Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  And by mid-October, he was ready to go see Sam Phillips.

  Chapter 4

  Sun Records, the Tennessee Two, and Boom Chicka Boom

  I

  CASH STARTED HIS NEW CAMPAIGN to reach Phillips by phoning Sun Records, only to be told again that Phillips was out of town. After three or four attempts, Cash assumed that Phillips was flooded by audition requests and was simply not taking calls. As he later learned, Phillips was indeed on the road constantly, hoping to get more airplay and better sales distribution for Elvis’s records. Phillips was so focused on his young star that he released only two singles by other artists in the entire second half of 1954—and he didn’t devote much promotion time to any of them.

  As soon as “That’s All Right” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky” hit in July, Phillips knew he had to rush out another single to convince radio stations and retailers that Sun’s new star wasn’t just a one-hit wonder. Phillips released Elvis’s second single, “Good Rockin’ Tonight” and “I Don’t Care If the Sun Don’t Shine,” the last week of September, and he spent most of October on the road promoting it throughout the South. He also accompanied Elvis to Nashville for his Grand Ole Opry debut on October 2. The Opry, of course, was the goal of every country singer. Not only was it the most respected of many of the country music showcases around the country, but also it offered the most exposure, thanks to a national NBC radio hookup every Saturday night.

  Phillips likely knew from the beginning that Elvis and the Opry weren’t going to be a good fit. For all its storied history, the Opry, in the rapidly shifting culture of the mid-1950s, was definitely the old guard. Elvis, Sam liked to think, was the future. When Opry manager Jim Denny proved cool to Elvis’s performance, Phillips thought immediately of the next-best country showcase—the Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport, Louisiana.

  The Hayride, which had played a major role in the launching of Hank Williams, was less formal than the Opry, more open to change and experimentation. Though its radio show didn’t have as big an audience, it blanketed the Southern and Southwest regions, which were the heart of Sun’s market. Phillips headed to Shreveport to watch Elvis make his Hayride debut on October 16. Management was delighted by what they saw and signed him to a one-year contract.

  Back in Memphis, John Cash was getting impatient.

  When he phoned Sun in late October or early November, he got some good news: Sam was supposed to be back in the office on Monday. That was all John needed to know. On Monday, he stopped by Sun on his way to work and waited by the front door for Phillips to arrive. His aggressiveness paid off; Phillips was impressed by Cash’s enterprise. When John told him he wanted to make a record, Sam invited him into the studio.

  There was something about this young singer that appealed to Phillips. He wasn’t like most of the other young singers who had been coming by Sun since Elvis’s success; there seemed to be a certain depth to him. When Phillips finally asked him to sing something, Cash picked up his guitar and launched into some of the songs he’d been doing in Germany, which meant a lot of Hank Snow, Eddy Arnold, and Jimmie Rodgers, as well as “Belshazzar.”

  He sang for two or three hours, just going from one song to the next at random, even throwing in “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” when it popped into his head. Phillips heard something in Cash that he liked—a certain authority. It was virtually a replay of his first reaction to Elvis. Phillips also noticed that Cash, like Elvis, had a charisma about him. He was tall and commanding—he looked like a star. Phillips asked about his band. Actually, Cash replied, it was just three guys, and they weren’t real experienced. Looking back, Phillips recalled that it wasn’t clear if Cash was auditioning for himself or for the group. No matter, Phillips said; he’d like to meet the other musicians. Sam wasn’t big on polish. He was into feeling. He told Cash that if he could find the right song, he might be interested in recording him.

  Cash got into his car and drove the four blocks to Automobile Sales, where he told Marshall, Luther, and Red about meeting Sam. In hopes of catching Phillips before he left town again, the four of them went back to Sun the next morning. “It was just to say hello,” Grant recalled. “We didn’t even bring our instruments, but we could see that he liked John and we all got along pretty good.” Once again, Phillips invited Cash to come back if he came up with a good song.

  Feeling they had a mandate, the foursome went back to work on “I Was There When It Happened,” the song they thought best showcased them. Cash knew Sam didn’t want gospel music, but figured maybe he could change his mind if the song was good enough. The musicians spent a couple of weeks rehearsing and then went back for an informal audition. As Phillips set up microphones in the studio, the musicians began tuning their instruments. Suddenly, Kernodle started shaking so badly he couldn’t tune the pegs on the steel guitar. He kept going over or under the desired marks. This in turn made everyone else more nervous. After a few minutes of this, he stood up, walked over to Marshall, and whispered, “Grant, I can’t do anything but hold y’all back.” With that he left.

  Embarrassed, Cash took Phillips into the control booth, where he explained what had happened. “John apologized to me for not having a professional band, but I said that he should let me hear what they could do and I would be able to tell whether they had a style I would be able to work with,” Phillips recalled.

  At Phillips’s signal, John, Marshall, and Luther started playing “I Was There When It Happened,” but they were so ragged—Marshall swore that John was shaking almost as badly as Red had been, perspiration pouring down his face—that they feared the worst.

  Sam came back into the studio and adjusted the microphones again to improve the sound balance. He then asked them to play the song again. This time they were more relaxed. and the music came together nicely. They felt they had nailed it.

  Marshall didn’t know what to make of it when Sam’s first words to them as he walked out of the control booth were “There’s something really squirrely about you guys.”

  Squirrely?

  What he meant, it turned out, was that there was something different about them—which was high praise in the Sun owner’s mind.

  “I’ve never heard anything like it before, it’s different,” he told them. “I like that. But I’m not going to record a gospel song. I can’t sell ’em. I’ve tried and it didn’t work.”

  Though he didn’t spell it out for them, Phillips was fond of the trio’s spare but insistent rhythm, and he especially liked the understated force in Cash’s voice. When listening to most want-to-be singers, Phillips could tell exactly who they were trying to sound like—in most cases recently, Elvis Presley.

  When Cash sang, the only person Phillips heard was Cash himself. Not only was he different from Elvis; he was different from the Nashville singers. Phillips was privately pleased, too, that the steel guitarist had left. He felt that the instrument would have taken away from the trio’s uniqueness; it would have made the music sound too much like all those conventional country records coming out of Nashville.

  At the end of the audition Phillips told Cash, “If you come up with something original, something that’s not gospel, I’d like to hear you again.”

  The solution came quickly.

  When they next gathered at the house on Nakomis, John pulled out a piece of paper with the “Hey, Porter” poem written on it.

  “What do you think of this?”

  II

  It was a good thing Cash’s country music dream was driving him on, because it kept him from brooding about his problems at Home Equipment. Actually, it was just one problem: he couldn’t sell anything door-to-door. Maybe it would have been different if his route had covered the wealthiest families, but he was the new guy, so he had to spend his days in the poorest neighborhoods.

  John had seen people struggle too many years in Dyess to ever forget what it was like. He knew that many of the people who answered his knock had barely enough money to feed and clothe their families
. Some depended on the charity of their church, family members, and neighbors. So in most stops on his route, John just made a half-hearted pitch.

  John’s low-key selling style worked in his favor one day at the store. Vivian was suffering from severe morning sickness, and John wanted to find an apartment closer to Home Equipment than the one on Eastmoreland, which was a good fifteen minutes away, so he could rush home if she needed him. He also wanted to get a first-floor place so his wife wouldn’t have to climb stairs and risk the chance of falling. But he couldn’t find anything he could afford.

  Just before closing time one evening, a woman came into the store to look at used refrigerators. When John walked over to her, she asked him the price of a nondescript unit. Before looking at the tag, John guessed, “About thirty dollars.” After seeing the tag, he shrugged. “They want sixty-five dollars for that, and it only has a thirty-day guarantee.”

  The woman was Pat Isom, and she was understandably surprised. Was this nice young salesman trying to talk her out of buying the refrigerator? She asked if he enjoyed working at the store and John said yes, except that he was having trouble finding an apartment nearby for $55. He then explained Vivian’s pregnancy and the run-down apartment on Eastmoreland.

  Isom and her husband owned a duplex just three blocks away, and they were trying to rent one of the units. Cash followed her over to 2553 Tutwiler Avenue and thought the place was perfect, but he didn’t think he could afford it. When Isom said he could have it for $55, John wanted to hug her. As the months went by, he could rarely pay the Isoms even that much, but he paid as much as he could, and the couple was nice enough to let this “real quiet and bashful boy” run a tab.

  Vivian was overjoyed by the new, cleaner apartment, but she was also worried about finances and the upcoming baby. Gently she brought up the possibility of moving back to San Antonio so they could be close to her family. Unknown to Johnny, her father was sending her a small check periodically to help them get by.

  The Isoms weren’t the only ones whose generosity greatly benefited John and Vivian. George Bates was proving to be an even bigger help to his new employee. Cash did sell an occasional washing machine or some ornamental fencing, but it wasn’t adding up. All he was making from commissions was about $12 to $15 a week, which simply was not enough to live on, especially with a baby on the way.

  He went to Bates to talk about his future. He thanked his boss again for believing in him. But he said he just couldn’t make it on his commission. Bates told Cash that if he’d keep trying to sell, he would receive a weekly advance—as long as the young man agreed to pay it back eventually. John thanked Bates profusely, but he couldn’t help feeling he was some kind of guinea pig—“like a pet project to see how far I would go on taking draws and not producing anything.”

  But the support meant a lot to Cash. He was glad to see that the world outside Dyess had some kindness in it, too.

  The residents of Memphis’s poorest black neighborhoods reminded Cash of a lot of the people in Dyess. He noticed particularly how they remained hopeful in the face of overwhelming economic odds and how music seemed to help lift their spirits. In almost every house he heard music coming from the radio—usually blues and gospel artists. He enjoyed the sounds, and he began listening to more black music on the radio. It was another significant step in building his musical vision. He was starting to weave together lots of rootsy influences. One of his favorites was Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a black gospel singer who’d grown up only about fifty miles from Dyess. John had been loosely following Tharpe’s career for years, admiring the way she mixed gospel themes with a rollicking, high-energy blues style—as on “Strange Things Happening Every Day.” In time, he learned that she took spiritual music into nightclubs and dance halls, not just churches and stately auditoriums—something he hoped to do one day.

  On one of his daily sales rounds, he came across an elderly man strumming his guitar on his front porch. Cash walked up to him and said he sure liked the music. The man invited John to sit down, and he kept on playing blues tunes for the better part of an hour. He even boasted about how they carried his records at the Home of the Blues shop on Beale Street. At first Cash didn’t believe him, but the man went into the house and came back with a 78-rpm single with his name on it: Gus Cannon.

  Born in the Mississippi Delta, Cannon was in his early twenties when he moved to Memphis around 1907. He began recording in the late 1920s and fronted a jug band for years. One of the group’s songs, “Walk Right In,” would become a folk-pop hit in the 1960s when recorded by the Rooftop Singers. Cannon had been retired since the late 1930s. Cash came back a few days later with his guitar, and the men played a few tunes together. Then John resumed his door-knocking for Home Equipment. Because of that black music, Cash started going to the Home of the Blues himself, looking for records by Sister Tharpe and others. On his tight budget, he couldn’t afford actually to buy anything, but he enjoyed being around the records, and he liked to listen to the customers talk about their favorite artists.

  Most days, he spent much of his time at home listening to the radio to keep up with what his favorite singers were doing. He and Vivian also took walks in the park and drove to Roy’s house, where they were always welcome. Roy knew how difficult it was to get going financially, so he helped John and Vivian in lots of subtle ways. He and his wife had them over for dinner often, and when he went to buy clothes, he took John along, making sure to buy his younger brother at least a shirt or some socks.

  On Sundays, John and Vivian frequently traveled to Dyess for some of Carrie’s country cooking, which was one thing John had missed greatly in Germany. Years later he would still speak about a “craving in his bones” for that Southern food. The one thing he did develop a taste for in Germany was large wiener sausages, which in turn left him a lifelong fan of hot dogs. Over the years, he developed a private list of favorite hot dog stands or shops around the country and invariably stopped by for a dog or two when he was in the area. At one point, after the money was flowing in, he even thought of opening his own hot dog chain, but calmer heads prevailed. Johnny Cash would never be known as a good businessman.

  III

  Marshall liked the “Hey, Porter” poem, but it was just a poem. How were they going to turn it into a song? They thought about taking the melody of some old song and putting the words to it, which was a common practice in country, folk, and blues music. John had done it on the songs he fiddled with in Germany. But they couldn’t think of anything that worked with “Hey, Porter,” so they tried to make up a tune themselves. They just started hitting the strings to see where it would take them. Roy was still a regular, cheering them on.

  They all looked to Luther’s guitar as the heart of their sound; but he was unable to move beyond that simple tick-tack-tick-tack—or hunt-and-peck—style. “John played the first note and the second one and asked Luther if he could do that. Luther worked and worked on it…must have been an hour or two, and he finally got it,” Marshall said. “That’s about all we achieved that first night.”

  Over the years, rather than apologize for their limitations as musicians, Marshall saw those limitations as a secret weapon. “Our inability had a lot more to do with our success than our ability,” he said. “If we had done what we wanted to do in those days—which was play like all those great musicians in Nashville—we would have sounded like everyone else, and that would have taken away from the character in John’s voice.”

  Though long embarrassed by his lack of range on the guitar, Luther, too, grew to be proud of the sound he brought to the group. “You know how all those hot-shot guitarists race their fingers all over the strings?” he’d say time and again. “Well, they’re looking for the right sound. I found it.”

  By the time they were comfortable with “Hey, Porter,” it was December and everyone was caught up in the holidays. Sam Phillips was rushing to release Elvis’s third single. John had been telling Vivian that a Sun contract would be the best Christ
mas present of all, but it wasn’t going to happen.

  There was one milestone for the group that month, though. A neighbor heard them rehearsing and asked if they would play some spiritual music at her church one evening. It would just be for a few ladies, and they wouldn’t be able to pay them. But the guys jumped at the chance. Setting aside “Hey, Porter,” they worked up a half-dozen or so gospel tunes for the church performance, including “I Was There When It Happened” and “Belshazzar.” Soon, they realized their band needed a name.

  “You’re the best with words, John, you come up with something,” Marshall told him.

  In almost no time, Cash had a playful name. “Well, let’s see, you’re from North Carolina [Marshall], you’re from Mississippi [Luther], and I’m from Arkansas…how about the Tennessee Three?”

  He offered Tennessee Trio as an alternative, but Luther and Marshall liked the sound of the Tennessee Three. After all, they did live in Memphis now, and they liked the Southern connection.

  The church show wasn’t a glamorous affair, but it was a start. The Tennessee Three played for about twenty minutes to about a dozen elderly ladies in the basement of the Galloway United Methodist Church.

  John couldn’t wait to tell his mother about the performance when the family got together for Christmas. Roy, ever the cheerleader, told everyone that John was going to make a record for the Sun label. John then sang “Hey, Porter.” Carrie was surprised it wasn’t a gospel song, but she loved it anyway—particularly the part about coming home.

  John wasted no time in getting back to Sam Phillips in the new year, and Sam gave “Hey, Porter” a thumbs-up. He said he’d record the song as soon as John came up with another original song for the back of the single. John again brought up “Belshazzar,” but Sam reminded him of the no-gospel rule. Once again, the Tennessee Three returned to the drawing board.