Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  John had wanted Vivian to come to the audition, but she was five months pregnant and still feeling the effects of morning sickness. Instead, she paced the floor while he was gone. Despite all John’s hopes, she couldn’t quite imagine how a band could jump from Marshall’s home rehearsal garage to a record contract. So she was all the more excited when Cash raced up the walk with a big smile on his face and told her, “Baby, we’re cuttin’ a record.”

  In contrast to the anxiety he’d felt over finding a job after high school and his entrance into the Air Force, John was absolutely certain that he was on his way to a life in country music once Phillips said he liked “Hey, Porter.”

  As George Bates had done, Phillips was fast becoming something of a father figure to Cash, one of several who would serve in that role over the years. In time, he’d speak of both men as his “angels.” There was something about Phillips that made Cash trust him implicitly—at least in the beginning—whether he was talking about music or giving advice on money matters. Though the record company owner was only nine years older, John called him “Mr. Phillips,” even after he left Sun. “I’ve got a lot of respect for him,” Cash declared. “He’s really a man of vision.…[H]e can see something happening that nobody else could.”

  Never one to shy away from hard work, Cash threw himself into following through on Phillips’s career suggestions in the early months of 1955—including trying to book some live shows so that he’d be comfortable when he started touring behind “Hey, Porter.” Phillips said it didn’t matter where he played—schoolhouses, town socials, rural roadhouses—just as long as he got some experience in “hooking” a crowd.

  Most of all, though, Phillips kept reminding John about the need for new songs. Sam had opened his own publishing company, Hi-Lo Music, and he made sure that all the Sun artists signed with it. By owning the publishing rights, he made a few more cents per record—and every penny counted in those early fledgling days. But Phillips also believed that Cash’s ability to write would give him a big advantage against the Nashville singers, most of whom depended on a network of songwriters for material. Cash began working on lining up live shows and songwriting—all the while trying to honor his responsibilities to Home Equipment. George Bates sensed that John would be giving up his job soon, but he was so fond of the young man that he would regularly ask for updates about the band’s progress.

  Ever the dreamer, Cash was already feeling so much a part of the music business that he was bringing home copies of the magazines and trade publications, including Billboard and Cash Box. He loved seeing photos of the new artists so he could picture them when he heard them on the radio. Luther and Marshall, by contrast, still couldn’t imagine giving up their mechanic jobs. This was fun, they told each other, but you couldn’t count on getting your weekly $60.

  Progress was slow on the live show front. John didn’t turn out to be any better at selling his music than at selling aluminum siding. On his days off, he—sometimes with Marshall or Luther or both—would drive his green Plymouth through small towns outside Memphis, hoping to find places that would let them set up a show. They stopped at movie theaters, social halls, schools, food markets, and roadhouses. No place was too small.

  Hoping to impress the various businessmen, John always mentioned that he was going to have a release on Sun Records. The problem was that most of the merchants hadn’t heard of Sun Records, and the ones who had told him to come back when he had the record. He became so frustrated that he even started offering to do shows for free—and he still couldn’t find any takers. Finally, he gave up and just concentrated on his songwriting.

  In looking for song ideas, John rummaged back over the pieces of songs he had been trying to put together ever since Landsberg. He also replayed in his head many of his favorite records—all the way back to Dyess days—in hopes of finding something to trigger his imagination.

  That meant a lot of Jimmie Rodgers recordings. Rodgers was still Cash’s main inspiration—and he wasn’t alone in his feeling for the man’s music. As Rodgers’s plaque in the Country Music Hall of Fame declares, he “stands foremost in the country music field as ‘the man who started it all.’ His songs told the great stories of the singing rails, the powerful steam locomotives and the wonderful railroad people that he loved so well. Although small in stature, he was a giant among men, starting a trend in the musical taste of millions.”

  Just as Sam Phillips often used the word “different” when dishing out praise, John employed the word “authentic,” and his model, in many ways, was Rodgers, who started making records in 1927 at the age of twenty-nine. Partly because Rodgers’s millions of fans knew about his life as a railroad brakeman, but mostly because he sang with natural, almost storytelling intimacy, those fans believed he was singing about himself and his experiences. Though commonplace in the rock world of the 1960s and beyond, this idea of “personal singing and songwriting” was revolutionary in Rodgers’s era, especially among best-selling music makers, who depended on Tin Pan Alley compositions.

  Even in the blues and country fields, where songs tended to be more conversational and anecdotal, the recordings were less autobiographical than one might now assume. They were usually reflections on common experiences rather than the consistent chronicling of a writer’s or singer’s own life. Rodgers blurred the distinction between common experience and personal testimony because he sounded so convincing, whether he’d actually written the song he was singing or not.

  In 1931 Rodgers wrote one of his most evocative tunes, “T.B. Blues”—at a time when he was actually battling tuberculosis, which would kill him two years later. During his final recording sessions in New York City, the story went, Rodgers was so ill that he had to sit in a chair or, sometimes, lie on a cot between songs.

  “When Jimmie Rodgers sang ‘T.B. Blues,’ his audiences knew that he meant it—and that was one of the things, amid all the hillbilly hokum of the day that distinguished him….It was what country music fans mean today when they bestow their highest accolade on an artist by calling him ‘sincere,’” writes Nolan Porterfield in his biography Jimmie Rodgers.

  Cash could have used “sincere” as well to describe what he prized in an artist, but he wasn’t talking just about how convincing a record sounded; he wanted to know that something in the singer’s background showed he was singing from his heart about experiences he had lived. To him, that was the greatest test of an artist—and that’s what made him so proud of “Hey, Porter.” He was being authentic to himself and his own life.

  As Cash listened to Rodgers’s records, he identified with the man who had grown up in hard times and found in music both a comfort and a personal salvation. It was those records that also instilled in Cash much of his fascination with railroads and their imagery in song. Whenever Cash reached deep inside for his best songs, whether it was in 1955 or decades later, he was usually reaching back to that Jimmie Rodgers tradition.

  But Cash was still learning how to write songs. He spent hour after hour listening to country music on the radio, hoping to hear a theme or lyric that would inspire him to create a song of his own. As he listened, he kept a pencil and a pad nearby so he could jot down his thoughts. Many a night Vivian sat with him, listening to the music, until she would fall asleep, but John would go on for several more hours. He’d bring some of the scribbled notes with him when he got together with Marshall and Luther, but most of the pages ended up in the trash.

  John’s and Marshall’s accounts of this period often differed when it came to the order in which the songs were written, but it appears that one of the first serious songs after “Hey, Porter” was one that Cash had been thinking about ever since Landsberg: “Folsom Prison Blues.”

  IV

  The genesis of what would become one of Cash’s signature compositions was “Crescent City Blues,” the Gordon Jenkins song that Cash had heard in the barracks at Landsberg. According to Marshall, John first mentioned “Crescent City Blues” at one of the rehear
sals soon after Phillips agreed to make a record with them. “Just before he played it for us for the first time, he told about how he wanted to write a song about a prison ever since seeing the Folsom Prison movie, but he didn’t figure out a way to do it until he heard the Jenkins song.”

  The concept of “Folsom Prison Blues” appealed to Cash on several levels. First, there was a long history of prison songs in country music. As a writer, too, he was drawn to melancholy themes.

  What caught Cash’s ear in the “Crescent City Blues” recording was the desperation in the female singer’s voice as she longed for the man who had gotten away. Jenkins’s line about a lonesome train whistle reminded him of so many country tunes, notably Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” and he loved the bit about wanting the train whistle to blow her blues away. It gave Cash the blueprint he needed—even if it took more than a year after he first heard Jenkins’s song for him to turn it into his song.

  First the Jenkins version:

  I hear the train a-comin’, it’s rolling ’round the bend

  And I ain’t been kissed, Lord, since I don’t know when

  The boys in Crescent City don’t seem to know I’m here

  That lonesome whistle seems to tell me, Sue, disappear.

  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 blowing, I hang my head and cry.

  I see rich folks eating in that fancy dining car

  They’re probably having pheasant breast and Eastern caviar.

  Now I ain’t crying envy and I ain’t crying me

  It’s just that they get to see things I’ve never seen.

  If I owned that lonesome whistle, if that railroad train was mine.

  I bet I’d find a man a little farther down the line.

  Far from Crescent City is where I’d like to stay.

  And I’d let that lonesome whistle blow my blues away.

  And here’s how Cash turned “Crescent City Blues” into “Folsom Prison Blues”:

  I hear the train a comin’

  It’s rolling round the bend

  And I ain’t seen the sunshine since I don’t know when,

  I’m stuck in Folsom prison, and time keeps draggin’ on

  But that train keeps a rollin’ on down to San Antone.

  When I was just a baby my mama told me, Son,

  Always be a good boy, don’t ever play with guns.

  But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die

  When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and cry.

  I bet there’s rich folks eating from a fancy dining car

  They’re probably drinkin’ coffee and smoking big cigars.

  Well I know I had it coming, I know I can’t be free

  But those people keep a movin’

  And that’s what tortures me....

  Well if they freed me from this prison,

  If that railroad train was mine

  I bet I’d move it on a little farther down the line

  Far from Folsom prison, that’s where I want to stay

  And I’d let that lonesome whistle blow my blues away.

  “He will tell you in a minute that he stole the song, but he made it a more interesting song,” Grant said. “Everybody sang about love; not everyone sang about shooting a man ‘just to watch him die.’ I didn’t know if you could even put that in a song. As soon as I heard it, I remember asking, ‘John, are you sure they’ll play something like that on the radio?’”

  When you compare the lyrics of “Crescent City Blues” and “Folsom Prison Blues,” it’s easy to see where he substituted the Folsom Prison setting and the reference to San Antonio. You can also understand the changing of “pheasant breast and Eastern caviar” to “drinkin’ coffee and smoking big cigars” to give the song a more blue-collar sensibility.

  Still, the crucial change is the one Marshall’s comment addressed. Cash wanted to capture the ultimate loneliness, which he had sometimes felt during those long, grueling days in the monitoring room at Landsberg. He wanted to write not just about someone who was lonely for his girl, but about someone so empty inside that he felt cut off from both his family and his faith—someone so numb spiritually that he could take pleasure in killing a man just to watch him die.

  The trigger to the line came from the song “T for Texas,” which was on a Jimmie Rodgers album Cash had bought in Landsberg. He’d been so excited to find it that he wrote Vivian at length about it. It’s tempting to imagine he might even have listened to “Crescent City Blues” and “T for Texas” back-to-back and realized how the startling Rodgers line, “I’m gonna shoot poor Thelma / Just to see her jump and fall,” could bring a real sense of desperation to the “Crescent City Blues” model. It was the heartlessness of shooting a man just to watch him die that was the central breakthrough of Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.”

  It took about three weeks for the musicians to work up a version of the song. As with “Hey, Porter,” Luther had the hardest time, so John ended up teaching it to him virtually note by note.

  Everyone—John, Luther, Marshall, Roy—was knocked out by the song, but Cash didn’t want to go back to Phillips with just one song. He wanted to hedge his bets by playing several different types of songs for Phillips. The guys had been playing Lead Belly’s “Goodnight Irene” just for fun, and it sounded good, so they could do that, even though it didn’t meet Phillips’s request for an original song. There was also “Wide Open Road,” the song John had written, or at least started, in Germany with Hank Snow in mind.

  John’s brother Roy thought “Wide Open Road” was John’s best song yet, but John himself wasn’t so sure. He thought it was pretty standard country stuff, but in the early months of 1955 Sam had seemed at least a little interested in it, so that gave them two possible B-sides for the Sun session. The guys also worked up arrangements of two other songs John had written—“Port of Lonely Hearts” and “My Treasure”—as well as “My Two-Timin’ Woman,” a Snow song that Sam also had seemed to like when John sang it for him at the first audition.

  Personally, the only new song Cash felt strongly about was “Folsom Prison Blues.” “John was a little nervous about the song because he had taken so much of the song from Jenkins, so he told Sam about the two songs,” Marshall said. “But Sam didn’t seem to care at all. Everyone was taking stuff from old songs, he said. He didn’t even ask to hear the Jenkins song.”

  Though Sun’s logs don’t confirm the date, Marshall believed they went into the studio in late February or early March for their first formal session. There is a tape in the Sun vaults that includes at least part of what they recorded that day. It begins with four limp, unconvincing attempts at “Folsom Prison Blues,” two reasonable but not knockout versions of “Hey, Porter,” as well as one or two takes on the other songs they had rehearsed.

  At the end of the day, the only song that Phillips accepted was “Hey, Porter.” and he wanted to set up another session to get a stronger version of it. Cash was disappointed that Phillips didn’t respond to “Folsom Prison Blues,” but he was thrilled about “Hey, Porter.” Plus, Phillips had given Cash a starting point on another song when he said he’d like a love song, a “weeper,” because country fans and DJs couldn’t resist them.

  During the drive home, Cash kept thinking about the term “weeper,” and he thought of a catchy phrase that he had heard Eddie Hill, a local disc jockey, use countless times on the air: “We’ve got some good songs, love songs, sweet songs, happy songs, and sad songs that’ll make you cry, cry, cry.”

  At home, John sat on the living room couch and started sketching a song built around the words “cry, cry, cry.” Vivian was astonished when he said it was finished fifteen minutes later.

  Again there was no music, but the words sounded to Cash like something you’d hea
r on the radio. Vivian thought it was wonderful. By the time he showed it to Marshall and Luther a few days later, he had made only a couple of revisions. It was pretty much a first-draft song.

  It wasn’t as personal or distinctive as “Hey, Porter,” but it sounded more radio-friendly, like a melding together of every heartbreak song he had ever heard on the air. Very much in the tradition of such Hank Williams songs as “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” the song put all the blame for the breakup on the other party and warned that she’d be sorry she’d been so cruel. It was just what Phillips had requested: a real weeper.

  It began:

  Everybody knows where you go when the sun goes down.

  I think you only live to see the lights up town.

  I wasted my time when I would try, try, try,

  ’Cause when the lights have lost their glow, you’ll cry, cry, cry.

  It took only a few nights with Grant and Perkins for Cash to put the music to the words of the song, which he originally called “You’re Gonna Cry, Cry, Cry.” It was easier for Luther to play than “Hey, Porter” because the song’s lead guitar run was much simpler. The threesome rushed back to Sun Records and played the song for Phillips, who liked it immediately. Again he used the words “different” and “unique.”

  Cash was expecting to record both songs right away, but Phillips told them it would be a few weeks before they could get into the studio because he was still tied up with Elvis. Just keep working on the songs, Phillips advised, so they’d be “red hot” in the studio.

  This time, Cash left Sun so excited that he went straight over to Home Equipment Company.