Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  Another demand on his time came from financial advisers and accountants who encouraged him to invest his money. He didn’t feel comfortable making business decisions, but he had seen how his country music heroes and peers had often ended up broke because they hadn’t handled their money wisely. In 1970 he paid just under $1 million for 146 acres of undeveloped property that stretched from Gallatin Road, Hendersonville’s main street, the equivalent of several city blocks, to his property by the lake. His immediate goal was to preserve the natural tree-lined state of the property, but he didn’t rule out its eventual use for commercial purposes.

  It was a big deal in town in 1972 when he finally opened his recording studio at the House of Cash, but it did not, as hoped, jump-start his recording output.

  All too often Cash’s busy schedule wore him out mentally and physically, causing him to enter the studio unprepared.

  “John would come in, pick up his guitar, sit down on a stool, and literally start trying to write songs,” Grant said. “Sometimes we’d stay for several days but accomplish nothing. Oh, we’d record something, but it was usually thrown together with no thought or arrangement.”

  In that busy summer of 1972, Cash also took time away from his weeks with the girls to become one of the first musicians of the rock era to use his celebrity to lobby Congress. Most of his contemporaries felt uncomfortable stepping into the political arena, but Cash knew the media attention and, he hoped, the public pressure that could accompany his visit.

  On July 27 he appeared with Glen Sherley and Harlan Sanders, another songwriter who had done time in Folsom, before a U.S. Senate judiciary subcommittee hearing on a prison and parole reform bill that had been introduced at Cash’s urging by Tennessee Republican William Brock. As expected, Cash was mobbed by autograph seekers in the Senate Office Building corridors, and his testimony was widely reported.

  “I’ve seen things that would chill the blood of the average citizen,” Cash told the senators, then gave some examples of prison brutality that had come to his attention, including the case of a fifteen-year-old boy who was dying in an Arkansas prison after being raped by older prisoners, and of a young man who hanged himself after being stripped of his clothing as punishment. “Prisoners have to be treated as human beings. If they’re not, when they’re turned out, they’re not going to act like human beings.” In his turn at the microphone, Sherley pushed for laws that kept young first-time offenders from being incarcerated and for better ways to deal with hardened criminals.

  Afterward, Cash generated additional publicity for his cause by meeting with President Nixon. When asked by the press if he would support the president’s reelection campaign, Cash remained loyal despite his misgivings about the war. “If he asked me, I would,” he said. “The dignity of the office should be upheld and respected by all citizens, and I will do anything I can for him. President Nixon has done a lot for peace.” According to Cash’s nephew Roy, who served in Vietnam, “he was opposed to the Vietnam War, but he was not a draft-card-burner kind of protester.”

  While Cash continued to advocate for prison reform, he was increasingly having doubts about Sherley. Things had gone well at first. Sherley joined Cash on tour, and he married a House of Cash employee, Nicki Robbins, at Cash’s home in December 1971. Cash even arranged for Sherley’s two sons from his first marriage to be flown in for the ceremony. But by the time of the Senate hearing, Sherley was showing signs of instability, and his songwriting was so weak that some in the Cash camp, including Grant, began to question whether Sherley had actually even written the song Cash sang during the Folsom concert, “Greystone Chapel.”

  One story widely circulated among Cash’s inner circle was that Harlan Sanders, who was at Folsom at the same time as Sherley, wrote the song and Sherley, in effect, stole it. According to one version of the story, when Sanders learned that Cash was going to record it, Sherley promised to give Sanders the royalties.

  “Glen was with us for about eight months when John started getting songs from Sanders, and they were good, a lot better than anything Glen had given us,” said Larry Butler. “One day John walked in and said, ‘I think we got the wrong man out of jail.’”

  The Cash party became further disillusioned with Sherley after a few months on tour. “I think that because Glen had spent so much of his life in prison, he felt out of place and was very insecure on the outside,” Grant said. “You couldn’t get Glen into bed at night, and you couldn’t get him out of bed in the morning, which began to be a problem because of our busy travel schedule.”

  The breaking point was when Sherley, apparently angered by being ordered around, looked Grant in the eye and said, “I’d like to take a knife…and just cut you all to hell. It’s not because I don’t love you, because I do. But that’s just the type of person I am. I’d rather kill you than talk to you.”

  When Grant relayed his concern to Cash, Sherley was dropped from the tour. He returned to California, where he ended up working on a cattle ranch. Apart from the Cash connection, his country music legacy was limited to his name appearing in stories over the years with those of Cash, Merle Haggard, and David Allan Cole whenever roundups were written about country stars who had done jail time. On May 11, 1978, at his brother’s home near Salinas, Sherley—the man who provided the feel-good heart of the Folsom concert—committed suicide with a gunshot to the head. Cash was rattled. He continued to support prison reform, but he stopped using Sherley as an example of redemption. In his 1993 autobiography, he didn’t mention Sherley’s name.

  That didn’t mean Cash lost his empathy for prisoners. In January 1997 he would phone Gary Gilmore the night before he became the first person executed in the United States in a decade. Gilmore’s case gained worldwide attention because Gilmore, who was sentenced to death after killing two people in Utah, demanded the state carry out the execution rather than use legal maneuvering to prevent it. In Shot in the Heart, a gripping, award-winning book about his brother and his family, Mikal Gilmore said Cash was Gary’s “biggest hero” and that Gary told him about the phone call from Cash: “When I picked up the phone,” I said, ‘Is this the real Johnny Cash?’ and he said, ‘Yes, it is.’ And I said: ‘Well, this is the real Gary Gilmore.’”

  III

  Despite family obligations, charity projects, awards dinners, Billy Graham Crusades, and endless touring eating up 90 percent of his time, Cash still found opportunities to keep his hand in acting and television, including a guest star role in an episode of the popular TV detective series Columbo in 1973 and a documentary about the history of American railroads in 1974. He was also beginning to outline his novel about Saint Paul. But the most dramatic moment of 1974 revolved, once more, around John Carter—only this time it was a moment of terrifying fear.

  It was Labor Day, and Cash felt especially drained. He canceled a TV appearance and headed to Bon Aqua with June. Soon after arriving, he got a phone call: John Carter had had an accident and was in Madison Hospital.

  John’s sister Reba had taken John Carter and seven other youngsters for a ride through the woods near Cash’s house. The front wheels of her Jeep hit some loose gravel on the road on the way back to the lakefront house, and the vehicle flipped over, hurling the children to the ground. A Grand Ole Opry tour bus had been following the Jeep; the driver and other passengers turned the Jeep right-side up and freed the children, who were then rushed to the hospital.

  John and June sped to the hospital, praying every mile of the frantic hour-and-a-half journey. It was, he said later, the most frightening ninety minutes of his life. June was near hysteria by the time they parked the car and joined John’s parents in the emergency room.

  “Where’s my boy?” Cash shouted. “Which room is John Carter in?”

  When he couldn’t seem to get an answer, he and June became even more desperate.

  Finally, they learned that John Carter had just left in an ambulance for Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital, thirty minutes away in Nashville. Cash’s kn
ees were trembling. He was too afraid even to ask about his son’s condition.

  John’s and June’s worst fears were relieved when they got to Vanderbilt and heard John Carter’s cry. Not only was he alive, but also the injury wasn’t as severe as feared, just a mild concussion and slight skull fracture. He needed to be kept in intensive care a couple of days, just for a precaution, but they were assured that everything would be fine.

  Cash used the next few days to think once more about his fast pace.

  “I must slow down,” he wrote later. “I must keep priorities in order. I must weed out the commitments I make that are not a part of what I feel He really wants me to do.”

  In relating the hospital experience years later, Cash valued one other moment. He learned that his daughters Rosanne and Kathy had spent the whole first night in the hospital waiting room. On the last night of John Carter’s hospital stay, Cash was thinking about all his children and wrote a song titled “My Children Walk in Truth.”

  He wanted to record the song, and he might have done just that a decade earlier, but now he was second-guessing himself more and more. He wouldn’t record “My Children Walk in Truth” for nearly a decade. And for all his promises about a slower pace, Cash continued to push himself to the limit in every area of his life except recording.

  IV

  It was only natural that as the oldest Cash daughter, Rosanne was the first to move to Hendersonville to live with her father. It was the week she graduated from high school in 1973, and she immediately went on the road with him. Watching her father onstage and learning to play the guitar, Rosanne quickly developed an interest in songwriting. When Cash was off the road, Rosanne reverted to being a teenager.

  “We were still trying to get to know each other, and he kept encouraging me in different directions,” she says. “That was him in a nutshell. He was always so expansive. He would never tell you that you were wrong. He treated you with real respect and let you make up your mind. He’d never lecture you.”

  Even when Rosanne and Rosie got into trouble after borrowing their dad’s vintage Chevy, he didn’t scold.

  “We went someplace and got drunk with a bunch of people and somebody puked in the car,” Rosanne says. “We got home real late and we planned to get up early, like six a.m., and clean it before Dad got up and saw it. Of course we sleep until eight, and by the time we get outside, Dad has seen it and has had someone take the car somewhere to get it cleaned.

  “We were supposed to go with him to Bon Aqua that day, and he has Rosie and me ride with him in his regular car, which was a Mercedes or something. No one says a word about what happened to the Chevy. Finally, Dad pulls up to an ice cream stand and buys us ice creams. He gives them to us, but still doesn’t say a word—all the way to the farm, which is more than an hour.

  “Finally, we get to Bon Aqua and he sits down on the front step and pats on the step; he wants us to sit with him. After all this time, he says very calmly, ‘You have a choice. You can stay at home and do drugs or you can go on the road with me, see the world, and make a lot of money.’ I was so touched that I started crying. I was already on the road, but he was going to make us choose. That’s what he always tried to teach us: ‘Everyone has a choice in life. It’s up to you to make the right one.’”

  Rosanne treasured those years with her father, but she finally decided she had to begin building her own identity. After three years she moved to London, where, thanks to her dad’s connections, she got an entry-level job at CBS Records. Within six months, she felt that she was just spinning her wheels, and she headed back to Nashville to attend Vanderbilt University and start working on her career as a songwriter. She was the only one of Vivian’s daughters to think seriously about the music business, though June’s daughter Carlene pursued a similar path.

  By then, Kathy had also moved to Hendersonville and begun working with a cadre of her relatives in the museum souvenir shop housed in the House of Cash complex. Cindy was the third daughter to head south, but it took a while. She was married right after high school and had a baby, but the marriage lasted less than two years. Cash offered to take care of all her bills if she wanted to go to college, which she did. After about a year, Cash called her and said, “I think it’s my turn.” When asked what he meant, he replied, “I think it’s my turn to have you live near me.”

  Cash sent plane tickets for Cindy and the baby, and had a moving van transport her belongings to Hendersonville, where he had already rented an apartment for them near his house. Cindy got a barber’s license and started cutting hair in a shop on Music Row. When her dad began spreading the word about her, even onstage, fans would show up to take her photo at the shop. It made her feel uncomfortable, and she quit. Cash then hired her to do hair and makeup on the tour.

  After studying acting in Los Angeles, Cash’s youngest daughter, Tara, moved to Nashville in her early twenties with an eye on modeling and acting. Cash got her some bit parts, but she eventually went to work in the production office and found she enjoyed being behind the camera more than in front of it.

  Cash’s generosity wasn’t limited to his children. “From the time I was a child,” says his niece Kelly Hancock, “I remember the love that radiated from John. He was always doing for others, usually without any fanfare or recognition, for he preferred it that way.”

  The temporary takeover of Cash’s career by Columbia with the Klein album served as a wake-up call. Within weeks of its release, he told Grant, “I don’t even consider that ‘my’ album.” Redirecting his attention to music, Cash scheduled more formal recording sessions in 1975—thirty-six in all—than he had done the two previous years combined (thirty-one).

  During this period, he fulfilled a long-standing pledge to produce an album for June. They went into the studio on January 31 to begin work on the collection, which consisted chiefly of songs June had written with John or various other family members, including Maybelle, Helen, Carlene, and Rosie. While on breaks from the road, they went back into the studio twice in February and once in March to finish the project, which Columbia agreed to release.

  The label was hoping that the album, Appalachian Pride, would benefit from the Cash connection, but the execs were kidding themselves; Cash’s fan base wasn’t even buying his albums at this point. Billboard didn’t bother reviewing June’s album, and few were surprised when it tanked.

  In returning to the studio the first week in May to work on his own music, Cash quickly realized that his skills were rusty and his confidence was low. Unable to write anything substantial himself, he continued to turn to others. He wanted to find the kind of song that would define him, something with character and a point of view. He found it in a song by Guy Clark, one of the many young folk- and country-flavored writers with a strong literary bent coming out of Texas. The song, “Texas 1947,” touched on many of the familiar themes in Cash’s music, including railroads, small towns, big dreams, and final chances.

  Two weeks after finishing another engagement at the Las Vegas Hilton, he and the Tennessee Three devoted an entire session on May 6 to the song. He wasn’t fully pleased, and after a Billy Graham Crusade appearance on May 12 in Jackson, Mississippi, he went back into the studio with a couple of other musicians to redo his vocal. He had to record it a third time before he was satisfied.

  By now Cash was thinking about an album, but not one of his formal concept works. He was too concerned with trying to regain his confidence to attempt something so grand. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to come up with more songs of “Texas 1947” quality. The most telling moment on the album would be Cash’s own “Down at Dripping Springs,” in which he acknowledged the rising Willie and Waylon outlaw movement that he had helped inspire but of which he was not even remotely a part. Despite the box office disaster of the inaugural Dripping Springs festival in 1972, Nelson put on a one-day festival at the same spot in 1973 and, thanks to word-of-mouth about the first festival, and better promotion, drew forty thousand fans. The news spread
through Nashville that something was happening with this outlaw movement. Waylon was red-hot on the charts, and Willie was heating up.

  It would have been ideal for Cash to step in and take his rightful place at the forefront of this exciting movement. And he might have pulled it off if he had been able to write a compelling song—something even half as striking as “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love),” the anthem that Bobby Emmons and Chips Moman would write in 1977 for Jennings. But Cash wasn’t able to deliver one. From the lyrics of “Down at Dripping Springs,” it wasn’t even clear if he was truly saluting the outlaw movement in the song or subtly trying to remind country fans that he was the godfather of the whole thing. Even Larry Gatlin, who was mentioned in the song, couldn’t figure out what Cash was trying to say.

  For all his hopes that this would be the album to bring him back, Cash had trouble deciding on a title for it. He thought about Texas 1947, but he wanted to do something to involve John Carter in it the way he had Rosanne, Carlene, and Rosie in the Juicehead album. An idea came to him one day when he was walking through his vegetable garden with his son. He’d call the album Look at Them Beans—after a Joe Tex novelty number he had recorded—and use a photo of him and John Carter frolicking in the field. To make it more of a family affair, June wrote the liner notes.

  Cash wanted to release “Texas 1947” as the first single, but he went along when Columbia execs advised him that “Look at Them Beans” had more potential. When that single stalled at number seventeen that summer, the label followed with the Guy Clark song, but there was no momentum. Retailers and DJs had already given up on the album.

  By contrast, the outlaws were picking up even more speed. At the same week in November that “Texas 1947” entered the country charts at number ninety, Jennings’s “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” was number one. Nelson’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” was in its fourth month on the charts.