Cash: The Autobiography (20 page)

thousands of stories he had in his office, all of it the real thing. He gave me a copy of John Wesley Hardin's auto- biography, My Life, in the form of a loose-leaf copy that was typed straight from the original handwritten manu- script before the book was even published, and for years I felt like I knew Hardin as well as I knew myself. Sometimes I might have gone a little too far, not such an uncommon trait in a person on amphetamines. I'd put on my cowboy clothes—real ones, antiques—and go out to the desert or an abandoned ranch somewhere, trying to feel how they felt back then, be how they were. I wore authentic Western clothes on the road and in concert, too. Sometimes I even strapped on my gun before I walked in through the backstage door. It would be loaded, naturally. Sometimes my amphetamine communions with the cowboy ghosts were productive and ideas came to me that became songs, on the spot or later. Sometimes the chem- istry wasn't right, as they say (though not in the sense I mean it) and not much happened in the way of creative progress. I still have a sheet from a yellow legal pad on which is written my entire output from a whole day in the desert: “Under the manzanita tree / Sits a pencil, a piece of paper, and me.” You can't imagine how much thought went into those words.

Bitter Tears, which preceded Ballads of the True West and in which I was inspired by the Native American songwriter Peter LaFarge, was another intense research project. I dove into primary and secondary sources, immersing myself in the tragic stories of the Cherokee and the Apache, among others, until I was almost as raw as Peter. By the time I actually recorded the album I car- ried a heavy load of sadness and outrage; I felt every word of those songs, particularly “Apache Tears” and “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” I meant every word, too. I was long past the point of pulling my punches. I expected there to be trouble with that album, and there was. I got a lot of flak from the Columbia Records bosses while I was recording it—though Frank Jones, my producer, had the good sense and courage to let me go ahead and do what I wanted—and when it was released, many radio stations wouldn't play it. My reaction was to write the disc jockeys a letter and pay to have it published as a full-page ad in Billboard. It talked about them want- ing to “wallow in [their] meaninglessness” and noted their “lack of vision for our music.” Predictably enough, it got me off the air in more places than it got me on. I guess it didn't help that the disc jockeys and everybody else in the business knew about my drug problem. It was probably quite easy to dismiss my challenge on those I grounds alone, if indeed any grounds but craven worship of the almighty dollar were needed. They certainly aren't today. The very idea of unconventional or even original ideas ending up on “country” radio in the late 1990s is absurd. * * * I was deeply into folk music in the early 1960s, both the authentic songs from various periods and areas of American life and the new “folk revival” songs of the time, so I took note of Bob Dylan as soon as the Bob Dylan album came out in early '6z and listened almost constantly to The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan in '63.1 had a

portable record player I'd take along on the road, and I'd put on Freewheelin' backstage, then go out and do my show, then listen again as soon as I came off. After a while at that, I wrote Bob a letter telling him how much of a fan I was. He wrote back almost immediately, saying he'd been following my music since “I Walk the Line,” and so we began a correspondence. Mostly it was about music: what we ourselves were doing, what other people were doing, what I knew about so-and-so and he didn't and vice versa. He asked me about country people; I asked him about the circles he moved in. I still have all his letters, locked up in my vault. It wasn't a long correspondence. We quit after we actually met each other, when I went to play the Newport Folk Festival in July of 1964. I don't have many memo- ries of that event, but I do remember June and me and Bob and Joan Baez in my hotel room, so happy to meet each other that we were jumping on the bed like kids. Later, of course, Bob and I sang together on his Nashville Skyline album and I had him as a guest on my TV show when that rolled around. In between we met a few times here and there, one of those occasions recorded by D.A. Pennebaker in his documentary film Don't Look Back, which chronicled Bob's European tour in 1965. June and I went up to Woodstock to visit him once, too. I remember some of that: Rambling Jack Elliot, that fine and loving gentleman, driving us up from New York; Albert Grossman, Bob's manager, putting us up at his house, where the food was great, the spirit free, and the hours flexible; Bob and I, and whoever else was around, indulging ourselves in lots of guitar picking and song trading. There's nothing on earth I like better than song trading with a friend or a circle of them, except perhaps doing it with my family. As Bruce Springsteen wrote, “Nothing feels better than blood on blood.” Thinking about The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, I have to say that it's still one of my all-time favorite albums. If

I had to answer that old but still interesting question, “What music would you want with you if you were stranded on a desert island?” (assuming your cell phone didn't make it through the surf but your solar-powered CD player did), I'd say that Freewheelin' would have to be on the list. So would Merle Travis's Down Home, which has “Sixteen Tons” and all those other great songs on it and was the first country concept album (Ride This Train was the second). Then I'd have to include Jimmie Davis's Greatest Gospel Hits, Emmylou Harris's Roses in the Snow, my daughter Rosanne's The Wheel, an album of Rosetta Tharpe's gospel music, something by Beethoven, and You Are There by Edward R. Murrow. I'd be entertained and inspired quite nicely, I think. * * * The 1960s were probably my most productive time, creatively speaking. I ventured out, testing different waters, and I really enjoyed that. And a lot of good songs came out of that period. Often I wasn't in my best voice, because the amphetamines dried my throat and reduced me, at times, to croaks and whispers, but that wasn't the story all the time, and my energy and output were high. I was in the prime of life, after all, my late twenties and early thirties, and it took a lot to knock me down either physically or creatively. Even- tually the drugs did that, but in the first half of the decade I often had it together as far as my music was concerned. That's how it felt to me at the time, any- way, and that's how it sounds to me still. Don Law, my producer at Columbia, was a great help to me, but as it happened neither he nor Frank Jones, who came in to replace him when he reached retirement age, had much to do with my biggest com- mercial successes of the '60s, “Ring of Fire” in 1963 and my two prison albums in '68 and ,G^. Jack Clement was the man who actually ran the session for

“Ring of Fire,” and both Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison and Johnny Cash at San Quentin were made after I'd switched to Bob Johnston as my producer. “Ring of Fire,” written by June with Merle Kilgore, raised a lot of eyebrows in Nashville because we used trumpets on it. Trumpets were not country instruments, or perhaps more to the point, nobody had thought of using them so boldly on a country record before. Technically speaking, I didn't think of doing so either. I heard Anita Carter singing the song, with trumpets framing her verses, in a dream. It still sounded good in my head when I was awake, so I called Jack, who'd moved to Beaumont, Texas, after leaving Sun, and asked him to come up to Nashville and help me get it done. I knew he was the only one who'd see how it could work; there wasn't any point in even discussing it with anyone else. So he found the trumpet players, came on up, arranged the song, and ran the session, with Don Law and Frank Jones in the control room. He never got credit for it, just as he didn't get credit for a lot of the work he did with me after that, but he was always there when I needed him. The prison albums were natural ideas. By 1968 I'd been doing prison concerts for more than a decade, ever since “Folsom Prison Blues” got the attention of the inmates at the Huntsville, Texas, prison in 1957. They'd been putting on a rodeo every year, and that year the prison officials decided to let them have an enter- tainer, too; they asked for me. I showed up gladly, with Marshall and Luther, and we set up right in the middle of the rodeo grounds. As soon as we kicked off, though, a huge thunderstorm let loose—I mean a big one, a real toad strangler—and that cramped our style considerably. Luther's amplifier shorted out and Marshall's bass came apart in the rain. I kept going, though, with just my guitar, and the prisoners loved that. Word got around on the prison grapevine that I was okay, and the next

thing I knew, I got a letter from San Quentin, asking me to perform at their annual New Year's show on January i, 1958.1 went ahead and did that, and did it again for several years in a row, taking June with me the last couple of years. I didn't know until years later, when he told me so, that Merle Haggard had been in the front row for three of those concerts. He wasn't a trustee, so we never got to meet each other. Those shows were always really hot—the inmates were excited and enthusiastic, and that got me going— so I thought that if I ever did a live concert album, a prison would be the ideal place for it, especially if I chose the kind of songs the prisoners could relate to. I didn't get anywhere when I approached Don Law with the idea, though; he just didn't like it. Then when Bob Johnston took over my production, I mentioned it to him, and he loved it. He said, “That's what we've got to do, first thing.” I called a preacher friend of mine back in California, the Reverend Floyd Gressett, who went into Folsom to preach once a month and knew the officials there, and we set it up. The rest of the story is right there on the album. I was about as relaxed as a bug in a Roach Motel, being still new to the business of getting up on stage in front of people without a blood- stream full of drugs, but once we were into it, that was one good show. I've always thought it ironic that it was a prison concert, with me and the convicts getting along just as fellow rebels, outsiders, and miscreants should, that pumped up my marketability to the point where ABC thought I was respectable enough to have a weekly net- work TV show.

There's a storm coming at Bon Aqua, a big one that's blown all the way from the Pacific over the southern end of the Rockies and on through New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas to the Missis- sippi, then into Tennessee and straight across the 300 miles of slowly rising, rolling farmland to the little patch of 107 acres that Captain Weems, Uncle Pete, and I have all claimed, foolishly, as ours. The land doesn't belong to us; we belong to it. I'm sitting in my library, looking out the west- ward-facing window at the strengthening rain and the blackening sky above the deep green fields of this beautiful place, and I feel good. This log house is a warm, strong, secure little cocoon. Short of a tornado, nothing can hurt me in here. When a storm rages, as this one is doing now, I get a kind of sensuous, inti- mate feeling, safe and snug, calm and content. It's a different sort of sensation from the anticipation of a storm. That's more exciting: exhilarating because I know it'll be such a big and glorious show, moving such huge forces and touching the lives of so many men, plants, and creatures, and also thrilling on the small scale, in the tiny personal universe inside me. When I was a boy on the farm in Arkansas, not very far from here, an oncoming storm meant that soon I could run from the toil in the fields to the magic in the house—turn on the radio, listen to the music made far away, let it take me where it pleased. Now I'm often content, more than content, to listen to the storm itself. I love weather. I'm a connoisseur of weather. Wherever my travels take me, the first thing I do is turn on the weather channel and see what's going on, what's coming. I like to know about regional weather patterns, how storms are created in different parts of the country and the world, what's happening at different altitudes, what kinds of clouds are forming or dissipating or blowing

through, where the winds are coming from, where they've been. That's not a passion everybody shares, I know, but I don't believe there are any people on earth who, properly sheltered, don't feel the peace inside a summer rain and the cleansing it brings, the renewal of the earth in its aftermath. For me such moments are open invitations to close- ness with God. Nature at work isn't itself God, but it is evidence of Him, and by letting myself be drawn into its depths and intrigues, I can come near to Him: see the glory of His creation, feel the salve of His grace. Any combination of religion and TV, or religion and sec- ular celebrity, makes for dangerous ground, full of traps and pitfalls, marked out with lines that can be too fine to see, and that's especially true for the man standing in the glare of the spotlights. I should know; I've crossed a few lines myself and found trouble on the other side. The most significant instance was when I made a public profession of faith on my network TV show. It wasn't something I was driven to do by an urge to con- vert anybody or spread the word of the Lord; I did it because people kept asking me where I stood, in inter- views and letters to the network, and I thought I ought to make it clear that yes, I was a Christian. I sang those gospel songs on the show not just because I liked them as music (which I surely did) and definitely not because I wanted to appear holier than thou, but because they were part of my musical heritage—our musical heritage—and they were part of me. Yes, in short, I meant the words I was singing. When I actually came out and said the words “I am a Christian” on TV, that was the context: introducing a gospel song. ABC didn't like it. I had one of the producers come up to me and tell me that I really oughtn't be talking about God and Jesus on network television.

I didn't like that. “Well, then,” I told him, “you're producing the wrong man here, because gospel music— and the word 'Gospel' means 'the good news about Jesus Christ'—is part of what I am and part of what I do. I don't cram anything down people's throats, but neither do I make any apologies for it, and in a song introduction, I have to tell it like it is. I'm not going to proselytize, but I'm not going to crawfish, and I'm not going to compromise. So don't you worry about me mentioning Jesus, or God, or Moses, or whoever I decide to mention in the spiritual realm. If you don't like it, you can always edit it.” They never did edit me that way, and I never made my big fuss with them about it after that; I just went on doing what I was doing. In many ways my TV show was a lot of fun. Mostly [ liked it because it gave me a chance to showcase the music and musicians who moved me, everyone from Ray Charles and Louis Armstrong to Joni Mitchell and Linda Ronstadt, as well as many Nashville artists who didn't usually get network TV exposure. I also really enjoyed putting the “Ride This Train” segment of the show together with people like Merle Travis and Larry Murray, taking those imaginary journeys through American history and geography. I was proud, too, that the whole production was done, at my insistence, in Nashville, which got a lot of good people involved in new kinds of work and, I hope, communicated to the rest of the country some of what made the place special. And of course it was nice that I only had to drive fifteen minutes to work. It was also great getting to know the guest artists who came to Nashville to do the show and to add them to the musical melting pot we had going at the house. I'd started up an informal tradition of “guitar pulls” in the big round room overlooking the lake, evenings when my favorite songwriters were encouraged to show up (and