Ray, always a serious-minded man, picked up early on his son’s fascination with music and tried to quash what he considered a frivolous pastime. Cash remembered his father often saying, “You ought to turn that stuff off.”
The first real crisis for Dyess residents came early in 1937. Torrential rain pelted much of the delta for days, swelling the Mississippi and other rivers in the region and flooding many of the surrounding farms and towns. It began to look like their dreams of a better life were going to be literally washed away. Adding to the trauma, the rain didn’t just keep coming, but sometimes gave way to clear skies, raising momentary hopes in the colony that the town would be spared. Then the rains returned harder than ever on January 21, and emergency workers began leading families to higher ground. By nightfall, some seven or eight hundred people were housed at the community center. But it wasn’t water from the Mississippi that threatened the residents of Dyess, as Cash often said later. It was the water of the less-well-known Tyronza River, which ran through the heart of the colony.
By noon the next day, the number of people at the community center had doubled. As conditions worsened—it was so cold that the rain froze as it hit the ground, making it difficult to operate trucks and tractors—residents who could stay with relatives elsewhere in the state began leaving Dyess by train. The water began rising during the night more rapidly than before, and by the morning of the twenty-third it was clear that a near-complete evacuation was necessary; there hadn’t been any electricity for three days.
Carrie and the younger Cash children were among the first to leave, returning by train to Kingsland to stay with relatives, not knowing if they would ever return. Ray Cash stayed in Dyess with Roy in hopes of safeguarding the house and to help in rescue work. Despite all the fear and upheaval, only two deaths were reported in the area—and the water soon started receding. By February 3 the roads were dry, and the word went out that it was safe to return. The Cashes were back home within two weeks—in plenty of time to celebrate J.R.’s fifth birthday on February 26.
The drama of the time was still vivid in J.R.’s mind nearly a quarter century later when he wrote a song about the flood, “Five Feet High and Rising,” that became one of his signature tunes. Looking back on the song, which appeared on a 1959 album titled Songs of Our Soil, Cash saw the struggle of the flood as another example of the power of faith and a community working together.
“My mama always taught me that good things come from adversity if we put our faith in the Lord,” he said, explaining the genesis of the song. “We couldn’t see much good in the flood waters when they were causing us to leave home. But when the water went down, we found that it had washed a load of rich black bottom dirt across our land. The following year we had the best crop we’d ever had.”
Thanks to the rich new layer of soil, on February 8, 1938, Ray was able to repay the government $2,183.60 to cover the cost of the land and the cash advances. The twenty acres of delta land were now his, and life in Dyess started to feel good. The whole family thanked God for His blessings three days a week at the First Baptist Church near the town center. That two-story building was as important in young J.R.’s life as the radio.
III
J.R. was taught to believe the literal message of heaven and hell, salvation and eternal damnation. He was also warned to be suspicious of other religions. Catholics, he was told, didn’t answer to God but to a mysterious tyrant in Rome, and the Jews killed Christ. Cash later rejected that backward thinking, showing enough tolerance for others’ beliefs that he married a Catholic, Vivian Liberto, and agreed to raise his daughters in that faith. When one of his daughters, Rosanne, married a Jew, record producer and guitarist John Leventhal, her father warmly welcomed him into the family. Racism was also rampant in Dyess, and it took a while before he was able to shake its venom.
J.R. joined the rest of his family at the church every Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday night. Unlike other kids, who complained about having to go to church, he looked forward to the music, the sermons, and the sense of community. Just as music had warmed his home, church was an early comfort. By the time J.R. was nine, he had two more siblings—a sister, Joanne, born in 1938, and a brother, Tommy, born two years later. Nothing in all he heard about the Bible and God’s Commandments struck him as more important than honoring thy father and mother—and he prayed that he’d have a loving wife and family someday. He even pictured the kind of wife he wanted and the way he would raise his children. She would have to be as sweet and loyal as his mother, and he wanted to give his sons and daughters the same affection she showered on him. When he thought about the man he’d like to be, though, he thought of his older brother Jack, and never his father.
Everyone in the family looked upon Jack, who was named after heavyweight boxing champ Jack Dempsey, as the golden child. Handsome, intelligent, outgoing, and generous, Jack made up his mind early that he would serve the Lord by joining the ministry. Even other residents of Dyess spoke about his inspiring spirit and message, and how he had seemed, even at the age of eleven, to behave like a preacher. Jack was especially thoughtful to people in need, counseling adults who drank too much and comforting anyone facing illness or a death in the family. J.R. marveled at how his brother, who was just over two years older, could make adults three times his age feel better about themselves.
J.R. noticed that his friends’ older brothers discouraged their younger siblings from hanging out with them in town or at school, but Jack always welcomed J.R. Even Jack’s positive influence, however, couldn’t keep J.R. from developing a rebellious streak as he approached his teens, when he began to show what his father branded an “attitude.” He was moody, sometimes snapping back at his father and his teachers. He started smoking cigarettes at the age of ten—an ultimate act of rebellion at the time. He didn’t have money to buy any, so he would sneak some of his father’s tobacco and roll his own, or he would bum them from other kids.
“Looking back, that was the first sign of John’s addictive personality,” his sister Joanne says. “The other boys might smoke an occasional cigarette, but John smoked all the time—except when he was at home.” There’s no way he would have worried his mother by smoking in front of her.
Jack, who didn’t smoke, learned about J.R.’s habit, yet he wasn’t judgmental. That was one of the things that J.R. liked best about his brother. J.R. felt such a tight bond with Jack that he even delighted in going fishing with him, which surprised everyone else in the family because J.R. usually preferred fishing alone. He liked his solitude. As he did on the gravel road, the youngster would sometimes lie at the water’s edge, staring at the sky and singing his favorite songs—though most often silently to himself to avoid disturbing the fish.
On Saturday, May 13, 1944, J.R. was planning to go to his favorite fishing spot in one of the colony’s drainage ditches just off the two-and-a-half-mile route to the town center. Most of the time, fourteen-year-old Jack was too busy to spend the day fishing. If he wasn’t helping someone in the community, he was trying to raise money for his family—delivering the Memphis Press-Scimitar or doing odd jobs. On this day, too, he planned to earn money by making some fence posts at the high school agricultural building. He knew the family could use the extra $3.
Years later, Cash remembered an exchange in the family living room that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
“[Jack] said he felt like something was going to happen and my mother said, ‘Well, don’t go,’” Cash said. “Jack stared at the door when an expression of death came over his face.”
J.R. pleaded with Jack, “Come, go fishing.” But Jack felt a duty to the family.
As Jack headed toward town, J.R. went to the fishing hole, but his heart wasn’t in it. He felt restless. Instead of staying most of the day, he stood up after a couple of hours and headed home. That’s when he saw the mailman’s car coming toward him with his father in it. As soon as he saw his father’s ashen face, he knew something bad had
happened.
Jack had been cutting the fence posts out of oak logs at the school workshop on a table saw without a guard on it, and the blade had ripped into the boy’s stomach. Stunned and bleeding, Jack tried to push his intestines back into his abdomen as he staggered from the shop building. He was spotted by a school official, who rushed him to the hospital. The teenager was alive but unconscious when J.R. and his father arrived. The family gathered around the golden child, their world cruelly and instantly shattered. Though the doctors held out little hope, Jack remained alive, but barely.
Neighbors who had been helped over the years by Jack stopped by the hospital to join the family in prayer. The outpouring overwhelmed J.R. All these people loved his brother as much as he did. It taught him a lot about compassion, he said later. He hoped someday that people would care for him like they cared about Jack.
When the boy’s condition worsened on Wednesday, a special service was held at the Baptist church, drawing people from all over Dyess. Learning the next morning that Jack’s condition had improved dramatically, Ray and Carrie Cash believed it was a miracle. But the euphoria was short-lived. The family was told on Friday morning that the end was imminent, and they crowded into the hospital room.
“[Jack] started to groan and asked Mama to hold his hand,” Cash said, remembering the farewell scene late in life. He said his brother closed his eyes and told Carrie he was at a river. “One way goes to the bad place; the other way goes to the light. I’m going to the light.” Then he said, “Can you hear the angels singing? Look at this city, this beautiful city, the gold and all the jewels, the angels. Listen, Mama, can you hear them?”
He died Saturday morning.
Pretty much the whole town came to the funeral on Sunday and joined the family in singing favorite hymns. Jack was buried in a cemetery in nearby Wilson; the words on the gravestone read “Meet Me in Heaven,” Years later, Cash would use the phrase in a song. At the height of his stardom in 1970, Cash would also dedicate his songbook, Songs of Johnny Cash, to his brother.
We lost you one sad day in May 1944.
Though the songs that we sang
Are gone from the cotton fields
I can hear the sound of your voice
As they are sung far and wide
In loving memory
Your brother, J.R.
Still reeling, the Cash family was back in the fields on Monday picking cotton. The crops wouldn’t wait. The loss of her son, however, was too much for Carrie.
“I watched as my mother fell to her knees and let her head drop onto her chest,” Cash recalled in his 1997 autobiography. “My poor daddy came up to her and took her arm, but she brushed him away. ‘I’ll get up when God pushes me up!’”
Finally, slowly and painfully, she got back to her feet and resumed picking cotton. She still had a husband to care for and children to raise.
Through the week, J.R. kept thinking about his brother’s words—about a crossroads between the lightness and the dark. “I made my choice after his death which way I was going to go,” Cash decades later told a friend, producer-director James Keach. “I answered a call to come down the aisle [in church] and shook the preacher’s hand and I accepted Jesus Christ as savior that next Sunday.
“[Jack’s] been with me all these years, and sometimes when I [was] so messed up, in such bad trouble, in jail somewhere, I would say, ‘I know you’re really ashamed of me.’ I’m still talking to him. A lot of things might have been different if it weren’t for him. He knew about the entertainment world. He knew about the trash that went on. My father would always talk about the evil stage, the evil show business. But Jack didn’t. He encouraged me.”
J.R. tried to avoid his father’s eyes in the months after Jack’s death because he didn’t want to see the disappointment and the blame. His father had told J.R. the accident would never have happened if he had kept his brother from going to the school shop that day, but really, what could he have done?
During this time, J.R. became increasingly distant, showing little interest in school or hanging out with his pals. More than ever, he treasured his time alone, whether it was at the fishing pond or the school library. Even when he was around friends, they’d often notice a lonely, melancholy quality about him. Rosanne, his daughter, believes a part of that sense of sadness never left her father. “Dad was wounded so profoundly by Jack’s death, and by his father’s reaction—the blame and recrimination and bitterness,” she says. “If someone survives that kind of damage, either great evil or great art can come out of it. And my dad had the seed of great art in him.”
It was around this time that J.R. saw a movie that left a lasting impression on him. For most kids, Frankenstein, the 1931 film about a mad scientist who creates a monster by putting a criminal’s brain into his man-made being, was simply a scary horror story. But Cash felt sorry for the monster, who was killed by a mob that thought he’d murdered a young girl, when in fact the monster had tried to befriend her. Explaining his sympathy for the monster, Cash said he was someone “made up of bad parts but was trying to do good.”
James Mangold, who directed Walk the Line, the 2005 film about the relationship between Cash and June Carter in the 1960s, talked to Cash about Frankenstein and came away from the conversation with the belief that Cash identified so strongly with the movie because he worried, in the aftermath of Jack’s death and his father’s reaction, that he, too, might have bad parts. “He certainly felt terribly misunderstood by his father.”
In his increasing loneliness and grief, J.R. started writing down his thoughts, sometimes in the form of a poem, a short story, or even a song. He found he loved to express himself in words. “I’d never known death either in the family or among friends, and suddenly I realized that I wasn’t immortal—that I too could die someday,” he said. The writings reflected a darkness that would reappear in Cash’s music throughout the years.
J.R. also tried to lose himself in books, showing a particular fondness for American history and the Old West. The stories and accounts stimulated his increasingly active mind, and he often took them with him to the fishing hole. He also developed a great appetite for poetry that never left him.
Like many kids, he loved the work of Edgar Allan Poe as he got older, but he responded most to poets who, like his beloved gospel music, offered inspiring messages. He especially prized one poem—Joaquin Miller’s “Columbus.” His face would still light up years later when he described the story of Columbus crossing the ocean and facing a series of seemingly impossible hurdles, only to respond each time with the words “Sail on!”
“Some people might think that’s corny stuff…how Columbus says, ‘Sail on,’” Cash acknowledged late in life. “But it always thrilled me to death. I love that stuff.”
Through all this, however, nothing comforted him more than those solitary late-night walks on the gravel road, though he was now singing hymns along with Jimmie Rodgers and Ernest Tubb songs.
It was on one of those walks that J.R. had a revelation that caused him to race home to share it with his mother. For months he had been trying to figure out how to keep Jack’s spirit alive and, perhaps, gain some smidgen of affection from his father. He even thought briefly about the ministry, but he couldn’t convince himself, even at age twelve, that it was the right choice. The breakthrough came as he walked down the road singing gospel tunes. That was it. He could spread Jack’s message through music; he would be a gospel singer.
Joanne Cash remembers her brother running into the house to tell his mother the news. Carrie smiled and hugged her son. When she told Ray about the boy’s latest dream, he scoffed. The reaction hurt J.R., but the youngster was used to being disappointed by his father.
J.R.’s demeanor differed greatly from that of his more outgoing brothers and sisters, and his parents interpreted it in opposing ways. J.R.’s father saw the boy’s daydreaming and love of music as lazy and unfocused. Ray Cash later explained, “I wanted him to start preparing for th
e day when he’d be on his own and have to take care of his family.” Ray even complained about J.R.’s facial expression or lack of it. Whereas he’d seen enthusiasm and warmth in Jack’s face, Ray found it hard to tell what his younger son was thinking—or if the boy was even listening to him—because his eyes didn’t reveal any emotion. Carrie Cash thought her son’s daydreaming and quiet demeanor were signs that he was thoughtful and sensitive. “He hardly ever said anything,” she said years later. “But he listened. He was drinking it all in.”
The boy tried hard to be loyal to his father; it was the Commandment that meant the most to him, and he did appreciate the way his father worked tirelessly to provide for the family. Yet, he said later, there was no getting around it: Ray Cash could be cruel, especially when he drank too much. Many of J.R.’s relatives and schoolboy chums would challenge that description of Ray. They said old man Cash was simply gruff, like most hardworking men in Depression-ravaged rural America. But J.R.’s list of complaints against his father went further than not hearing “I love you” regularly.
J.R. was forever wounded when he came home from grade school and found his dog lying dead in the woods near the house. To J.R.’s horror, he learned that his father had shot the animal after it broke into the chicken coop and killed a half-dozen chickens. Most of their neighbors would have done the same thing, but other farmers would have found a more humane way to tell their youngsters, perhaps simply saying the animal had run away. J.R. sensed that his father almost felt glee in telling him about the shooting.
Years later, Ray Cash said he wished he had handled the incident differently. “I wouldn’t have killed that dog if I had thought about it,” he told Christopher S. Wren for a biography, The Life of Johnny Cash: Winners Got Scars Too, in the early 1970s. “I dragged the dog back into the woods. I hated the killing, but it was done. J.R. found the dog and he came and asked me why I shot him. I told him. He never said anything about it to this day.”