Cash: The Autobiography (13 page)

the family, and that's absolutely no problem between Carlene and Rosanne and me. Just imagine the mess if it were any other way. Also, we're talking about a lot of people, and not just any old people, either. If you could corral my collection of sons-in-law, present and past, onto one record label, you'd have the best roster in town, plus all the great songs you could ever need and a band to burn the house down. Add my daughters, June's daugh- ters, and our son, and you could just tell your stockhold- ers to retire right there and then. Isn't bragging about your kids a pleasure? It's about one of the best feelings life offers. When Marty left to go on his own I hired Kerry Marks, a very fine guitarist who now plays lead in the Prime Time Country band on TNN. He stepped right in and came about as close as anybody could to filling the hole Marty had left. Waylon Jennings even played guitar for me once. I was booked to play five days in a theater in Toronto, but Bob got sick at the last minute and there I was, up the creek. I really didn't want to cancel the dates, but I had no idea who might be able to fill in for Bob. Was there even any- one who knew my material well enough? I didn't have an answer for that question because I'd never been plugged into the music scene in Nashville. I'm still not—less than ever in fact—but on the other hand, I knew someone who was. Waylon, my dear old friend and former roommate, knew every picker in town and just what each of them could and couldn't do. I called. He answered. He'd get right on it, he said. He called me back the next day and said, “I found you a good guitar player.” “Who's that?” I asked. “Me,” he said. “No, no, no,” I said. "You're kidding. You can't do

that. I can't have you playing guitar for me. That's just not right, a star of your magnitude standing out there playing guitar for me.“ He wouldn't bend. ”Well, Hoss, I'm going with you. I'm going to be there. I'm off the next five days, so I'm going to play guitar for you in Toronto, and that's all there is to it. I ain't going to be great, but I'll do the best I can.“ I took him up on it, thankfully, on the condition that we'd do a couple of duets together in addition to my reg- ular show. It went really well. When we got on stage in Tor- onto, I had him stand way back out of the lights for the first few songs, then gradually move forward a litde at a time. As he began to emerge, people started noticing that it wasn't Bob up there. Then they saw something familiar about the man, the way he stood, the way he moved, the way he held his guitar. They started nudging each other, whispering and pointing. I could see them, and it was fun. Finally he was fully lit, and even the people who couldn't make out his face could see the black-and-white tooled-leather Telecaster that'll always shout WAYLONH to country music fans. At that point I confirmed it. ”Well, you're right,“ I said into the mike. ”I've got the greatest guitar player in the world on stage tonight. This is Waylon Jennings." When the applause died down, he stepped forward and we talked a little, telling the story of how he came to be on my stage, and then we carried on with the show. And so it went for almost a whole week. Waylon hung in there every night, and when it was over he wouldn't take a penny for it. That all says something about the kind of friend

Waylon has been to me. Put simply, he's another of my brothers. I keep looking for something good to do for him sometime. The thing about it is, I know that if either one of us is hurt or in trouble, we can call on each other. We both feel that bond, even though we haven't talked in a while. We know that we're still almost blood brothers. Our friendship has had some rough spots, some ups and downs, things that could have tested it and even ended it, but I think as kindly of Waylon today as I ever did. We both have good reasons to be cranky—we've suffered a lot, him with his carpal tunnel syndrome, me with my jaw, both of us with major heart problems—but I'm sure that the next time I hear his voice on the phone, it'll be like it's always been: no complaints about how long it's been, just “What are you doing, John?” “Nothing much, Waylon. Want to come over?”

10 We're edging into the heart of winter now, and I'm in Texas. Unit One is rolling, eating up an endless undulating double strip of blacktop through the scrubby high-plains country northwest of Dallas, a land- scape of worn, low hills, stunted trees, and life lived close to the bone without much to spare either in nature or in the human sphere. You can't grow much of anything in the soil, and if there ever was any money in these parts, it seems to have been blown away by the winds coming down off the Great Plains all the way from Canada or to have drained off into the magnetic field of the wealth in Dallas and Fort Worth. You can drive for a hundred miles here, up toward Oklahoma and the Panhandle, as we've just done, and see nothing along the highway except truck stops and mobile homes. I've been places since I was in California. I've been to Chicago, I've been to Toronto, I've been to New York. I've been to Philadelphia, I've been here, I've been there. I've even been home once or twice. I haven't been to London to see the queen, exactly (I won't see Europe until the spring), but I've done the American equivalent: I've been to Washington and seen Mr. Clinton. They got me up there to present me with a Kennedy Center Award and, apart from being exhausting and dangerous for my ego, that was very gratifying, a big deal. It was quite wonderful, sitting there with the president of the United States and the first lady as my famous friends and family honored me from the stage, on TV, in front of an audi- ence of the most powerful people in the world. Every time somebody said something really nice and deeply flattering about me, which was quite often, they'd all look straight at me and applaud. Wouldn't that turn your head? Luckily, as all that

praise and admiration washed toward me, I kept think- ing about something Ernest Tubb told me in 1955, tne first time I met him. That was a big-deal night, too. I'd just encored on the Grand Ole Opry several times and now I was meeting Ernest Tubb, the Texas Troubadour, live and in person! He looked straight at me and told me in that grand, gravelly voice I'd been hearing on the radio, “Just remember this, son. The higher up the ladder you get, the brighter your ass shines.” The day after the Kennedy Center show, I came fur- ther down to earth when my daughters got together with me and voiced some very deep feelings they'd had for a very long time—told me things, that is, about the lives of girls whose daddy abandoned them for a drug. That was very hard. Now I've got a cold progressing into something more serious. The inside of my head feels just like the gray sky on the other side of the bus window. Next up, fever and laryngitis. When it gets like this they quit trying to figure out its component parts and call it “exhaustion.” And Faron killed himself. That's been the news the last couple of days. Faron—nobody who knows country music needs to add the surname, Young—shot himself, lingered a while in a coma, and then slipped away from us. He'd had serious health problems, and emotional problems too, and of course he drank a lot. June and I really loved him. He left behind a thousand outrageous stories, because he really was as colorful a character as they say he was, but at this moment my strongest memory of him is from one Christmas a few years ago when I talked to him before the big day and asked him his plans. Oh, he said, he guessed he'd just stay home and cook himself an omelet or something. We made him come over to our house for the big family Christmas we always have—and we've got some family, so it really is big—and that day he was a

prince. He could be so nice, such a dear and gentle man. We were sad when he died, but not terribly sur- prised. Over his last ten years or so June and I had been to visit him in the hospital more than once—I'd gone by myself, too—and we'd talked to him about alcohol. I'd tell him he had to get off it or he was going to die, but he'd come back with, “Didn't you ever hear my song, 'Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young'?” I'd say “Sure, but you're not taking that seriously, are you?” and he'd admit that, no, it was just brave talk. My last contact with him was a message that he was sick and to please call. I did, but there was no answer at the number I was given, and then I had to leave, get on the road again, and I never followed it up. Faron's birthday was the day before mine and Liz Taylor's is the day after. Over the years he and I had a lot of fun with that. He'd call me or I'd call him, and we'd talk about Liz Taylor. And even after I actually got to know Liz and started exchanging birthday greetings with her, too, we kept that up. So now, I guess, every time I get that birthday card from Liz I'll think of Faron Young. Even loving him the way I did, I believe I'd prefer to think about Liz Taylor. There are thousands of stories about him. People in the business will be telling them for years to come, just as they have been for decades past, and doubtless some of them will filter out to a wider audience. I'm not in the mood to get hilarious, though, so I'll share just one in the hope of conveying how far out Faron could get. We were on our first tour together, checking into a motel in Birmingham, Alabama, when he decided to do something. The doorman and the bellmen at this motel were wearing white gloves. Faron glanced at them, then went over to the counter and started pounding on it, demanding to see the manager. Somebody went and found him.

“Yes, sir, can I help you?” Faron snorted. “Why—why—have you got those bellmen and that doorman wearing those white gloves?” he demanded. “They've got to handle all that dirty lug- gage. This is the most terrible thing. You people are so unkind, making those bellmen and that doorman wear those gloves when they have to get so much dirt on them! What do you do when that happens? Do you fire them when their gloves get dirty?” “Well, no, sir, of course we don't.” “You're lying. I bet you do. I bet you fire those peo- ple!” The manager was completely at a loss. He couldn't figure out how to deal with this. Who could? Faron didn't let up, either. He was still raving at the poor man when I hurried off to my room, glad to be away from it. I got him pretty well one time, in the area of profan- ity. He was in the hospital after a car accident in which— don't ask me how—his tongue had ended up wrapped around the steering wheel, which had just about separated it from his mouth; they said it was hanging by a thread when they brought him in. Which was very strange, since just a couple of weeks before the accident I'd told him, “Faron, if you don't stop talking filthy, God is going to jerk the tongue out of your head.” There he lay, then, with his face all swollen up and his mouth full of stitches and dressings. I just strolled up to him, grinned, and said, “Say 'shit,' Faron.” “Huttthbhh Guuuooo.” I guessed he might be trying to say something ending in “you.” Faron is one I really will miss.

We're in Wichita Falls now, and I almost made it. We're actually parked at the backstage entrance of the audito- rium, with our equipment set up on stage and people start- ing to come in through the doors, taking their seats. I can't do it, though. I've got a temperature, my head is con- gested, my throat is closing up, and I'm weak and dizzy I'm giving up. I just told Lou, my manager, to cancel the show and start the process of giving the people back their money, and he's gone off to do that. He didn't argue, as many managers might have. He's known me well enough for long enough to have it clear that I don't cancel shows frivolously (and never have), that for me it's a very big deal. We'll be sure to come back here and make this date up to the fans I've disappointed. Now I need to get this bus turned around, head it back to the airport, and take a flight to Tennessee. I love the road. I love being a gypsy. In some impor- tant ways I live for it, and in other ways it keeps me alive. If I couldn't keep traveling the world and singing my songs to real live people who want to hear them, I think I might just sit myself down in front of a TV and start to die. Right now, though, this road goes no farther. I've given it every- thing I've got, but it wants more, so that's enough. I'm going home. Sometimes you have to surrender so that when your tim e comes, you can fight again—or in my case, play again. For ultimately, even with its little hardships and major challenges, that's what the road really means to me. It's adventure, companionship, creativity, freedom. It's the voice of a very old, beloved friend, perhaps a boy back in Arkansas or a young man in Memphis, still fresh and clear despite the years, calling: “Come on, J.R., let's go play!”

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 A postscript about Faron. His wishes were that he be cremated and his ashes scattered over Old Hickory Lake, so shortly after the funeral we got a call from his son Robin. He wanted to come out to the house, have a small ceremony, and release the ashes into the lake from our boat dock. We said that would be fine and that we'd be honored. My only regret was that I'd be gone on tour. The day came and the ceremony proceeded as planned, up to the point where some of the ashes were to be scattered on a semiformal part of our garden that we'd decided to dedicate to Faron, with a small brass plaque in his memory. Things went a little wrong (or right, depending on how you look at it; Faron himself probably would have loved it). Just as the ashes emerged from the urn, at exactly the crucial moment, a sudden gust of wind came up and blew them back into the yard toward the mourn- ers. Th

ere they were with Faron in their faces, Faron on their coats, Faron on their shoes, Faron in their hair. Later, when I came home and got in my car, I found I had Faron on my windshield, too. I turned the wipers on. There he went, back and forth, back and forth, until he was all gone. Today I'm in Florida with June at the little house she inherited from her parents, Ezra and Maybelle Carter. Ezra was the brother of A. P. Carter, leader of the origi- nal Carter Family, which has been hailed as “the first family of American folk music.” I dedicated Man in Black to the memory of Ezra, who died in 1975. Maybelle, whose singing and musicianship were so important to the group's sound, followed him in 1978.1 became their friend in 1962, when June and the '60s ver- sion of the Carter Family joined my show.

Their house is in Port Richey, a community identified by Consumer Reports in 1961 as the best and cheapest place to live in the whole United States. That's what prompted Ezra, or Pop Carter as we all called him, to come looking for property, find this house on the river, and begin negotiating. After about a year he'd talked the owner into a good deal. Naturally, many other citizens followed the beacon lit by Consumer Reports, and in short order Port Richey began growing at such an explosive rate that very soon it lost many of the qualities that made it so desirable in the first place. These days it's just one in a string of little coastal towns that have blended into a solidly urbanized strip running forty miles, north to south, between U.S. 19 and the Gulf of Mexico. The highway is so clogged with traffic most of the time that people talk about it the way Californians talk about earthquakes or New Yorkers talk about crime, and in some of the souvenir shops you can buy T-shirts boasting / Survived U.S. 19. Still, once you're on our little street, on Pop Carter's front porch with the river right across the pavement from you and your boat bobbing at the dock, waiting to zoom you out into the open waters of the gulf just a few hun- dred yards away, all that stuff could be in another coun- try. Here you have the tide, the meeting of fresh water with salt, the seabirds and marsh birds and land birds. The weather cooks up its sudden subtropical tempests out over the horizon or, on the landward side, takes the whole afternoon to build one of those immense, impos- ing fortresses of thunderheads, and then, as afternoon begins its long transition to evening, turns the whole tow- ering edifice purple-gray and brings it all tumbling and crashing down on you, transforming everything into wind and water. Mostly that's a summer treat, so I don't experience it very often, for like other nonnatives with enough money and sense, we go elsewhere during Florida's months of eighty percent humidity. Whenever I

see it, though, it always makes me marvel: at the sheer scale, power, beauty, and complexity of God's creation, at the simplicity and strength of my human root in nature. The house itself is quiet and comfortable, and it's not at all grand in the manner of Cinnamon Hill or our main home on Old Hickory Lake. It's just a regular Florida family bungalow from the early part of this century— 191 z, I believe—wood-framed, with painted clapboard and a big screened porch in front. It reminds me a lot of the farmhouses you see in the hotter, more northerly parts of Australia. Unlike out there, though, our neigh- bors here are close. Next door is only twenty feet away. That helps us feel less like celebrities, and the people in the neighborhood help in that regard, too. They're friendly, but they allow us our peace and quiet. Strangers knock on our door sometimes, wanting to say hello or get an autograph, but not often enough to bother us. The house inside is a maze. The rooms aren't very big, and most of them are decorated and furnished very much like they were in Pop and Maybelle's day, with many of Pop and Maybelle's things still in place. Which is good; it feels right to have such a palpable connection to them and their days. At times when our money has gotten tight, we've seriously considered selling the place (as we have Cinnamon Hill), but we've never absolutely had to, and I'm glad we've always decided to keep it. It belongs in the family. The same goes for the Carter Family house in Maces Springs, Virginia, which we bought from June's Aunt Theda about fifteen years ago. June, John Carter, and I own it now. We've updated the paint, the electrical sys- tem, and the heat and air-conditioning and added an- other bathroom, but apart from that we're keeping it as close to original as possible. It's on the Virginia Registry of Historic Homes because it's where Maybelle Carter lived and June Carter was born. It has its own special

feeling: a simple white house sitting on the side of Clinch Mountain, with a spring-fed stream running through the yard and boxwoods clustered around it. It smells wonderful there, and the water is cold and pure and good. Down the road about a mile from the house is the Carter Family Fold, built by A.P.'s son Joe Carter and daughter Jeanette and two of their offspring, Dale Jett and Rita, with contributions of all kinds from various other members, relatives, and friends of the Carter clan. It's a performance facility dedicated to mountain music: a stage with its back to the road and seating for a thou- sand or so tiered up the side of the hill. Every Saturday night, fans of traditional acoustic music, which today is a very healthy, thriving art, fill the place up to hear the bands and watch the doggers. In that part of Virginia they do a kind of clogging they call flat-footing, which is a little different from anything else and looks like a lot of fun. People of all ages get into it, down to two- and three-year-olds, and it brings big smiles to all their faces. You can have a pretty good time at the Carter Family Fold—and yes, that's a commercial. Jeanette gets a small grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and I do a free show there once a year, but what really keeps the place alive, and thereby helps musicians keep working in the rich and beautiful traditions of mountain music, is peo- ple coming through the doors. So go there. You'll have a good time. I sure do. On my last visit I saw the Red Clay Ramblers, and they were great. I have special status there: mine is the only musical unit allowed to use amplified instruments. I get away with it on the grounds, a little dubious I think, that I was already plugged in when June met me. I'm not about to argue. The last time I played there I didn't even bring Bob and Fluke and the boys; it was just June and me with acoustic instruments and the band that was booked in there, which worked out really well. They backed me up on practically anything I wanted to do: my own songs, a

Carter Family song, a Bayles Brothers song, a Merle Travis song, a Bill Monroe song, a Bradley Kincaid song. My kind of music. I grew up on the Carter Family. Beginning in 1927, when they made their first recordings for Ralph Peer, a talent scout for the Victor Recording Company of New York, in an improvised studio in Bristol, Tennessee, their music filled the air in the South (and elsewhere). It's difficult, in fact, to overemphasize their importance and influence in American country, folk, and pop music. Their albums, the first to popularize Southern folk music on a large scale, were a mixture of original compositions and songs col- lected from rural communities and reworked by the group's original leader, A. P. Carter. Many of them became permanent pieces of the heart of country and folk music and are still performed and recorded today—even more often, perhaps, than they were in the original Carter Family's heyday: “Keep on the Sunny Side,” “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow,” “I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes,” “Hello, Stranger,” “Worried Man Blues,” “Wildwood Flower,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” and hundreds more. The Carter Family's music was a major source of inspiration for the folk revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and today's “alternative” country movement takes its name, No Depression, from their “There'll Be No Depression in Heaven.” They and Jimmie Rodgers, who auditioned for Ralph Peer that same day in Bristol, were the first great stars of country music—though unlike great stars since (and unlike Rodgers) they never saw the pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. They did better than they had when A.P. was making all his money selling fruit trees in southwestern Virginia, but they were never rich—and anyway, the term “star” doesn't fit any of them even loosely. They were stellar makers of music, cer- tainly, but they never wanted or participated in the kind of ego glorification at the core of the whole star concept.

The quartet that joined my show in 1962 wasn't “The Original Carter Family.” That had been A.P., his wife, Sara, and Maybelle. By 1962, A.P. had passed on and Sara had retired, leaving Maybelle to carry on the family act with her girls: Helen, June, and Anita. At this point I want to address a subject about which I've kept my mouth shut for a long time. It's been said in some circles at various times, by some of my singer friends as well as a few music critics and more than the occasional record company executive, that working with the Carter Family has been a detriment to my career. It's been implied that they and I shared stages and recordings for so many years simply because I married into the fam- ily. Well, hogwash. It's not so, and it never was. From day one, back in '62, it was a great feeling for me to have their support out there on the stage, a great honor and opportunity. As I said, I grew up on Mother Maybelle's singing, and having her in my show was a powerful con- firmation and continuation of the music I loved best. It kept me carrying on the traditions I come from, keeping the circle unbroken, and that has always been very important to me, and rewarding. Then, too, of course, I got to sing with the great Anita Carter not just once or twice or now and again in my career, but every night I walked onstage. I bet you that if you went around to the people who really know, the small number of musicians, singers, and fans who have heard enough to make a judg- ment based on all the evidence, not just the work readily available via radio and record, you'd find a fair number of them willing to endorse Anita Carter as the greatest female country singer of them all. Others might make a case for Connie Smith, but either way, that's all I have to say about that, and I hope it's clear enough. Well, maybe that's not all. I should add that the main reason you can't go out and buy an Anita Carter solo recording no matter how hard you look (the duet hits she

had with Hank Snow in the early '50s don't count) is that she has always devoted her time and energy to the Carter Family, to holding it together, keeping the tradition alive. I really admire her for that. In fact, the same goes for June, and for Helen. Many times I've seen them begin to take a separate course with some record deal or other, and then say, “Well, I have to have my sisters singing with me on this,” and it would end up being a Carter Family record. About the closest any one of them ever got to mak- ing a genuine individual album was June's Appalachian Pride. And June, you know, is one of the most neglected artists in country music. Quite apart from being a fine singer and songwriter (her compositions include “Gone,” “A Tall Lover Man,” “Ring of Fire” with Merle Kilgore, and “Kneeling Drunkard's Plea” with her sisters), she's a won- derful comedienne and a very talented writer of prose. She plays guitar, mandolin, autoharp, and banjo—autoharp just like Maybelle did, and banjo in the old flailing style Uncle Dave Macon used. Moreover, she's been on stage in the heart of professional country music longer than just about any other living performer. She started at the age of nine and has spent more years on the stage than even Bill Monroe had when he died. Sadly, I think her contribution to country music will probably go under- recognized simply because she's my wife; it certainly has been up to now. That's regrettable—my only regret, in fact, about marrying her. It's always been such fun for me, working with the Carter girls (then women, now ladies). They have an enormous storehouse of traditional songs in their heads, which I've often been able to access just by singing one line I might have remembered from somewhere. I'd put that line out and one of the Carters, most often Helen, would come back at me with the whole song. Other times I'd be taken by a whim on stage and feel like singing some old favorite of mine that I hadn't sung in years, even decades, not even one of my own songs. I'd just

announce it—“I'd like to sing a song for you now that was one my mother liked a lot, 'Life's Railway to Heaven'”—and by the second verse they'd be singing their parts right along with me, in harmony, on key, with the words down pat. They could just pull it out of the air; it was wonderful. And of course they'd been on the road forever, since they were just little girls, so they knew every- thing there was to know about the traveling life, the music business, the whole thing. Helen was there right at the start, literally; she was in the womb when Maybelle, Sara, and A.P. traveled down out of the mountains in A.P.'s Model A Ford to meet Ralph Peer in Bristol and record “Wildwood Flower.” Covering the country with Maybelle and her girls was a wonderful way to go. Maybelle was especially sweet to work with, the last person in the world who'd ever be a problem to anybody. She had a great attitude. If we had a thousand-mile car ride coming up, something we really weren't looking for- ward to, her approach was “Well, let's get on the road.” That was her way of dealing with difficult things: Let's do it. The gypsy life was never better for me than it was in those years. Mother Maybelle was a great character. She was a quiet, unassuming, good-hearted Christian woman, but she was also very worldly, and she loved to laugh. She seemed tireless, though I'm sure she wasn't. After a whole day out on the Gulf in the sun, we'd all come back to the house, hose down our rods and reels, stand them up on the porch to drain, and then more or less collapse. Not Maybelle. She'd go straight into the kitchen and start cooking. She didn't care how many people she had to cook for; if there were a dozen or more, that was fine with her, just as long as she knew how many mouths she had to feed. Ezra was like that, too. He'd be right in there with her, and then, after dinner, those two would hunker down together and play a card game they called “Don't Get Mad.” I still have no idea how it worked, but it cer-