Johnny Cash: The Life

  Though the elder Cash never said anything on the record about his thoughts regarding J.R. and Jack, there remained a lingering resentment over the tragedy.

  “Grandpa always kind of blamed Dad for Jack’s death,” says Cash’s daughter Kathy. “And Dad had this real sad guilt thing about him his whole life. You could just see it in his eyes. You can look at almost any picture and see this dark sadness thing going on. Dad even told me…that one time when his daddy had been drinking, he said something like, ‘Too bad it wasn’t you instead of Jack.’ I said, ‘Oh, my God, Dad. What a horrible thing to say.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I think about that every time I see him.’”

  IV

  J.R. was walking down a colony road one day more than a year after Jack’s death when he was surprised to hear music coming from one of the wooden houses. He didn’t know at first if the voice and guitar strumming were from a record or someone inside. Curious, he walked up to the door, where he saw a boy about his age singing and playing an old Ernest Tubb hit called “Drivin’ Nails in My Coffin.”

  The boy, Jesse Barnhill, invited J.R. inside; he was delighted someone else was interested in music. J.R. had seen the teenager around school, but he had never spent any time with him. Jesse suffered from polio, which made walking difficult and clumsy. His paralyzed right arm was only half as long as his left, and his right hand was withered. J.R. marveled that the boy could play the guitar.

  Jesse tried to teach J.R. how to play, but J.R. didn’t catch on. Even so, J.R. longed for one of the guitars he saw in the Sears Roebuck catalog, especially the Gene Autry model, thinking it would be fun to hold while he was singing. But the family couldn’t afford it, so he mostly just sang along while Jesse copied the guitar parts from the records.

  Not only did J.R. start spending a lot of time with Jesse, but also he helped his friend overcome his hesitancy and brave the outside world—ignoring the kids who made fun of him. With J.R. leading the way, they’d go to the town center, usually to see a movie or listen to the jukebox in the tiny café. They’d often be joined by Harry Clanton, who was in J.R.’s class. J.R. liked Harry because he had a wonderful sense of humor, and J.R. loved a good joke. Together, J.R. and Harry became known as cutups and pranksters in class—going to elaborate means to entertain the other students with such antics as leaving a dead squirrel in the teacher’s desk drawer or causing havoc in the library by pulling out scores of books and putting them back in the wrong places.

  When J.R. was feeling especially aggressive, the pranks would take on a harder edge. He loved, for instance, to break bottles he’d find stacked up behind stores in town or sneak into a field at night and set fire to a farmer’s haystack. In the Dyess High School annual at the end of his junior year, Cash was called “historian” for his interest in the subject, while Clanton, who was known throughout the school as the mastermind behind all the pranks, was simply “The Schemer.”

  After his weekly trip to the movies, Cash never had enough money to play the jukebox, but he did a good job of talking others into pushing the button next to the name of Eddy Arnold, who had become a new favorite. Arnold was the hottest thing in country music in the mid-1940s, thanks to such records as “I’ll Hold You in My Heart (Till I Can Hold You in My Arms).” Unlike the rawer honky-tonk style that J.R. usually preferred, Arnold sang with a crooning, pop-flavored approach that made him sort of the Bing Crosby of country.

  One day in the summer of 1947, J.R. heard on the radio that the cast of one of his favorite radio shows, the High Noon Roundup, was coming to Dyess for a concert. The whole Cash family listened to the show, which was broadcast live over Memphis station WMPS, during their lunch breaks from the fields. J.R. arrived at the school for the concert two hours early with Jesse and Harry. He puffed anxiously on a cigarette, hoping to figure out a way to meet the Louvin Brothers, who were the stars of the weekday program.

  J.R. recognized Charlie Louvin when he got out of a black Cadillac, and the teenager’s knees shook as Louvin walked toward him. All Louvin wanted was directions to the restroom, but J.R. took advantage of the request to escort the radio star there. He wanted to ask Louvin how he could get into the music business, but he didn’t have the nerve. Just walking alongside Louvin, however, made the whole idea of being a professional singer seem more possible.

  After the show, J.R. and his friends watched as the musicians put their equipment into their car and headed back to Memphis. J.R. would have given anything to be in the car with them. When Louvin waved at him as they pulled away, it was his biggest thrill since Eleanor Roosevelt shook his hand. In the weeks after the concert, J.R. started thinking of country singers and the Roosevelts in the same light. They both brought people together and made them feel good, and people cheered them. He assumed, of course, they must all be Baptists.

  V

  As J.R. moved through high school, he began to feel increasingly anxious about his future. For all the time he had spent thinking about being on the radio, he realized he didn’t have any idea how to make that happen. There was no station in Dyess where he might try to persuade someone to give a local boy the chance to show what he could do. J.R. still talked to his family and a few friends about being on the radio someday, but privately he was starting to worry.

  Truth be known, Ray wasn’t the only one in the Cash family who had doubts about J.R.’s musical dreams. Carrie wanted to support her son, but his voice was high-pitched, not at all husky and deep-rooted like the singers on the radio. Besides, he was shy. How could he be a singer if he couldn’t stand before an audience? Carrie had tried to help J.R. with his insecurity by arranging for him to sing in front of the church congregation. Cash later called it the “most horrible experience of my life.” It might have been all right in church if his mother had been onstage with him, but he found himself standing next to the preacher and a stranger on piano. He felt as if he “totally bombed,” but his mother didn’t give up; she kept pushing him to sing before the congregation, and every time J.R. felt embarrassed. It wasn’t the singing—it was the people watching him.

  That wall of shyness began to crack one afternoon in the summer of 1947. Carrie and Joanne were doing the dishes in the kitchen when they heard a voice through the open window singing a new gospel song that had been sweeping the country, “Everybody’s Gonna Have a Wonderful Time Up There.”

  Carrie looked out the window and saw fifteen-year-old J.R. pumping water into a bucket.

  “Is that you singing, J.R.?”

  He spun around and smiled, “Yes, Mama. My voice has gotten a little lower.”

  Carrie called her son into the kitchen and she cried as she hugged him.

  “You’ve got a gift, J.R. You are going to sing,” she told him. “God’s got his hand on you. You’re going to carry the message of Jesus Christ.”

  Carrie was so caught up in J.R.’s “gift” that she vowed to do what she could to nurture him. She wanted J.R. to take singing lessons, but he resisted for almost two years. Finally, Carrie insisted. She was making $5 to $6 a week using the family’s new washing machine to launder the clothes of some of the schoolteachers. She set aside $3 for once-a-week lessons with a young teacher in Lepanto, a larger town eight miles away. J.R. went along grudgingly each week to see LaVanda Mae Fielder. It might have been okay if she had let him sing songs he knew, but he had to sing songs the teacher thought were good vocal exercises, such as the Irish ballad “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.”

  After just three lessons, Fielder was frustrated by the teenager’s lack of progress. To make him more comfortable, she changed her strategy. She asked him to pick a song. He thought immediately of Hank Williams, whose “Lovesick Blues” was all over the radio in the early months of 1949. The chance to sing one of his favorite new songs freed J.R., and his voice was so engaging, the teacher closed the lid on her piano and told him the lessons were over. He shouldn’t ever let anyone change his style, “ever,” she repeated forcefully.

  These words gave J.R. enough
confidence finally to stand in front of the church congregation without quivering. He started becoming more active at school, too, widening his group of friends and even showing his poems and other writings to some of his classmates. He gained such a good reputation as a writer that several of his friends paid him—usually about fifty cents—to write their homework poems or essays. “He was good with words,” recalls J. E. Huff. “He was smarter than we were. That’s for sure.” Classmate A. J. Henson liked a poem that J.R. wrote for him so much that he could still recite it more than five decades later:

  The top hand mounted his trusty steed

  And rode across the plain.

  He said, “I’ll ride until setting sun

  Unless I lose my rein.”

  The top hand gave a jerk

  And Bob drew up the slack.

  He rode his trail until setting sun

  Then rode a freight train back.

  A.J. got an A on the assignment.

  Still, J.R. couldn’t shake the pressure of needing to find a job after high school. All the years his father told him he was foolish to waste his energy on music had left an impression.

  VI

  As their senior year approached, J.R. and his friends spent many an evening trying to figure out how to escape the toilsome life their parents led. “The only thing we knew for sure was we weren’t going to be farmers,” Huff says. The government program in Dyess had given people like Ray Cash the chance to survive, but never to flourish. The land was worked so hard that it had already lost what richness it had had, making it almost impossible for families to break even. Many of the long-timers left the delta settlement for Memphis, just fifty miles away, or other parts of the country where they could find better pay and easier work. Ray Cash began taking odd jobs in nearby towns to supplement his income.

  With his pals, J.R. weighed the merits of the main career paths that young men from poor families in the South often chose in the 1940s: head north to the auto plants in Michigan or join the military. There was also a third option—head to California in hopes of claiming agriculture jobs—but no one in Dyess wanted anything further to do with harvesting crops. Henson was the first of the three to make the break. While J.R. and J.E. returned to school, A.J. joined the Army.

  On the outside, things were good at school during J.R.’s last year, though his grades, as usual, were only a little above average in most classes, even his favorites, English and history. He was elected class vice president, appeared in school plays, and was chosen to sing at the commencement exercises—not a country song, but “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,” an expression of faith with lyrics from a seventeenth-century poem by Ben Jonson. In the yearbook, the editors made a special mention of him: “It was in this year that one of our number showed so much talent on the stage, both as an actor and with his voice, that we think he should be publically recognized: this boy was J.R. Cash.”

  But the good feelings of his final school year didn’t last long. Deep inside, J.R. couldn’t shake the fact that he had no idea how to break into the music business. He thought about heading to Nashville, the home of country music, but he knew he didn’t have the courage to do it, and that left him despondent. By graduation day, even the joys of his solitary walks had faded.

  Desperate to demonstrate his independence from his father, J.R. heard there were some jobs available in west Arkansas picking strawberries, and, despite all his years of dreading picking cotton, he headed for the town of Bald Knob. The trip proved a bust; the strawberry crop was too small for him to make any money, so he headed home after three days. Not knowing what to do next, he happened to bump into Frank McKinney, a barber in Dyess. McKinney was thinking about taking the bus to Michigan to try to find a job in the auto industry, and he invited J.R. to go along. J.R. agreed so quickly that he spent much of the bus ride wondering if he was making a mistake.

  In Michigan, J.R. got a job the first day as a punch press operator at the Fisher body plant in Pontiac. He walked a mile and a half to work each morning, but this wasn’t like the gravel road in Dyess. He couldn’t sing on the city streets, and he didn’t have enough spirit left to daydream. He felt trapped. The only thing to keep him company was his chain-smoking. From the first day, he found the work tedious and repetitious—far worse than picking cotton back home, because he wasn’t surrounded by the love of his family and community. For the first time, he also felt the sting of being branded an outsider, someone who was considered inferior—and this experience led him to begin to question some of the racist attitudes prevalent in Dyess.

  While J.R. was working on a Pontiac one day, the fender slipped and cut his arm. When he went to the medical office, a doctor looked at his file card and smirked when he saw the words “Dyess, Ark.” “All you Southern hicks are always just looking for a way to get off work,” he said. J.R. tried to explain that it was an accident, but the doctor was unbending. Cash recalled the doctor’s response: “How long you gonna work here? You gonna get yourself a good paycheck or two and then split like they all do?”

  A few days later, Cash came down with stomach flu, but he wouldn’t go back to the doctor; he didn’t want any further abuse. The landlady at his boardinghouse gave him a big glass of wine and told him to get some sleep—he’d feel better in the morning. He did feel better the next day, but he decided he was going home. Between the monotony of the work and the anti-Southern bias, after a couple of weeks he’d had enough of the car factory. He hitchhiked back to Dyess.

  His mother was thrilled to see her son, but she was also alarmed by how skinny J.R. was. He had always been slender, which is why he hadn’t joined the sports teams at school with most of his pals. But he was now down to 140 pounds, low for a six-foot teenager. Carrie did her best to stuff him with home cooking around the clock.

  Despite his craving for independence, J.R. was so desperate to get a job that he accepted his father’s offer to try to get him taken on at the oleomargarine plant near Dyess, where Ray was working. Predictably, J.R. hated the regimentation and he quit after a few days. Ray just shook his head once again. J.R. wondered if his father wasn’t right after all. Maybe he wouldn’t amount to anything. Maybe he was lazy and unfocused.

  With nowhere else to turn, he decided to follow his father’s lead one last time and do what Ray had done three decades earlier. He would join the military. J.R. always enjoyed hearing his father talk about his adventures in World War I and about such appealing perks as going to Paris and seeing the Eiffel Tower. Besides, this was one way to finally please Ray. He first thought of joining the Army, like the elder Cash, but the Air Force seemed more glamorous and probably safer in case all the talk about war in Korea proved true.

  On July 7, 1950, J.R. drove the family’s 1945 Ford to Blytheville and enlisted in the Air Force. Because regulations required a first name rather than initials, J.R. wrote down John, though no one had ever called him that. When asked for a middle name, he wrote simply R. He was just six weeks past high school and, after many false starts, he was finally saying good-bye to Dyess.

  In his mind, however, J.R. would return to his hometown frequently—not just the house on Road 3 and his family, but also the wider community and all that it had meant to him. He’d sometimes imagine himself walking out of the movie theater in the town center and turning to the right, where he could see the porch of the administration building where Eleanor Roosevelt had stood. He would turn left, walk one block down Main Street, and see the old Baptist church, head another block down Main and picture the school library and the assembly hall where he’d seen the Louvins. A little farther along Main and J.R. could imagine the spot on the riverbank where he often fished and another spot on the river where he was baptized. It was a short stretch of land, just 250 yards, but he knew that the lesson of Dyess was one of inspiration and hope.

  As J.R. said good-bye to his family at the station in Memphis and boarded the train for Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, the initial excitement of joining the
service quickly gave way to nervousness. He found himself staring out the window, avoiding conversation with the other enlistees, some of whom seemed to relish the adventures ahead. One of his worries when he’d signed up had been getting sent into battle in Korea. He was now fretting over another kind of survival.

  As with the trip to Michigan, he soon began asking himself if he hadn’t made a mistake. If anything, the failure of the Pontiac experience made him even more apprehensive. Would this trip, too, end in disaster? Was he smart enough to compete with the boys from the big city? Would the recruits from the North treat him with contempt like the doctor in Pontiac?

  What about his spiritual values? He wasn’t used to being around alcohol, and he had never had a serious relationship with a girl. Would he be able to stay on the right path, or would he let Jack and his mother down? Could he actually flunk out? Would the Air Force send him home if he didn’t measure up?

  The thought of that possible humiliation numbed him. He couldn’t shake his fear of what lay ahead. J.R. finally just laid his head against the seat and hoped, as he often did in moments of stress, to find that comfort in the escape of sleep.

  Chapter 2

  Vivian and the Air Force

  I

  JOHN R. CASH, as he was now starting to think of himself, was one of thousands of men rushed through the revolving door of basic training at Lackland in the late summer of 1950, the normal thirteen-week training schedule cut to seven as the country mobilized for war in Korea. For someone whose high school class had numbered just twenty-two, the size of the operation was overwhelming.