He played in Cash’s band from 1980 to 1985 and he was married to his daughter Cindy from 1983 to 1988. The first country music album Marty Stuart owned was The Fabulous Johnny Cash. Blessed with a profound imagination, he used the gift to express all the various lost causes of the human soul. If we want to know what it means to be mortal, we need to look no further than the Man in Black. In plain terms, Johnny was and is the North Star you could guide your ship by him-the greatest of the greats then and now. After Cash’s death, Dylan movingly described his friend: Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash were friends for more than 40 years. He also inspired performers as diverse as Bob Dylan and Marty Stuart. In the decades that followed, Cash’s impact reached far beyond teenage dances, as he wrote two autobiographies Man in Black and Cash: The Autobiography, hosted The Johnny Cash Show on television, and was the subject of the Hollywood film Walk the Line. We played rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and blues records at our dances, and Cash’s “boom-chica-boom” rhythm on “I Walk the Line” fit in nicely with the music of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis. I keep the ends out for the tie that binds I keep a close watch on this heart of mine Cash etched his lyrics into the memory of our generation as he sang: I discovered Johnny Cash as a teenager in Vicksburg, Mississippi, when Sam Phillips released his song “I Walk the Line” on Sun Records in 1956, and it sold more than two million copies. We got so excited that we stood up on the chairs. We were in an auditorium, and when Johnny Cash sang, he was wonderful. Fish Michie, a Merigold native and former keyboard player with the Delta band the Tangents, memorialized the concert in his 2020 article in Delta magazine, “Rockabilly in Merigold: Elvis Didn’t Work Out, So Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins Rocked Bolivar County,” illustrated with a promotional photograph Cash signed for Eunice Howell, a student in the junior class: “To Eunice, Best Wishes, Johnny Cash.”Įunice’s classmate Gwen Daves recalled the concert it was still fresh in her memory when I spoke with her earlier this year. It drew a sellout audience of 400, and tickets sold for 60 cents each. The legendary concert was in the school gymnasium, which was built by the New Deal Works Progress Administration in 1938. Neal then offered to send both Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins for $35, and Speakes readily accepted. Speakes phoned Neal, who told him that Presley’s fee to do the show would be $85, which Speakes said they could not afford. Their classmate Larry Speakes-who later served as White House press secretary during the Ronald Reagan administration-and his band had recently played on the same stage with Elvis at Ellis Auditorium in Memphis, where he met Bob Neal, Presley’s manager at the time. In 1955, the class planned a fund-raiser to support their trip to Washington and invited Elvis Presley to perform at the event. During his early years as a musician, he performed for small audiences like the Merigold High School junior class in Merigold, Mississippi, a Delta town with a population of 664. He grew up on government-granted land in the Arkansas Delta, and that hardscrabble world of poor farmers helped define his musical career. Cash broadened his own musical roots in the Deep South when he married June Carter, whose family are considered the aristocracy of country music in the Upland South.Ĭash’s roots were humble. Cash’s all-black wardrobe earned him the nickname the “Man in Black,” and he opened each concert with his familiar line, “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.” He was part of the “Million Dollar Quartet” that Sam Phillips recorded at Sun Records in Memphis in 1956, along with Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Elvis Presley.
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