldier, saying he shouldn’t be going with a white woman. The argument got so heated that a military policeman had to restrain the men, the story went. It shocked his mates, because there were lots of African Americans on the base and John had gotten along well with them, especially C. V. White, an outgoing guy with a love for flashy clothes. It was White’s wardrobe, in fact, that gave John the germ of an idea that his friend Carl Perkins would turn into “Blue Suede Shoes.”
Also, writing to Vivian in early May of 1953, Cash apparently referred to the same drunken incident which he described as an argument at a train station, not mentioning any interracial component. “I called him every name anyone has ever given a Negro,” he wrote. “The further he walked away, the louder I yelled, calling him ‘Coon,’ ‘Nigger,’ ‘Jig-a-boo,’ and a few others.” He continued, “This morning I was so sick I wanted to die. I drank a lot of coffee and threw it back up.” Cash later maintained that the episode in Germany was an irrational drunken outburst. He acknowledged that he had grown up around much racial prejudice, admitting to a friend in the late 1990s that a relative had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan and had committed acts of violence against blacks. But that was long before his family moved to Dyess, he said. Like millions of other whites of his generation in the South, he felt that he eventually distanced himself from the earlier bigotry of the region, and for him that process began in Germany. Despite the Landsberg incidents, Cash told James Keach, who would eventually co-produce the film Walk the Line with Cathy Konrad, “I never, ever disliked blacks.”
Cash’s high school classmate A. J. Henson supports that view. “I would say that there was racism in Dyess,” Henson confirms. “Since there were no blacks there, we didn’t have many incidents. But the talk was no one wanted much to do with blacks. A group of us were in Wilson and we were walking on the sidewalk when we met a black man. I stepped to the side so he could get past. One of the boys got on me for that and said that whites didn’t get out of the way like that. I think most of us have changed since then. I have three adopted black grandchildren.”
Cash’s daughter Rosanne believes the time in Landsberg helped her father become a more tolerant person. “I think Dad took the prejudices of his upbringing with him to Germany,” she says. “He had never seen the wider world; didn’t know anything else. His mind quickly began to open. The little travel journals he kept were just so rich and wonderful—he wrote about mountains and monuments, how much things cost, how old they were, histories of places, train rides and boat trips, and of seeing the queen travel through the streets of London. He was clearly enamored with the world, and reveled in a new sense of sophistication and worldliness. Along with that new sense of worldliness came a much greater tolerance and understanding of the evils of racism. Once that was dissolved in him, it never appeared again. He was, in adulthood, the most tolerant person I knew.”
To underscore the point, Rosanne relates a moment when she was nineteen and lying on her bed reading a book on astrology when her dad walked in and asked what she was reading. “I showed him and he nodded. I said, ‘You don’t believe in this, do you?’ He said, ‘No, but I think you should find out everything you can about it.’ Once his mind started to open, there was no stopping it. It was huge. He ‘contained multitudes.’”
During the summer of 1953, Cash was well past running with the crowd in German bars. He asked Vivian to come to Germany and live with him in an apartment in Munich. Because she was still under twenty-one, the Air Force required written permission from her parents before she could join him. So he wrote to Vivian’s father on July 17 asking for his daughter’s hand, but Tom Liberto turned him down. “Dear John,” Liberto wrote on August 8. “I know I have taken more time than I needed in order to properly answer your letter which I have thoroughly read and understood. Mrs. Liberto and I did not try to find the answer that would be best for you and Vivian by our own judgment, but rather we spent a few days in prayer asking Divine Guidance.”
In the letter, Vivian’s father went even further in discouraging an immediate marriage. Pointing out how little time the couple had known each other before Cash went off to Germany, Liberto recommended they “extend this courtship at least a reasonable time after your arrival in the States” to make sure they were right for each other.
Cash was crushed, and he continued to pour out his love for Vivian in letters.
With his return home only a few months away now, Cash spent his off-hours fishing and sightseeing in Europe, including a spin through London and Paris that fall. Perea enjoyed traveling with Cash because he knew they would be seeing historical sites, not bar-hopping in search of women.
There was a disarming innocence in the letters Cash wrote to Vivian during that trip—the letters Rosanne had found so illuminating.
From Paris, on October 18, he wrote: “After a long ride, we reached a cold, foggy Paris at 8:30 a.m….We took a taxi through Pigalle and finally stopped at ‘the Arch of Triumph.’ It was really a beautiful thing. About 3 times as big as I thought it would be and a lot prettier. We walked around there, taking pictures, etc., and then we went on to the Eiffel Tower….We couldn’t see it from very far off because of the fog and we didn’t go to the top because we were plenty cold on the ground…and it sure looked a lot colder up there.
“We fooled around the Eiffel Tower awhile taking pictures, then walked down the waterfront. The Eiffel Tower is just a few yards from the Seine River. We sat down on the riverside and watched the people fish for a while. Then we walked down the riverside and came up on the streets and took a subway back to the main part of town. We window shopped for a while, then ate dinner at a swank restaurant. At 1:30 p.m., we returned to the hotel and got some much needed sleep.”
Three days later he wrote Vivian from London: “Today we really saw a lot of London. We ate breakfast at 9 o’clock (lazy), then for a while we walked the streets. We took a bus to Buckingham Palace and got there just in time to see the 11 o’clock guard changing ceremony. After taking pictures and seeing as much of the Palace as possible, we walked on down to the Thames River and walked out on Westminster Bridge just as Big Ben was striking twelve. We had a meal of ‘fish & chips’ near the bridge, then walked up to Picadilly Circus. Times-Square sure hasn’t got much on this place.”
There were still occasional rough spots in John and Vivian’s long-distance relationship, most of them involving religion or alcohol or both. When in January 1954 Vivian confessed that she had become ill after taking a drink at a Christmas party, Cash was furious and threatened to end the relationship: “Now, darling, what do you want to do? Do you want to choose a life of drinking and running around with those drunkards and filthy talking people, or do you want our marriage, our happiness? I want to know now Vivian. It’s either our love, or your social drinks.”
The following day, he continued to press the issue. Whatever Vivian wrote in response, Cash was satisfied—and he started talking again about their life together. Once more the note was signed �
�Your husband, Your Johnny for life.”
It was when John began to think more and more about the wedding and going home that he resumed going to church, at least occasionally.
He also carved out time on base to work on his music.
In the early months of 1954, Johnny told Vivian about hearing a bunch of new Hank Snow songs and mentioned that he felt his singing was getting better. “I think I’ve improved my voice since I’ve gotten this recorder,” he wrote. “I guess it’s only natural. When I’m not working or sleeping, that’s about all I do, is listen to music or play it.”
But the most important piece of music he heard the whole time he was in Germany he stumbled upon by accident.
Walking through the barracks one day, he heard a strangely seductive piece of pop-blues about a railroad train and a lonely woman’s grief over a lost love. He walked over to Chuck Riley’s bunk to listen more closely to this moody track. The song was “Crescent City Blues,” part of a concept album, Seven Dreams, by composer-arranger Gordon Jenkins, who worked with such pop stars as Nat “King” Cole, Frank Sinatra, and the Andrews Sisters.
Riley had just bought the album at the PX, and he remembers Cash asking him to play it again. John was fascinated by the words and the gently haunting tune:
When I was just a baby, my mama told me, “Sue,
When you’re grown up I want that you should go and see and do.”
But I’m stuck in Crescent City just watching life mosey by
When I hear that whistle blowin’, I hang my head and cry.
A few days later, Cash came back and borrowed the record from Riley to write down the lyrics or perhaps copy it on his tape recorder. As much as any song he heard in Landsberg, “Crescent City Blues” captured the recurring loneliness Cash felt. Remembering the Folsom Prison film, he almost immediately began trying to incorporate some of the feeling of “Crescent City Blues” into a song about the despair of prison confinement, but it would be months before he would finish it. Riley, a jazz fan, had bought the pop album only on a whim. He couldn’t find any new jazz albums in the bins, and he liked its cover.
This was the second of a remarkable pair of coincidences that would pay enormous dividends. If John’s unit had arrived in Landsberg just two weeks later, he probably would never have seen the Folsom Prison film, and if Riley hadn’t bought the Jenkins album, Cash might never have heard the recording and been inspired to write the song that would prove to be so pivotal for him.
Cash also had a minor operation in late March to remove a cyst on his chin, and it left a scar. In coming years, rumors would circulate that the scar came from a knife fight, adding to his rugged, he-man image in the early days of his career.
In April he was promoted to staff sergeant and was asked by the Air Force to reenlist. No way. He wanted to go home.
As eager as he was to see Vivian and begin his civilian life, in his final weeks in Germany John began to realize just how much he missed Dyess and his family. “I had such grief about being away from home for almost three years,” he later said. “I missed the fields, I missed the land, the woods, the river, the swimming hole.”
It was that homesickness that led him to write the poem “Hey, Porter” on the train as he began his journey home from Landsberg. The song was also a victory statement of sorts. Just twenty-two, Cash felt he had emerged from the challenges and temptations of Landsberg in relatively good shape. He could now look forward to everything that really mattered to him. He’d be back with Vivian, his family, his faith, and his music. The joy of that moment was what “Hey, Porter” was all about. Johnny Cash was returning to his personal promised land:
Hey, porter, hey, porter,
would you tell me the time?
How much longer will it be ’til we cross
that Mason Dixon Line?
At daylight would you tell that engineer
to slow it down,
or better still, just stop the train
’cause I wanna look around?
Hey, porter, hey, porter,
what time did you say?
How much longer will it be ’til I can
see the light of day?
When we hit Dixie, would you tell that engineer
to ring his bell,
and ask everybody that ain’t asleep
to stand right up and yell?
Hey, porter, hey, porter,
it’s getting light outside.
This ol’ train is puffin’ smoke,
and I have to strain my eyes.
But ask that engineer if he will
blow his whistle, please,
’cause I smell frost on cotton leaves
and I feel that southern breeze.
Hey, porter, hey, porter,
please get my bags for me.
I need nobody to tell me now
that we’re in Tennessee.
Go tell that engineer to make that
lonesome whistle scream.
We’re not so far from home,
so take it easy on the steam.
Hey, porter, hey, porter,
please open up the door.
When they stop the train, I’m gonna get off first
’cause I can’t wait no more.
Tell that engineer I said thanks a lot
and I didn’t mind the fare.
I’m gonna set my feet on southern soil
and breathe that southern air.
“Hey, Porter” was an excellent piece of writing—filled with warmth and disarming nuance, and it would forever serve as a reminder to Cash that he was at his best as a writer when he wrote about something from his own experience—songs about the cotton fields, the flood of 1937, and hard times of every sort. The only thing he regretted was that he’d written it about returning to Tennessee rather than Arkansas. He later joked, “The problem is I just couldn’t think of enough words that rhymed with Arkansas.”
But maybe Tennessee was more appropriate. Arkansas was John R. Cash’s past. Tennessee would be his future. The young man from Dyess was dreaming again.
Chapter 3
Memphis and Sam Phillips
I
FOR SOMEONE AS RAW and independent as Johnny Cash, there wasn’t a better place to try to enter the music business than Memphis in the summer of 1954. On July 4, Cash’s American Airlines flight returned him to Memphis to see his fiancée and family for the first time in three years; and the very next day, Elvis Presley would walk into Sam Phillips’s fledgling Sun Records studio to make the record that arguably would define both the attitude and sound of rock ’n’ roll.
It was easy in the years following that July 5 Elvis session for young people to think that rock ’n’ roll had always been around, like school bells and the World Series. For all practical purposes, however, rock as we came to know it was born that night. Almost by accident, Phillips and three musicians tapped into the volatile social currents of the time and unleashed a force so mighty that it would unite a generation.
In attempting to explain the magic of that summer night, music fans and critics have tended to focus on Presley the charismatic teenage singer who went on to be the music’s biggest star. Yet Phillips played an equally important—if not more important—role. As much a rebel as any long-haired musician who would follow in his footsteps on the rock trail, the thirty-one-year-old Alabama native didn’t invent rock ’n’ roll, but he knew it when he heard it. Unlike some of the big-name Nashville producers, Phillips didn’t believe in forcing a certain style or sound on his artists. Sam’s genius was in encouraging independent artists to be themselves and recognizing when a record had the human quality that would make it resonate with listeners.
When Phillips, a largely unknown radio announcer and engineer, first opened his storefront recording studio near downtown Memphis in 1950, even his best friends thought it was a good thing Sam was keeping his day job at WREC. How could he ever compete with the major labels in New York and Los Angeles that boasted pop stars l
ike Perry Como and Patti Page? But there was something the doubters didn’t know about this ambitious young man: his unshakable faith in the power and appeal of the roots country and blues he had loved growing up in the South. He didn’t plan to compete with the pop sounds; he intended to replace them.
Perhaps the sound that caught Phillips’s ear that night could only have been forged in Memphis. The city is less than three hours by car from the country music recording center of Nashville, but they are so different that it’s hard to believe you haven’t crossed a state boundary when driving between them on Interstate 40. There’s even an old saying: Nashville may be the capital of Tennessee, but Memphis is the capital of Mississippi. The city’s Beale Street had already been a showplace for black music for half a century. “I had grown up in the South, and I felt a definite kinship between the white Southern country artists and the black Southern blues or spiritual artists,” Phillips said years later. “Our ties were too close for the two not to overlap. It was a natural thing. It’s just that the record business in those days looked at the music as totally separate. They didn’t realize that it was a natural exchange and that the public would eventually accept it.”
To that end, Phillips opened his storefront recording studio at 706 Union Avenue, hoping to record the city’s deep pool of gifted black musicians. He started by making singles with local blues and R&B artists, including B. B. King and Howlin’ Wolf, on assignment from indie record companies such as Chess in Chicago and Modern in Los Angeles. After one of those singles, a lively novelty song titled “Rocket 88” that he made with Ike Turner and Jackie Brenston, became a number-one R&B hit for Chess, Phillips started his own Sun Records. With just one employee, a receptionist-secretary who handled most of the books, Phillips worked like a man possessed. Besides recording the artists, he drove hundreds of miles a week in his 1947 DeSoto, hoping to persuade DJs in the region to play the recordings on the radio and talk record shops into stocking them.
Johnny Cash: The Life Page 6