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The Sinner, The Saint, and The Songs - Unpacking Johnny Cash · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_03: Hello, Alex.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_03: I'm Kelly Shores.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, good to meet you, Kelly.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_02: Nice to meet you too.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_02: How are you today?
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_02: I'm alright.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_02: What's up?
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_02: I'm uh excited to be here recording with you on Dirtnap City, the podcast about interesting dead people.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: And today I want to talk about somebody that everybody's heard of.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody, all Americans, probably most people around the globe have heard of, but is a um very, very complex person.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: Somebody that I think uh really broke free from the genre that they started in and became a larger-than-life character, but somebody with a lot of flaws, like a lot of good to offer and a lot of flaws.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_02: Misunderstood?
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_02: So misunderstood.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: Oh.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: This guy was a 20th century guy born in 1932 in Kingsland, Arkansas, and he died in 2003.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: So kind of, you know, spanned 70% of uh the 20th century.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_02: Where did he die?
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: He died in um Tennessee.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: Near Nashville.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_02: Country boy.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yep.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_02: Was he known as a country boy?
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: He was.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_02: Uh he was he was said to be a terrible driver.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_02: That was one thing that he was actually like everyone that knew him said he was a terrible driver, wouldn't let him drive.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_02: You're not talking about the guy from the Ernest movies, right?
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um I'm not talking about Ernest P.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_02: Worrell.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um, pretty much the opposite of Ernest P.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_02: Warrell, honestly.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: This guy always stood up for the underdog.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: He was known to champion the causes of um poor people, uh, Native Americans.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he was also said to be generous to a fault, like almost to the point where he had so many people on his payroll that sometimes he struggled uh personally with his own finances, even though he made a lot of money.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_02: And you did you say it was an entertainer?
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, an entertainer.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he actually was primarily known as a musician, but he also had a TV show, he appeared in movies, he wrote some books, um, he directed a movie.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um he was primarily a country musician, and he was famous for the color of his clothes Johnny Cash.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_03: I was just before you said that, I was just about to say Johnny Cash.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_03: I didn't know he was born in Arkansas.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_03: He was born in Arkansas, yeah.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_03: Very, very poor.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah, I'd love to hear about Johnny Cash.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_03: I was I've been to the Johnny Cash Museum in Nashville.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_03: You ever been over there?
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_02: I have not, but but I do remember if you might may or may not remember this, when we were at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, they had the Johnny Cash tour bus out front.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_03: Well, in Nashville, it shares a museum with the Patsy Klein Museum.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_03: You pay one price and you can go to both.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and it's it's um just like off in an alleyway off of Broadway there.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_03: And it's a really cool, it's a really I I love it, and they sell definitely sell lots of merch in that store.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_03: You know, they sell the sh the t-shirt with him with this mugshot.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_03: Um, yeah, the man in black.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_02: The man in black.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: Let's get into it.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_02: Well, he was born, as I said, in 1932 in Kingsland, Arkansas.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_02: His parents were Carrie and Ray Cash.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_02: And Cash was not a made-up name, by the way.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: Cash was his real name.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, it was traced back to um Ireland and was actually uh ancestors from way way back.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_02: So uh that name that name had been in his family for a long time um as cash.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_02: And he was actually not named Johnny or John, his his birth name was J.R.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_02: This is kind of like Al from Austin.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you know how he goes by those initials.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um he was named J.R.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_02: Cash, and that's what it was on his birth certificate, and that's because his mother, named Carrie, she wanted to name him John after her father, and then his father, Ray, wanted to name him Ray after himself, so they just went with J.R.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: He adopted the name John R.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: Cash when he went into the Air Force in 1950 because the Air Force would not accept JR.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: He had to have a given first name.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_02: So he he put in John, and he never had what R stood for.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_02: I guess it could have stood for Ray, but it didn't.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_02: It was just JR.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: So, um, and that's what his family called him growing up.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_02: He had six siblings.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_02: He had Jack, wait, what's JR?
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_02: JR.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he was he was just called JR.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it wasn't Junior either, it was JR.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_02: Six siblings growing up, uh, Jack, Tommy, Joanne, Margaret, Reba, and Roy, and therefore lots of uh nephews and nieces and such.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and they were cotton farmers, they were very poor.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: In 1935, when J.R.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: was three years old, they moved from where they were, um, which I think was Kingsland, to this place called Dice.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_02: So it was D Y E-S S, Arkansas.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_02: Now, have you ever heard of these colonies that uh FDR set up?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, and again, we're back to the Roosevelts.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_03: What were the colonies called?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, they were they were places where people who were poor could go and work on a farm, and they were able to, it was almost like a layaway plan.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_02: They could eventually own the land they worked on.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: So it was set up in such a way that they could farm this land and become landowners and become homeowners and and you know, kind of move up in the financial world based on um the work that they did.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_02: So they they moved to Dice, and Dice was an entire colony of this.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_02: This was something that it was part of the the New Deal after the Great Great Depression.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: No, I didn't know anything about that.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: So Dice, Arkansas was a town like that.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it was on a river, I forget the name of the river, but they worked the cotton fields, they would sing songs, they would uh sing a lot of gospel, a lot of hymns.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: His parents were very religious, and they actually had a flood on this river, and you know what that became the inspiration for later in life?
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: Hmm.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_02: How high is the water, mama?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's a three feet high and rising.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_02: You know the song?
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, how high is the water popping?
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: That was written based on the flood that uh J.R.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_02: experienced in Dice.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_02: Oh wow.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_02: So it's funny, we were talking in um in a previous episode about Irving Berlin, Irving Berlin, and how people didn't have radios in the 1800s and early 1900s.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: Well, in the 30s and 40s, they did have radios, and John J.R.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_02: would spend a lot of time listening to the radio, but his mother liked that he was into music, but his father didn't really support it.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_02: His father did not see music as a way to make a living.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_02: He thought his son should be more practical and should, you know, work a regular job.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_02: And his father never really approved of him being into music the way he was, even to the time when he became very successful as Johnny Cash, uh he never got that approval from his father.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I can see if you're a hard-working man that seeing somebody with a guitar could, you know, just show that they're kind of lazy or not working, you know.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_03: Having a guitar is something you did in your free time.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_02: And that that was his father's take on it.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_02: And that was uh something it was always a raw spot for him trying to prove to his father um that he was successful and that he did work hard.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but you're right.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_02: But but the interesting thing was he did actually work hard.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_02: He was out picking cotton, you know, at five years old with his brothers and sisters and um you know, going to school, and and I can't imagine what it was like to be a kid back then in that situation.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: Poor kid.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: He loved to fish, and he fished a lot with his brother Jack, who was uh older than him, and his brother Jack was kind of the golden child of the family, the one that, as a matter of fact, uh his father, you know, he he kind of had J.R.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_02: had some jealousy of his siblings because his father seemed to favor them.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_02: Well, his brother Jack studied the Bible constantly, they were a pretty religious family, and um his brother Jack wanted to be a preacher, and and J.R.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_02: looked up to him and looked up to that.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_02: Well, his brother Jack worked in a sawmill cutting boards at the age of like, I don't know, 11 or 12.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_02: And this is a time when when J.R.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_02: was 10, and he was cut by an unguarded table saw.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: He was pushing pushing some wood through the table saw.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_02: It got him, it stuck, and it cut him really badly.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_02: And the thing that always got JR was his father, his brother passed away from that accident um about a week later, and his mother and family had actually encouraged Jack to go fishing with JR that day.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_02: They loved to fish.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_02: This was one of their big, big getaways was to go fish.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: And his brother had stayed to work at the sawmill and ended up dead.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: And it really tore at him.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_02: Like he said throughout the rest of his life, he always remembered losing his brother and saying that he wanted to meet his brother in heaven because that's where he knew he would be.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_02: So big, big thing.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um, as a matter of fact, talking about not being lazy, according to um JR's sister, Johnny Cash's sister, Joanne, she said that when they attended Jack's funeral, that JR actually took up a shovel and helped dig the grave.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody else in the family did this, only J.R.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_02: did it.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_02: And he he was wearing his Sunday best and got down with the grave diggers and dug dug the grave.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_02: So carried that burden the rest of his life.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I mean, it wasn't his fault that his brother died, but it was just sad, I think, at that age or any age to lose a sibling, but especially as a child.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um, as I was saying, he was really into gospel music, he was listening to the radio a lot, and he grew up on the farm doing all the farm things, and things got a little better.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_02: The family was able to start to pay for the house that they were in and pay for the property.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_02: And then in 1950, um J.R.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_02: enlisted in the Air Force, officially becoming John R.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_02: Cash, and he um ended up going to Lackland Air Force Base, um, which is where my dad was stationed when I was born.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_02: So he was in San Antonio.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_02: There's there's several Air Force bases in San Antonio, there's Lackland, Randolph, um Kelly, which is where where I was born, um Brooks Air Force Base, I think.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: And he ended up going there to be radio operator.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_02: Well, while he was in San Antonio on his basic training, he met his future wife, Vivian, who was a local there in San Antonio.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: They they met uh at a park.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: He asked her to go roller skating, they went roller skating, they went had milkshakes.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it was all the classic classic uh 50 stuff.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_02: He felt very hard for her, for Vivian.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but then two weeks later, he was shipping off to um Landsburg, Germany, where he would serve in the 12th Radio Squadron of the Air Force.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_02: And this was the kind of thing that was kind of weird for him because he had never really had a girlfriend, and you know, he kind of was um falling in love for the first time.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_02: He leaves immediately and he went all in with her.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_02: He would send her letters daily, sometimes twice a day.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_02: They they said that between the two of them over the four years he was in the Air Force, there were over a thousand a thousand letters sent back and forth.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's a lot of letters going on.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_02: This is like you said the early 50s.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_02: Uh yes, yep.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_02: 1950 is when he joined the Air Force, so 50 50, 51 to 54, 55 time period.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_02: So relative peacetime.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh yeah, this was after Korea.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um he was, you know, it was kind of Cold War was going on, so he was there and in Germany.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_02: And this is funny because this is exactly what my dad did in Germany later in the 60s, 10 years later, my father was also listening to radio transmissions.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_02: And supposedly, um, Johnny Cash was one of the first people to hear, one of the first Americans to hear that Joe Joseph Stalin had died via Morse code when he was listening to the radio.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_02: He'd like to tell that story.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_03: Did your dad know that Johnny Cash had this same career?
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it's funny.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't know this.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_02: I knew I knew Johnny Cash had been in the Air Force.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_02: I did not know he had been in Germany and had been as part of the radio squadron.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so my dad and I never talked about that.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_02: My dad talked about it a lot.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_02: We talked a lot about his time in Germany, but he never mentioned Johnny Cash being there, you know, pretty much 10 years before he was.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_02: He probably didn't know that.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_02: Did did your dad like Johnny Cash?
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_02: My grandfather liked Johnny Cash a lot.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_02: My dad's dad.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_02: My dad's dad is the one who kind of turned me on to him.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_02: He had a lot of 45s of his.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: And and we had a he had they had a record player in Goodland, Kansas, and we would play records of.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_02: I remember they had Ray Stevens, they had several, you know, like The Streak.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: You remember that song?
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Ahab the Arab was one they had.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_02: And uh one about a gorilla.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, Harry, Harry the Harry Ape.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that was another Ray Stevens song.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_02: But they had Johnny Cash too.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_02: So we would listen to that.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_02: But he served this four years, got out of the Air Force in 1954, and immediately returned to San Antonio and asked Vivian to marry him.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_02: Now, Vivian's parents were pretty um concerned because she had only spent two weeks with him before before he shipped off.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_02: They had spent a lot of skating.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_02: Two weeks of roller skating, then he ships off, and then it's all letters and um and phone calls, you know, occasional phone calls back and forth.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, but he he was head over heels for her.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_02: And she was also Catholic, and John was Baptist, and so you know, I I think back then there was a lot more um, I mean, kind of like in Ireland, there was a lot more uh tension between Catholics and Protestants, Protestants, yeah.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_02: And so he he didn't really understand what it meant to be Catholic, and he had always heard that Catholics were you know going to hell because because of they were Catholic and not not Protestant, but he ended up um getting her hand in marriage.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_02: Uh they were married actually by Vivian's uncle, who was a Catholic priest, and John was willing to go to Mass.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_02: He he you know, he said, I'll do whatever it takes to have your daughter's hand in marriage.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_02: And then he and Vivian moved to Memphis, Tennessee.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um now one interesting thing about Vivian, do you know anything about her?
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_02: Vivian Cash?
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_02: I don't.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_02: She was Sicilian, German, and Irish, and didn't know that she had any um African, I guess you wouldn't even call it African American, but any black in her bloodline.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_02: But she did have that she looked like she was.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: And back then, you know, back in the 50s, it was pretty racist still.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh a black woman with a white man was was raised some eyebrows.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it was kind of like with her, I don't think she looked necessarily black, but she definitely looked mixed.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so they ended up getting a lot of racial threats from white sus white supremacist, white supremacist groups and things like that.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but again, Johnny being the person that I think stood up for the the little guy and the underdog, he stood by his wife, at least at first, you know, for a long time.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't think the reason they ended up getting divorced, spoiler alert, they did, it had nothing to do with race, it had to do with other things.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_02: But but um that was kind of an interesting little fact.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_02: And then Roseanne Cash, who was their oldest daughter, so they had four daughters, Johnny and Vivian, Roseanne, Kathy, Cindy, and Tara.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: And Roseanne, who is I think a pretty famous musician in her own right these days, she went on a show on PBS where they did um blood test for ancestry, and it turned out that there was black people in Vivian's uh family.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: But Vivian never knew this.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_02: She didn't know it.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_02: She went to an all-white school in San Antonio.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, she was just thought of as Italian and kind of olive-colored skin, you know, is was what they they said back then.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, it came to a point with these um threats and these things that were going on with people boycotting Johnny Cash's records.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_02: This all came a little later, that they had to issue a statement with her birth certificate and with her, you know, going into an all-white school.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: They they basically had to deny that she was black or that she had any black in her.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_03: Talking about being on the wrong side of uh history.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_02: And and and a lot of people actually it's really interesting.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_02: Everything I've read about Vivian um who he divorced later, was that she was a very strong woman, that she was a very, you know, she kind of was a big reason Johnny was successful.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_02: She she gave him the the support that he needed to become successful as a musician.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_03: Man, yeah, the spouse that's with you when when you start, when you're first starting.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_03: It's not the one they end up with.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_03: But man, they're the ones that put up with all of the nonsense and all of the heartbreak and drugs, infidelity, and and but also the ones to convince you to keep going that they see promise in you.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean uh be an interesting.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_03: We should do a whole podcast where every week we just talk about a different first wife or or husband.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_02: Or first husband, sure, of a of a famous uh I only talk about white guys on the show.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_02: So well, that would be the first husband.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, yeah, I see what you mean.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, yeah.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_02: So when um when they moved to Memphis, um Johnny got a job selling appliances door to door.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: Really, really tough thing to do because he was the new guy, so the territory he had was very um like kind of the poor part of town.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_02: He was trying to go in and sell appliances.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_02: The owner of the appliance store liked him a lot, but he was terrible at it because he was too honest.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_02: He would say, You don't need this, you know, you don't you don't need a washing machine.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_02: You're you know, you uh I I don't know if he would say you obviously can't afford it, but you know, when you're trying to sell somebody something and you just know they don't really need it, um, he he he kind of took that thing, like talk people out of buying things.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's probably how I would be if I was I think I would too be you know, just like hey, I'm really sorry to bug you, and yeah.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_02: So he did that for a while.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um he met a couple of guys named Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_02: Now, Luther and Marshall were auto mechanics, and he liked them, they got along, they were musicians.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um they uh Luther was the guitarist and Marshall was the bassist, and they formed what they called the Tennessee Two, and they formed a little band called Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two, and they were mostly playing gospel music because that was kind of what they knew.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and none of them were actually very good musicians, they were very they played very simple stuff.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_02: It's interesting again, the Irving Berlin thing that he wasn't a good musician.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: Johnny Cash had not owned a guitar until he went to Germany.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_02: Really?
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_02: That was the first time he started really messing around on a guitar.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: And these two guys, uh Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant, they were auto mechanics that just kind of played for fun.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_02: But Johnny decided, you know, he kind of decided when he was um in Germany and maybe even before that, that he wanted to be a recording artist.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_02: That was his his goal, his dream.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_03: Oh his voice, though, even his speaking voice.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_03: Like if I was his friend, you would say I would be like, Man, you should take up singing.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_03: You have a great voice.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_02: You've never told me that.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_03: That's true.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: That's true.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_02: So, do you know the record label that was in Memphis at that time?
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_02: Was it Sun Records?
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, Sun Records was there.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_02: So you could go to Sun Records and pay four dollars to record a record.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: Like if you anybody could do that.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_02: Just walk in, you know, they had the recording equipment.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_02: But then some records.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Sun Record had their own label artists.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: And at that time, the producer who owned the owner and producer at Sun Records was a guy named Sam Phillips.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_02: Now, Sam Phillips was also the one to discover people like Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, and all those guys were on Sun around this time.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_02: So Johnny Cash heard about this.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_02: You know, he really wanted to become a recording star or recording artist.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_02: He approached uh Sam Phillips, like literally stalked him on his.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: He was supposed to be out selling appliances, and he went to there and waited for Sam to show up one morning and said, Hey, I want to record a record.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_02: And Sam said, Well, it's four dollars, you know.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_02: Come on in, let's do it.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_02: And he's like, No, no, no, I want to, I want to be on your label.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_02: You don't understand.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Johnny Cash, or at this part pointy's John Cash.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_02: I'm the future John Johnny Cash.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_02: So he got together with uh Luther and Marshall, his his guitarist and his bassist, and they practiced and practiced, and then they came in and auditioned for Sam Phillips.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_02: Well, they auditioned initially with a gospel song called I Was There When It Happened, and he listened for a little while, and then he stopped him and said, Um, go home, sin, and come back when you have a song I can sell because I can't sell gospel.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: He wasn't into the idea of trying to sell or record gospel.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_02: So he actually now I don't know what song he used to audition, but in the movie, um, the movie is called the line Walk the Line with uh Joaquin Phoenix um and Reese Witherspoon plays June June Carter Cash.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: In that movie, after they bomb with the um uh gospel song, they start playing Folsom Prison Blues, and that catches his attention, and he says they got something.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_02: They let's wild in that audition too, right?
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_03: Um I don't know if they got wild.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_03: Have you heard that?
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I compared to what they were doing with the gospel song, didn't they rock out a little bit?
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_02: It was it was a rockabilly thing, and it it was it was a definite style.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_02: Like pretty much almost every Johnny Cash song sounds almost the same.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_02: Like the boom dick-a-doom, dick-a-doom, dick-a-doom, dick-a-doom.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_03: You know, is that kind of sounds like a train coming down the track?
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yes.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_02: He loved trains, he loved stories about trains, and a lot of his songs were about trains.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_02: You're absolutely right.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so his first sun recording was was uh a single called Hey Porter.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_02: Now, have you ever heard that song?
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_02: I have Hey Porter, Hey Porter.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_02: He had written a poem while he was over in Germany called Hey Porter, and he put it to music, and that became that first single, and it was a big hit.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_02: And then there was another song called Cry Cry Cry about you know, relationships gone bad.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: That was the flip side, and that release on Sun immediately was successful on the country hit parade.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_02: It's you know, it kind of hit the charts right away.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it proved that they had something there.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: And what was interesting that I've discovered is I do think of Johnny Cash as a do you think of him as a country musician, or what do you think of him as primarily?
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_03: I do.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I I yeah, I mean, country is his Americana is his roots, but yeah, he's much um probably closer to that genre.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_03: Not he doesn't resemble anything in today's country, but yeah, I mean at the time he was he was from there.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_02: But well, what Sam Phillips always pushed him for and pushed all his artists for was crossover into the pop charts.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_02: He he basically said to his artists, look, country is great, country is good, we can make money at country, but where you make the big money and where the where the um trends are going is in pop.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: And so they would pay a lot of attention to where they were on the country charts, but also on the pop charts, which I thought was really interesting.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_02: And I I listened to the um his biography, and every song that they were talking about, they would talk about where it was in the country charts and in the pop charts.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_02: Some would do real well in one and not in the other.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_02: Most did well in the country charts, but when he would have a crossover hit with a pop song, that was where he really was successful.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_03: But the songs were the same kinds of songs, like he wasn't changing his style or the types of songs, right?
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_02: So he really had uh a couple of different styles of songs.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_02: He had the, and I say styles, I mean they all kind of had a similar sound, but he did have kind of a rockabilly beat, a rockabilly thing going.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_02: That that that rockabilly was something that would cross over into rock and roll more um easily or into pop music more easily than traditional country music, right?
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_02: Because we're talking about here like the 1950s, traditional country music was was going way back to the original Hank Williams.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it wasn't Hank Williams Jr.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't, I mean, Whalen Will, Whalen Jennings, Willie Nelson, those guys weren't even around yet.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_02: You know, none of these big country stars were around during this time.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_02: This was early stuff.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_02: So he got to be friends with um Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, and the four of them um happened to be at the studio one night at Sun, and um they were just goofing around playing music, having a little jam session, and Phillips actually recorded it.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_02: Sam Phillips hit record, recorded that, and released it as what he called the million-dollar quartet.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_02: And he said basically, you know, it's the only time those four guys ever played together on a on a record.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_02: They toured, Johnny Cash started touring with um Carl Perkins and with Elvis Presley and with um Jerry Lee Lewis.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_02: Now, Jerry Lee Lewis was kind of a wild man.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know how much you've heard about him.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_02: He kind of did some things, he married a 14-year-old or something who was his cousin, right?
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_02: And and there were a lot of issues with him.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_03: But yeah, I've I've toyed with talking about him on the show, and it's just yeah, all the interesting things about him are a little gross.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yes.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um Johnny Cash then released what was gonna be his uh next record, and it hit number five on the country charts.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_02: It was based on a film he had seen when he was stationed in Germany, and the film was called Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison, released in 1951, and this was Folsom Prison Blues.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_02: And you know the song Dan Dan Dan Dan Dan Dan Dan Great Song.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_03: It is a great song.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_03: One of the most famous kind of that that that line that you just uh sang.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the line the line that was most famous in that was I shot a man in Rio just to watch it or in Reno just to watch him die.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_03: No, I mean kind of that bass line, the oh yeah from the guitar line.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_03: Great opening.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_02: So that song was actually based on a song from 1953 called uh Crescent City Blues, and a lot of the melody and a lot of the lyrics are taken but changed slightly from Crescent City blues to Folsom Folsom Prison Blues.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_02: And when he came up with that line, uh shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh his quote was, I sat with a pen in my hand trying to think of the worst reason for a person to have killing another person, and that's what came to mind.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, great, great, great poetry there.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, it really is.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's so harsh, but it's so brutal.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, um gets your attention for sure when you're listening to it.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_02: Well, he he was a big borrower of other people's songs.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_02: He did write some original songs, he played a lot of other people's songs over the years, but he also would take things like other songs and change them slightly to make them his own, and that's a great example from Crescent City blues to Folsom Prison Blues.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, that was something he struggled with for years and years was keeping up with the demand for new stuff.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_02: Are you talking about stealing?
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_02: I'm talking, yeah, I'm talking about but you wouldn't give the other people credit.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_02: He did not give uh Gordon Jenkins credit for Crescent City blues, and he ended up getting sued and having to pay$75,000 in a lawsuit uh to Jenkins.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_02: But I think that was a lot more common back then.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_02: I think back then you had songwriters that didn't play music and and they literally wrote songs for artists.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you know, we talked about Irving Berlin.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_03: Um yeah, but we've also talked about how white artists were stealing music from black uh artists.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so I mean a lot of that happened as well, especially in that genre.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_02: I I I think it happened, I mean, that probably happened a lot.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_02: I think it happened regardless of race.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_02: I think it was just kind of you heard a song you liked, and a lot of times um they would actually get an artist, several artists to record the same song.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, The Gambler by Kenny Rogers, right?
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_02: Both Kenny Rogers and Johnny Cash recorded that song.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the the producer who had gotten that song, and I forgot who wrote the song, it was somebody I hadn't heard of, but took it to both of them, had them both record it, and ended up releasing the the so Johnny Cash's version did get released on an album, but they didn't promote it.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_02: Johnny Cash didn't think that much of it, like he didn't really put that much effort into it, but Kenny Rogers did, and it became a huge hit.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_02: But to think if if he hadn't taken it to both, we wouldn't know that song.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_02: It would have just been uh another song on a Johnny Cash album you'd never heard.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_02: Have you heard the Johnny Cash version?
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's very flat.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, it's not good.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_02: No, it's not, it's not it's not nearly as good as it really worked better for uh uh Kenny Rogers' voice and for his kind of presentation of it, like the way he sings it and the storytelling.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_02: Johnny Cash was a great storyteller, but he had kind of a a lane that he stayed in with storytelling, yeah.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that song didn't really fit it.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_03: So he wouldn't have been good on The Devil Went Down to Georgia, though.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, big especially growing up uh Baptist and you know lots of religious gospel stuff, Charlie Daniels band.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_02: So he did have a big hit um soon after that, right as he was starting to tour.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_02: It was in 1956, uh, called I Walk the Line.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_02: So you know that song, right?
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah, classic Cash.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_02: Now that song, do you do you have any idea what that song was about?
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_02: Like the message.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: Because you're not I keep a close watch on this heart of mine.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: I keep my eyes wide open all the time.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: I keep the ends out for the ties of pine because you're mine.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: I walk the line.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: Alright, so what's that about?
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_02: He was touring, and there was a lot of temptation on tour with women, with drugs, with alcohol, with all the things that happened, and he wrote that for Vivian to say that he would be um walking the streets two years into their marriage.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_02: I got married in 54.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_02: He wrote that in 56, and he wrote that to say he would be faithful to Vivian.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_02: How that would be.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_02: No, it didn't, it didn't.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, um, but he wanted to.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_02: Like at the time, he he very much wanted to, and I'll talk a little bit about his um divorce from from Vivian.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_02: I guess I could bring that up now.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_02: Is part of the problem was she wanted to be at home.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_02: She wanted to be, they ended up moving to California.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, she wanted to be there with their four daughters.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_02: She wanted to be a mother, she wanted him to be a stay-at-home father.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um, she didn't, I think, realize when he first got into music what that meant, like him being gone as much as he was, him being on the road, him being away from his children, him being, you know, with beautiful people all the time and groupies and women screaming his name and you know, backstage groupies and all that sort of thing.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_02: Once she realized all that, and she also wasn't as into the music as he was.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: She did not um feel the need to talk about music or listen to music constantly like Johnny Cash did.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_02: He he felt the need to constantly be learning and grew apart.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, they had different interests, and and she saw him as somebody who should be uh a father first and a musician second, and he saw it the other way around.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_03: But it's crazy because the way you first established is that like love was so intense and so like he was willing to change his everything about himself, and then it's like oh yeah, well, we grew apart.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_02: When when he went into the Air Force and left her, he was he was just you know missed her so much for those four years they weren't together, and even in their early years of marriage, it was like that.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_02: But I think you're right, they they grew apart, he had different interests, he had other um people, women chasing him at that time, and particularly um June Carter Cash, who was his second wife.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_02: So, have you heard of the Carter family?
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_02: Are you familiar with there?
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_02: Kind of a kind of a revival folk um singing family.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_02: They had Maybell, Anita, June, Helen.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I think the father's name was Ezra.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_03: They were very popular in the kind of very popular Christian music circle.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_03: What didn't it call Christian music?
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_02: It was just gospel, gospel, yeah.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_02: And and very um interestingly in the movie, at least, I don't know if this was actually true, but in the movie, there's foreshadowing when he's living in Dice, Arkansas, you know, still a young boy, and he's listening to the radio, and June June Carter comes on to sing a song on the radio, and he hears her, and and you know, he's kind of smiling.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's like foreshadowing what's to come.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_02: Well, he ends up um he ends up with a promoter and manager named Saul Holiff.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_02: Up to this point, he had had, I think, people who had either been assigned to him by the record label or friends and family that had been his promoter and manager.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_02: Saul was based in London, Ontario, and he came to him with just this organization that Cash had never had before.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_02: He had a list of all the records, how they were doing on the charts, where they should play, where his best audiences would be, like all this stuff that he had never really thought of.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_02: It was kind of like today when you look at data analytics and stuff and you start to base things on that.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_02: Saul brought all of this to him, you know, in a more analog kind of way, but uh became his manager and really kind of helped him grow from a um small regional, primarily country star into a superstar.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_02: Saul did.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um but as he started to take off in the 50s, he started to become addicted to amphetamines and barbiturates.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_02: Now, the the reason for the amphetamines initially was they were literally driving their own cars, you know, three or four of them in a Cadillac or whatever, from city to city.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_02: They would end a show, they would drive to the next city, they would sometimes actually um they had uh shotguns with them, they would sometimes see a rabbit on the side of the road and shoot it and eat it because they they didn't always have enough money for food.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it was a pretty hard life, and the amphetamines were uh used to keep them awake, driving from show to show and give them the pep and the energy they needed to actually play.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_02: Well, this became a big problem because Johnny got very, very deeply addicted.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_02: He was taking way like way more than most people that were even the people using at that point didn't take as many as he did.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_02: And it made him very erratic, it made him very nervous, it made him very um moody.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_02: And his friends knew about this, and they really kind of uh tried to temper him or tried to control his temper and control all of this, but he was becoming he was a rising star, he had an ego, and he would blow them off and he would fire people and he would yell at people.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_02: He actually didn't like confrontation much, um, according to everybody that knew him, except when he was on the amphetamines, then he would be very confrontational.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's funny.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_03: The the more I listen to like um people that had entertainment careers that were addicted to drugs and hear their stories, and now you know they've been clean for 20 or 30 years, and you hear them a lot of them write books and they talk about it.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_03: You find that a lot of them got into drugs not to party, not to get high, but to like help to get by, exactly, because what a weird life, you know, getting uh going on stage at nine o'clock at night and coming off at 11 30 and then getting on a bus and driving to the next city and um not being able to having weird sleeping hours and yeah, having to be on your best at uh late at night and in front of hundreds or thousands of people.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm sure that stuff was so available and they had money, but it wasn't like let's go backstage and and um party as much a lot of the stories I hear.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_03: Um it wasn't about that.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_02: It was both.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think it was both, but I think the way he first was introduced to it was from having to drive and and being told, hey, this will as a matter of fact, they would they would actually talk about the distance from city A to City B in terms of how many pills you needed.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_02: So you know, if you're driving from you're driving back after a night game in Austin back to Houston, you know, it might be a two-pill.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, well, I I measure that in Dr.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_03: Peppers for sure.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_03: Too bad they didn't have it back then.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's two or three Dr.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_03: Peppers, depending on what time the game is.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_03: Bags of sunflower seeds.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_03: Um Skittles, actually.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_03: It's sunflower, I mean it's uh Dr.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_03: Pepper and Skittles.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_03: That's what keeps you awake.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_02: Mine is mine is those little Frappuccino Starbucks Frappuccinos and sunflower seeds.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um well this this was going on, and during this time is when he started um touring more with being put on with the um the Carter family and really getting to know June Carter.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_02: Now, June had been married um twice and had children of her own, and of course Johnny was still married and had four children, but the the common consensus is that he started having an affair with her before he divorced Vivian and the song Ring of Fire, um, which was a crossover hit, like it was a big rock song as well as a big I mean if you can think about that, uh love is a love is a burning thing, it makes a fiery ring.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I fell for you like a child, ooh, but the flames went wild.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_02: It was all about June Carter, it was all about how he felt.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_02: But you know what the big memorable thing about that song, one of them that everybody talks about, or at least in the book they were talking about, uh, that was different that nobody had ever done before that made it such a huge hit or helped make it such a huge hit.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_02: Can you think of what that is?
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_02: It's a musical thing.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_02: At the beginning of the song, the mariachis.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_02: Uh-huh.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody had done that on a country song.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_02: That was that was, or if they had, it was not as popular as as when he did it.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_02: And he said that came to him in a dream.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he asked the producer to try it.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_02: The producer was like, What?
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_02: You want mariachis in this country song?
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_02: And it turned out to be like the best thing he could have done on that song.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_03: It's a little cold-blooded though, since his wife that he was cheating on is from San Antonio.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yes, true.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_02: True.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_02: He, you know, it's funny, like the number of times he played back in Texas or in San Antonio and was on TV.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_02: I can only imagine how difficult it was for her to watch his meteoric ride rise once all that was going on.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, for sure.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_02: Well, um, he he and June had a um uh kind of on again, off again relationship.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_02: They were on the road together, traveling together.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_02: They had a big hit together.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh have you ever heard the song Jackson?
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_02: I'm going to Jackson.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_03: That was the best song from that movie, I think.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_03: I think that was they really that was great.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_03: And you know what's interesting Phoenix performed that song.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_02: That yes, yes.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_03: He he and um yeah, Reese Witherspoon actually sang it.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, great.
• 43:55
  unknown: Yeah.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_02: So did you see the movie?
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_02: That came out twenty years ago, right?
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_02: Oh.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: 2005, yeah.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_02: I think exactly 20 years ago.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_02: It was it was a great movie.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_02: I thought it was actually pretty good.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of stuff in it was from the book, but kind of condensed down a little bit.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so you know, basically, I walk the line was about him being true to Vivian, and then Ring of Fire was about him uh falling in love and leaving Vivian and leaving her leaving her for June.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_02: How long between those two songs?
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_02: Like three years?
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um let's see, uh Ring of Fire was in the late 60s, like 68.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_02: And and uh I walk the line was in the 50s.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_03: So uh was Ring of Fire his most popular song?
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_02: Uh yes, I think it was his well, actually Folsom Prison Blues might have been his most popular song.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_02: The the album that was recorded in Folsom Prison outsold the Beatles that year.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_02: It was it was one of the big as a matter of fact, Rolling Stone named it like number 38 of the greatest albums of all time of any genre, the the Folsom Prison thing.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_02: So while he was on drugs, he did a lot of stupid things.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_02: He was arrested several times.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_02: He actually was with his nephew in Los Padres National Forest in California, and he caused a fire that burned hundreds of acres and almost killed all of the um uh California condors that were around at that time.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_02: This was like their only habitat.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_02: I think it burned 508 acres, and it uh drove off or killed 49 of the 53 condors that were accounted for at that point.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my gosh.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_02: And his reaction when he was uh when he was pressed against it, the federal government actually sued him.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_02: He said, I don't care about your damn yellow buzzards.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_02: Not a great take.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_02: No, and I think he regretted that later because he he actually so I was also gonna mention um two two things.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_02: That was a that was a comment that comes across as very callous towards the environment, and he wasn't that way.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_02: He he he really this was the drugs talking, this was ego, and this was him being sued.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um, there was also a report that he had gone off when he was in Germany on a black soldier, an American black soldier who was with a white woman and had called him all kinds of racist names, and he had been drinking, and and that that was never substantiated, but it was a story that was told and that he really regretted it or denied it later, you know, like that wasn't something because the rest of his life and the times when he wasn't on drugs, he was standing up for prisoners, he was standing up for Native Americans, he was standing up for blacks, he was standing up for people that were the poor, poor whites, poor of every race.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so these couple of times when he said terrible stuff like that, it just was this sort of Dr.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_02: Jekyll and Mr.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_02: Hyde thing.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_02: So he he did end up in jail, um was arrested seven times.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_02: Probably the the biggest arrest was he had gone to El Paso and went across the border to Juarez to buy some drugs, and he was caught coming back, bringing them back into the US.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_02: 688 amphetamines and four hundred and seventy-five tranquilizers were in his guitar case back from Mexico.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_02: That's where he got um arrested, that's where the pictures were taken, that's where he spent the night in jail.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and he was actually given sort of a lenient uh sentence on that because the drugs were not necessarily illegal because he had bought them with a prescription in Mexico, but it was illegal for him to bring them back in that quantity.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_03: So they they like I said earlier, they market the hell out of that mugshot because his brand, at least his estate's brand, yeah, it's outlaw.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_03: Outlaw, right?
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, 100%.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_03: Did he embrace that?
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_02: Did he like that?
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_02: He did, and and he would use that when he was in the the prisons doing his concerts.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_02: You know, he would say, I've been in before, I've been arrested, I know what it's like, I know what it's like to be in trouble, I know what it's like to make a mistake, I know what it's like to uh feel like you're being um mistreated by the system.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_02: You know, he kind of he kind of really ran with all of that.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_03: So a lot of rappers do that, right?
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_03: Like that's part of their their uh mystique, right?
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_03: That they're you know gangsters or whatever.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yep, yep.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_02: In trouble with the law since the day I was born.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_02: I guess that's Willie Nelson, or that's Wayland Jennings.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_02: Good old boys.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_02: So one incident where he was arrested, he ended up writing a song about it called Starkville City Jail.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_02: Now, have you heard about what he got arrested in Starkville, Mississippi for?
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_02: Well, he was intoxicated, and it was two in the morning.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_02: He was wandering around on the street and he started to pick flowers out of somebody's yard, out of somebody's garden.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, and they called the police.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_02: The police showed up and arrested him for picking flowers.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, he says he actually he actually never did any time in prison.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_02: Everything he did was, you know, kind of yeah, he was in and out very quickly.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_02: But he said of that particular thing in Starkville that before the the cop let him out, he was given this kind of like shaming talk by the sheriff who said, Um, my my wife is a big fan.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna let you go, but you are really screwing things up for your fans, you're really screwing things up for your family, you know, like gave him this sort of father lecture, uh, the the sheriff from Starkville.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_02: And interestingly, he actually went back to Starkville, Mississippi years later and played a benefit and raised like$100,000 for the school or something.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_02: So he he felt like that sheriff had done him a big service by doing that.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_02: He did release an album in what was the name of it called?
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Bitter Tears in 1964.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it was uh Ballads of the American Indian.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_02: And this was sort of a concept album taken from the plight and the mistreatment of Native Americans by the government.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_02: Well, as you can imagine, some of his fans weren't big fans of that, right?
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_02: They they they kind of saw the cowboy as the the good guy and the Indian as the bad guy, and it cost him some fans, it didn't sell very well, it was considered too radical for the public, and Columbia Music, really the his record label at that time, he went from uh Sun Records to Columbia, by the way, uh really wasn't a big fan of that.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_02: They were they were like, get us more hits.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_02: I always thought he was part Native American.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_02: So uh he said he was, he claimed to be on his father's side, but in DNA tests, remember I said that um uh Roseanne Cash did a DNA test and found out that her mother was um had had uh blood from Africa.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh actually they didn't find any um Apache or Native American in Johnny Cash's blood.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_02: So he did tour for years and years with the uh Carter family.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, it was 13 years after they met.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_02: So they met in I think 1955, and in 1968, he proposed to June Carter uh during a concert in in Canada, and they got married in I sorry in 1968 he proposed.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_02: Did I say 55 to 68, 13 years?
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_02: So they got married in Franklin, Tennessee, and they had one son named John Carter Cash, who was born in 1970, so he's basically our age.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_02: So between them, they had I don't know, like nine kids or something.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um, June had, I think, two daughters.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_02: Johnny had four daughters, and then a son, so whatever, I guess seven, seven kids between them.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_02: Big family.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_02: He very much was in love with June, but he continued using drugs, and this was a problem because they wanted to continue to go on these um tours and do these shows, but he got very much into uh missing shows, canceling shows at the last minute, um, trashing hotel rooms, you know, he did all those things until his son was born, and that was kind of a uh turning point for him where he decided to clean up was after he and June had gotten married, he did the drugs for a while, and then when uh when John Carter Cash was born, he decided it was time for him to stop.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_02: He stopped taking drugs for several years, I think seven or eight years, but then he had an accident, and this involved his pet um ostrich.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_02: And he was attacked.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_02: He was attacked by the ostrich, it cut him up pretty badly.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_02: I'm looking for the ostrich's name here, I forgot what it was.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_02: It was like Elmer or something like that, and it cut him up pretty badly.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_03: And what he did to those condors, I wouldn't have bought an exotic bird.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_02: Right, right.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he had he had kind of a weird thing with with the birds after after that.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um so this ostrich uh injured him.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_02: He ended up on pain meds, and that was kind of a start back down another set of drug use into the 70s, and by 83, he was um so in such bad shape they ended up going to the Betty Ford clinic, and he was able to kind of kick it after going to Betty Ford.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that's great, and then he was clean the rest of his life, or did he uh relapse?
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I I there's talks that he kind of he he was never as bad as he had been, um, but he definitely kind of off and on with the amphetamines and pain meds and all that stuff.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_02: He he kind of had those things off and on over the years.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he did really become a big uh Christian later in this time period during the the late 60s and early 70s.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_02: He connected with Billy Graham, he went to a lot of Billy Graham's um, you know, those those uh meetings he would have, the big um Promise Keepers, those revivals, um and he considered actually um becoming a minister.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_02: I think he did actually get ordained and he was the um minister for one of his daughters, um one of his daughters' marriage.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_02: He went to the Holy Land to Israel with June, and he ended up doing a film about uh Jesus um in the Holy Land.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_02: They they shot it over there and he connected it with music, and it was not popular with most people, but it was popular with Billy Graham's crowd, and Billy Graham actually bought the rights away from the production company and uh showed it to his congregations for free.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_02: So that that made him happy.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he wrote a book about the Apostle John, or I'm sorry, about the Apostle uh Paul, um, called Man in White.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_02: And it was it was a fictional account of the life of Paul and kind of his conversations on the road to Damascus, and he uh he started studying the Bible more and more.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_02: He got he got very religious, and he also did actually have the right at this point because he had been such a big star for so long, that several record labels actually let him record gospel albums, yeah, which was something he had wanted to do.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_03: Well, and his voice, that haunting voice, hearing him saying gospel is a different experience.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_02: It is, it is it is incredible.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_02: He I I think he's well served for gospel and and probably country more more so than pop, you know.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but his biggest things that he was proud of in his life were these prison concerts that he had done.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_02: So he did his first uh prison concert was at San Quentin in California.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_02: He did a live show there, and then he did the um show at Folsom, and he actually recorded albums at both Folsom and San Quentin the second time in 68 and 69.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_02: And again, the Folsom City or the Folsom Um recording was considered to be uh one of the best albums of all time by Rolling Stone, like in the top hundred albums ever, and outsold the Beatles.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_02: It sold 6.5 million albums the year 1969 after he released it.
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_02: So it was a big hit for him.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_02: He also did a prison show in Sweden, which is an interesting place to do a prison show.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and he did um a lot of benefit shows.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_02: Do you know who Ira Hayes is?
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_02: No, so he has a song called The Ballad of Ira Hayes, and it was not a not a big commercial hit.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um Ira Hayes was a Native American and he was one of the soldiers featured in the photo of the U.S.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_02: flag being raised at Iojima in World War II.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, okay.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_02: So he was in that photo, and he became famous because of the song.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_02: You know, he had grown up poor, he had grown up on a reservation, and Johnny Cash made him famous because he wrote this song.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_02: Well, a lot of record companies would not promote the song.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_02: They thought it was unappealing, they didn't think it was something the public wanted to hear.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_02: He ended up in 1964 writing a letter.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_02: This was a little earlier than the things we were just talking about, where he um took an ad and billboard and said, This is a quote DJs, station managers, station owners, where are your guts?
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_02: I had to fight back when I realized so many stations were afraid of Ira Hayes.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_02: Just one question why?
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_02: Ira Hayes is a s is strong medicine, so is Rochester, Harlem, Birmingham, and Vietnam.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_02: And that actually ticked off a lot of DJs and ticked off a lot of record officials, this sort of aggressive way he took.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_02: But he believed in the song.
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he actually went and met Ira Hayes' mother after Ira Hayes had died.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_02: Ira Hayes actually had died um pretty tragically, just was found in his house on the reservation um alone and you know maybe had had too much to drink or something, but he he had died tragically.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_02: Johnny Cash went and met his mother and ended up getting a piece of jewelry from her that was um something that their their tribe would give to honor people, and he wore it around his neck for many years after that.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_02: Is it a good song?
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's kind of one of those ballady songs.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_02: I I'm not a I'm not a big fan of it.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_02: The message is really good, but it's you know, it's one of those the the legend of Jock Jack Henry, or um, you know, it's one of those kind of songs which aren't really my my uh cup of tea.
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um he ended up having his own TV show from 69 to 71, and guess what it kind of was?
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, it was a variety show and I love watching clips from the Johnny Cash um variety show because so you've seen some.
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah, tons of them.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_03: And he always seems like he's wearing like a uh tuxedo with like a blue, uh like a light baby blue, ruffled dickey or something.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_03: It was very it was very waiter the the outfits.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_03: And the oddest duets of like current pop songs, but not in his genre, but like he would sing them.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_03: He would sing them with like people like with Cher, you know, and people that he would yeah, Linda Ronstadt.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um yeah, I love those clips.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_02: Louis Armstrong, Neil Diamond, Kenny Rogers, James Taylor, Ray Charles, uh Roger Miller, Roy Orbison, Derek and the Dominoes, Joni Mitchell, and then somebody that was on his show that he was a big fan of and had met several times was Bob Dylan.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_02: Now I haven't seen that movie, A Complete Unknown.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_02: Have you seen that?
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, great movie.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_02: Was it good?
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um so Johnny Cash is featured in that, or at least a fictional Johnny Cash.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_02: Because they were friends.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_02: They played uh Girl from the North Country was was something that uh he played with Dylan pretty frequently.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's interesting because he wanted to break into that folk area as well.
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_02: He liked the folk music as protest songs, as songs about current times.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's he was a weird guy because he was very patriotic, but at the same time, he was also very woke.
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_03: For the time.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_03: The guy that plays him in the movie plays him interesting too.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_03: He plays him plays him drunk.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_03: Which he might have been, and he probably was high, yeah.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_03: But like he gives good advice, but then he is also like drunk.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_03: So I I love the way they position it in the movie, actually, because you you don't know as a viewer, like, is this good advice, or is this just coming from a guy who's drunk?
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_03: Um so it's it's really cool the way they the way they do that.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_03: He kind of plays.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_03: I want to see I want to see that movie.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and now now I really want to see it to see the Johnny Cash part.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's really good.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_02: It's not a big part.
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_02: There there was a quote on Ozark.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um one of the characters says, The best advice I can give you is don't take my advice.
• 1:02:50
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 1:02:50
  SPEAKER_02: Like, well, okay.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um, yeah, so so he had this show, he enjoyed it.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_02: He it started off a little rough because he felt like he was being told what uh acts to have on the show, and he didn't like that.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_02: He wanted it to be more country, more gospel.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_02: He got a little churchy with it, and people started to be turned off by that.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but he would also do kind of a thing on each episode where he would um talk about uh the country, like like traveling around the US on a train, and it was called like train trips or something like that, and he would put music to it and it would show different areas of the of the country and tell stories.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_02: He loved to tell stories.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, his whole big thing about a lot of his albums was his talking, right?
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_02: He talked, he talked on a lot of the songs, told stories, played the music, and then would tell more stories, which yeah, I thought was kind of an interesting.
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_03: I don't love those songs.
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_03: There's a kind of like you said, it's just not my cup of tea.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_03: Um, because he has such a good singing voice.
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_03: I don't like it when he like narrates over songs.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_03: And he did that a lot.
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_03: He does that a lot, yeah.
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so my mind wanders when I hear those.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not usually listening, especially if I'm in the car, I'm not listening to the story.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_03: You know, yeah.
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_02: He he um got to be friends with Chris Christofferson, and there was a song called Sunday morning coming down.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_02: Don't know if you've ever heard that one, but it's kind of about having been out and you know, done too many drugs and alcohol on Friday night.
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_02: And in it, there's a line that says, Um, on Saturday morning, oh sorry, on Sunday morning sidewalk, I'm wishing Lord that I was stoned.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_02: And there was a big broha about that because he wanted to play it on this show, and they wanted him to change um the lyric to uh I'm wishing Lord that I was not alone.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's not doesn't mean the same thing.
• 1:04:50
  SPEAKER_02: And and he didn't.
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_02: He stuck to it and he said he sang it the way he wanted to sing it.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_02: The Statler brothers were a big part of that show.
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um Billy Graham became a big part of that show, and it it went on for a little while.
• 1:05:05
  SPEAKER_02: He eventually stopped doing the show.
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_02: He started to realize that his ability to write songs and to sell albums and to have big hits was starting to drop.
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_02: That wasn't happening as often, but he could still tour.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I think I mentioned earlier that he was generous to a fault.
• 1:05:24
  SPEAKER_02: He had on his payroll, he had 30 or 40 people.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_02: His his business organization was called House of Cash, and it was his entertainment and management company.
• 1:05:35
  SPEAKER_02: And he, you know, he had his family, he had the Carter family, he had his musicians, he had his drivers, he had, and he treated them all, he paid them all really well.
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_02: He treated them all like when they traveled, they traveled first class.
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so while he made a lot of money, he had to um really he kind of struggled with his finances because his outflow was so big.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_02: And June was the They owned houses in New York.
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_02: They owned a house uh you know, they had an apartment in New York City, they had a house in Jamaica, they had a house in uh several in Tennessee, California, like lots of houses, lots of and you know, all with really nice furniture, and so he kind of struggled with money because he was bad with his money.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_02: I wonder if he took care of Vivian.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_02: I think he had to.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_02: I think there was a settlement there where you know he had four girls, he had alimony, he had um child support that he had to pay, all that stuff.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_02: Vivian actually wrote a book called uh I walked the line with Johnny Cash or something like that.
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_02: That's a great title.
• 1:06:41
  SPEAKER_02: Throwing it back at him.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_02: His whole thing with wearing black, um, you know, he had a song about that, and and that was kind of one of those talky songs whereas I wear the black for the prisoner who's um oh yeah.
• 1:06:53
  SPEAKER_03: I think I've heard that song.
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's not it's not a great song, but he said he actually said in reality that he they started wearing black because it was the only thing that he and the Tennessee two had that matched.
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_02: They all had black shirts, and then he said after that it was just a practical thing because on the road, you know, you might not get a chance to wash your clothes, so a black shirt was gonna look better after three nights of wearing it than a white shirt.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_02: Sure, you could have mustard stains on it.
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you'd never know.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_02: As I said, his his company was called House of Cash.
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_02: After he died, his son and his daughter-in-law uh took it over, and they formed Cash Cabin Enterprises, and that's the ones that have the um the Johnny Cash Museum and sell all of his merchandise, and you know, we talk we talk sometimes about the richest people in the world who are dead, you know, like their estates are still making millions.
• 1:07:48
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure he's up there.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'm sure.
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_02: A couple of more interesting things before before he died.
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um he did uh record with Rick Rubin, which I thought was pretty interesting.
• 1:08:00
  SPEAKER_02: So, like have you ever heard his covers of uh um Hurt Trent Reznor?
• 1:08:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 1:08:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Hurt that's that was his last big hit, and it was a big hit too.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_02: It was, it was, and Trent Reznor actually said that he was skeptical of it, but that when he heard it, he was pleasantly surprised that it was something that um he actually kind of liked.
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_03: Um and he And didn't didn't he also do that uh uh God's gonna cut you down that sooner or later.
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yep, that was in that same record.
• 1:08:29
  SPEAKER_02: It was, yes.
• 1:08:31
  SPEAKER_02: And he did one by Depech Mode.
• 1:08:33
  SPEAKER_02: Personal Jesus.
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_02: Personal Jesus, yep, yep.
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_02: He was on a few interesting television shows in addition to his own.
• 1:08:39
  SPEAKER_02: He was on a lot of he was in a lot of movies, several were flops, several were okay, but mostly flops in his movies.
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but he was on the Muppet Show.
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_02: I thought that was kind of cool.
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 1:08:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he was on Saturday Night Live with Elton John, which really I thought was a pretty good deal.
• 1:08:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he was on Hee-Haw several times, four episodes of Hee-Haw.
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_02: Sesame Street.
• 1:09:01
  SPEAKER_02: We talked a little bit about that.
• 1:09:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um and then I thought this was kind of cool.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_02: He actually played the voice of a coyote in uh The Simpsons in 1997.
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_02: Have you ever seen the episode of The Simpsons where Homer takes a he eats a chili and he starts to hallucinate?
• 1:09:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's like magic mushroom kind of chili.
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_02: No, I don't think I have.
• 1:09:22
  SPEAKER_02: Well, he meets this coyote out in the desert, and Johnny Cash is the voice of the coyote, which is kind of cool.
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_02: He was friends with uh Richard Nixon all the way through to Jimmy Carter and uh uh George Bush, the first George Bush.
• 1:09:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um actually Jimmy Carter was a distant cousin of June.
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_02: So big big connection there, both from the South.
• 1:09:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um and he also was involved.
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, he was the Grand Marshal of the United States Bicentennial Parade.
• 1:09:57
  SPEAKER_02: We talked about the bicentennial.
• 1:09:59
  SPEAKER_02: You want to know what that is?
• 1:10:00
  SPEAKER_02: And then you were talking about his outfit that he wore um during uh the show.
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_02: So during that bicentennial parade, he wore an outfit or he wore a shirt from a guy named Nudie Cone.
• 1:10:13
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah.
• 1:10:14
  SPEAKER_03: You know who that is?
• 1:10:15
  SPEAKER_03: Nudie suits.
• 1:10:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, nudie suits.
• 1:10:17
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, nudie suits are a big deal in Tennessee, man.
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_02: I had never heard of that.
• 1:10:22
  SPEAKER_02: Really?
• 1:10:22
  SPEAKER_02: So I had to look it up.
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it was a Ukrainian guy, and that was his nickname was Nudie.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_03: If you go to Nashville, you see those, you can get you can get one made, like an original.
• 1:10:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you can get one.
• 1:10:36
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Nudie is dead.
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_02: He died in 84.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, but they still you can you can still get yourself one.
• 1:10:42
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, okay.
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_02: I thought it was a rapper thing, because I've heard of like Lil Nudie and uh that's a whole different thing.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh well he he had the country music hall of fame.
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_02: He was the youngest person inducted at the age of 48, but he was also inducted into the rock and roll hall of fame.
• 1:11:02
  SPEAKER_04: Wow.
• 1:11:03
  SPEAKER_02: He also was in a super group with Whelan Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Chris Christofferson.
• 1:11:08
  SPEAKER_02: Do you remember that one?
• 1:11:09
  SPEAKER_03: So this is one of the things that I think about a lot is why that the Highwaymen, yeah, why they weren't bigger.
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_03: Because that's like a traveling Wheelbury's type of before traveling Wheelbury's.
• 1:11:22
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's actually what gave the Traveling Wheelburries like the idea.
• 1:11:27
  SPEAKER_03: Um and I think they came up with three records over like a 10-year stretch, and I don't know why they weren't more popular.
• 1:11:35
  SPEAKER_03: They were good.
• 1:11:36
  SPEAKER_03: They were I I listened to the record.
• 1:11:39
  SPEAKER_03: I think every one of those guys were on the down side of their career at that time.
• 1:11:45
  SPEAKER_03: Except for Willie Nelson.
• 1:11:47
  SPEAKER_03: I don't feel like he ever has a downside.
• 1:11:50
  SPEAKER_03: But in terms of being um 1985, Willie Nelson was probably actually really popular at his like his peak then in terms of pop crossover.
• 1:12:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:12:02
  SPEAKER_03: I don't understand why that group wasn't bigger than they were.
• 1:12:06
  SPEAKER_03: Like you'd think their tours would have done really well, but I don't think they were.
• 1:12:11
  SPEAKER_03: I don't I think they're commercially, I don't think that was very successful.
• 1:12:15
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, those are four giants.
• 1:12:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they are, they are, and you wonder why that doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna be a hit though.
• 1:12:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh they did make three albums though, and um I think they were pretty well received.
• 1:12:27
  SPEAKER_02: The the one thing we haven't talked about with regard to and actually uh just strange little fact um for a little while after he divorced um Vivian, he was roommates with with Whalen Jennings in in Nashville.
• 1:12:42
  SPEAKER_02: He and he and Whalen had a uh apartment.
• 1:12:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:12:48
  SPEAKER_02: That was that was in the movie.
• 1:12:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um there was a quick scene where you see them in the apartment.
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um and the person that plays Whalen was shooter shooter Jennings, his son.
• 1:12:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_02: So um the one thing we haven't talked about was novelty songs.
• 1:13:05
  SPEAKER_02: So you you don't really think of Johnny Johnny Cash with novelty songs, but you know, he played he did a lot of them.
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_02: He did one way back early called Luther Plays the Boogie Woogie.
• 1:13:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um he did one called A Boy Named Sue.
• 1:13:21
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe you've heard that one.
• 1:13:22
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, of course, yeah.
• 1:13:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um that was a pretty big hit.
• 1:13:25
  SPEAKER_02: He did one called One Piece at a Time.
• 1:13:27
  SPEAKER_02: Have you heard of that?
• 1:13:28
  SPEAKER_02: No, why would you call Boy Named Sue a novelty song?
• 1:13:31
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's kind of a it's kind of a funny song about a boy named, you know, a boy who has to, and you know, at the end he's like, and if I ever name my if I ever have a son, I'll name him Bob Joe, not Sue.
• 1:13:44
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's yeah, I guess there's a little comedy shtick in it.
• 1:13:48
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, I see what you mean.
• 1:13:49
  SPEAKER_02: Uh One Piece at a time was a song that he didn't think was gonna do well, but it ended up being a big hit.
• 1:13:56
  SPEAKER_02: It was about a um a guy who works in a car factory and he can't afford a Cadillac, but he always wanted one, so he steals one piece at a time and builds his own Cadillac.
• 1:14:08
  SPEAKER_02: Kind of funny.
• 1:14:09
  SPEAKER_03: But the the one that That's how we're gonna do when we when we send that Cadillac to our Patreon uh listener, it's gonna be one piece at a time over a number of years.
• 1:14:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yeah, and and and in the song that's what happens.
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_02: It's like over ten years he steals all.
• 1:14:23
  SPEAKER_02: And and the parts don't act necessarily fit because it is year after year.
• 1:14:27
  SPEAKER_02: So in 1984, he did a record or a song titled The Chicken in Black.
• 1:14:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I watched the video for this, and it's about um Johnny Cas.
• 1:14:37
  SPEAKER_02: Basically, his his um brain has given out, but his body is okay.
• 1:14:42
  SPEAKER_02: So they transplant or they transplant the brain of an armed robber into Johnny Cash's body, and he becomes an armed robber with a guitar, and so he's running around robbing banks using a guitar, but then it turns out that a chicken got cash's brain and is becoming a pop sensation.
• 1:15:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's the dumbest song, but it's actually great.
• 1:15:08
  SPEAKER_02: Like it really sounds like him, and and it it's uh I'll I'll I'll probably finish the show with that one because I think it's so funny.
• 1:15:17
  SPEAKER_02: He liked it at first, it was played during his 1984 Christmas special, and then several of his friends in the country music world told him he looked like a buffoon and it was stupid, and so he actually um had all the um singles taken from stores, and uh they had to take it, they had to edit it out of the Christmas special for reruns and all that stuff.
• 1:15:38
  SPEAKER_02: But you can still find it if you type in the chicken in black, you'll find uh music video.
• 1:15:42
  SPEAKER_02: Missed up.
• 1:15:43
  SPEAKER_02: So, like I said, he did record with um Rick Rubin towards the end of his life.
• 1:15:48
  SPEAKER_02: He wrote two autobiographies, he wrote one in 75 called Man in Black, and one in 97 called Cash the Autobiography.
• 1:15:57
  SPEAKER_02: And he got all kinds of awards.
• 1:16:01
  SPEAKER_02: He outlived June by just a few months.
• 1:16:06
  SPEAKER_02: She actually died in May of 2023, and he was sorry, of 2003, and he died in September of 2003.
• 1:16:17
  SPEAKER_02: So after she died, he didn't have much purpose.
• 1:16:21
  SPEAKER_02: He said the spirit of June Carter overshadows me tonight with the love she had for me and the love I have for her.
• 1:16:27
  SPEAKER_02: We connect somewhere between here and heaven.
• 1:16:30
  SPEAKER_02: She came down for a short visit, I guess, from heaven, just to visit me and give me courage and inspiration like she always has.
• 1:16:36
  SPEAKER_02: She's never been one, she's never been one for me except courage and inspiration.
• 1:16:42
  SPEAKER_02: I thank God for June Carter, and I love her with all my heart.
• 1:16:47
  SPEAKER_02: So he died in September of 2003.
• 1:16:52
  SPEAKER_02: He's buried in Memorial Gardens in Henderville, Hendersonville, Tennessee, and that would be another grave that we could definitely go see.
• 1:17:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:17:02
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:17:03
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a lot of stuff I skipped.
• 1:17:06
  SPEAKER_02: Sure, sure, sure.
• 1:17:07
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's uh it's it's a lot.
• 1:17:09
  SPEAKER_02: He's a big one.
• 1:17:10
  SPEAKER_02: I I've wanted to do that one for a while, but I've definitely been a little intimidated because it was like, oh my goodness.
• 1:17:15
  SPEAKER_02: One of my favorites.
• 1:17:16
  SPEAKER_02: Definitely.
• 1:17:17
  SPEAKER_02: The man in black.
• 1:17:18
  SPEAKER_02: Well, pour one out for Johnny Cash, and uh hope you enjoyed this episode, and we will see you next week.
• 1:17:34
  SPEAKER_00: For two long years, my head hurt bad, so the doctor checked me and he shook his head.
• 1:17:39
  SPEAKER_00: He said, I'm sorry to tell you, but your body's outlived your brain.
• 1:17:44
  SPEAKER_00: He said, I know this doctor in New York, son, and he'll fix you right up with a brand new one.
• 1:17:50
  SPEAKER_00: So the head doctor met me when I stepped down off of the train.
• 1:17:55
  SPEAKER_00: He said, We had this bank robber killed last night, his body shocked, but his brain's alright.
• 1:18:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'll give you a transplant, boy, and you'll be okay.
• 1:18:05
  SPEAKER_00: I got my new brain in, and I was feeling great.
• 1:18:08
  SPEAKER_00: I went right back to Nashville with no headache, but something strange happened when I walked in the bank one day.
• 1:18:15
  SPEAKER_00: I said, stick em up, everybody, I'm robbin' this place.
• 1:18:21
  SPEAKER_00: Don't nobody move a don't nobody reach that door.
• 1:18:26
  SPEAKER_00: A lady said, Why you're Johnny Cash?
• 1:18:28
  SPEAKER_00: I said, No, ma'am, I'm the Manhattan Flash, and I am the best bank robber in New York.
• 1:18:36
  SPEAKER_00: Now the other night, Roy Hiccuff called me.
• 1:18:38
  SPEAKER_00: He said, John, I'd like for you to do the opera.
• 1:18:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I went out on the stage, but I couldn't sing.
• 1:18:45
  SPEAKER_00: I got into half a verse if I walked the line, and something snapped in this head of mine.
• 1:18:51
  SPEAKER_00: I yelled, stick him up! Give me your money, your watches and rings.
• 1:18:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I call New York and talk to that brain quack.
• 1:19:01
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Doc, I've gotta have my whole brain back.
• 1:19:04
  SPEAKER_00: He said, I'm sorry there, Mr.
• 1:19:05
  SPEAKER_00: Cash, but I can't do that.
• 1:19:08
  SPEAKER_00: He said, I put your brain in a chicken last Monday.
• 1:19:11
  SPEAKER_00: He's singing your songs and making lots of money, and I got him signed to a 10-year recording contract.
• 1:19:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, friends, if you see me walking down the street, remember what you see ain't necessarily me.
• 1:19:24
  SPEAKER_00: And if I try to hold you up, don't pay me no mind.
• 1:19:28
  SPEAKER_00: But when you got ten bucks that you can blow, you oughta catch that Johnny Chicken show.
• 1:19:34
  SPEAKER_00: He's doing fairs and concert dates all up and down the line.
• 1:19:38
  SPEAKER_00: I said, stick a look, everybody, and I'm robbing this place.
• 1:19:49
  SPEAKER_00: A lady said, Why you're Johnny Cash?
• 1:19:51
  SPEAKER_00: I said, No ma'am.
• 1:19:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the Manhattan Flash and I am the best bank robber in New York.
• 1:20:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't pay any income tax.
• 1:20:04
  SPEAKER_00: You don't pay tax on money you steal.
• 1:20:07
  SPEAKER_00: You ought to catch a Johnny Chicken show.
• 1:20:11
  SPEAKER_00: Chicken in black.