Johnny Cash

Summary

Johnny Cash rose from Sun Records in the mid-1950s to become one of the defining voices of American music, but his career was nearly destroyed twice and rebuilt twice. The first collapse came from a decade of amphetamine and barbiturate addiction in the 1960s that wrecked his health, his first marriage, and his reliability as a performer.

His first comeback was anchored in a hard-won, partial sobriety, helped by June Carter, and crystallized in two live prison albums: At Folsom Prison in 1968 and At San Quentin in 1969. They returned him to the top of the charts and led to a network television variety show on ABC. For a few years he was again a giant.

A second decline followed in the late 1970s and 1980s. Relapses recurred, his record sales faded, and in 1986 his longtime label, Columbia Records, dropped him after nearly three decades. He spent years recording for smaller labels with diminishing commercial impact, written off by much of the industry as a nostalgia act.

The second comeback was the most improbable. In 1994, producer Rick Rubin paired the aging Cash with stark, stripped-down recordings under the American Recordings series, reaching a young rock audience. The arc peaked with his 2002 cover of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt, a late-career masterpiece, before his death in September 2003.

Timeline

The First Fortune

After serving in the U.S. Air Force, Cash signed with Sam Phillips' Sun Records in Memphis and released his first single, Cry! Cry! Cry!, in 1955; it reached the country charts. He followed with Folsom Prison Blues and, in 1956, I Walk the Line, a number-one country hit that crossed over to the pop charts and made him a national name.

In 1958 Cash left Sun for Columbia Records, a larger label that gave him more creative latitude and resources. Through the late 1950s and into the 1960s he produced a steady run of hits and concept records and toured relentlessly, building a reputation as one of country music's biggest draws and a figure who bridged country, folk, gospel, and rock and roll.

That relentless schedule carried the seed of his undoing. To stay awake across endless tour dates, Cash began leaning on amphetamines, with barbiturates to come down afterward. What started as a touring practicality hardened, through the first half of the 1960s, into a dependency that would gradually take over his life.

The Fall

By the mid-1960s Cash's addiction governed his daily life. He grew erratic and unreliable, missed and ruined shows, and racked up arrests. In October 1965 U.S. customs agents arrested him after a trip to Juárez, Mexico, finding hundreds of Dexedrine and Equanil tablets stashed in his guitar case; other incidents, including arrests around El Paso and Starkville, Mississippi, underscored a man out of control.

The damage was personal as well as professional. His weight dropped, he had brushes with death, and his behavior strained every relationship around him. His first wife, Vivian Liberto, filed for divorce in 1966, citing his drug and alcohol abuse, constant touring, and infidelity; the marriage formally ended that year.

Throughout this period June Carter, whom he had met years earlier and toured with, repeatedly tried to keep him off pills, sometimes finding and destroying his stash. Cash himself later described hitting bottom in the mid-1960s. The addiction had taken him from a rising star to a performer many in the business expected to die young.

The Comeback

Cash's first recovery was gradual and never absolute, but with June Carter's help he pulled back from the worst of his dependency. The two married on March 1, 1968. That same period produced his definitive reinvention as a chronicler of prisoners and outsiders.

On January 13, 1968, Cash recorded a live concert at Folsom State Prison in California; the resulting album, At Folsom Prison, was released in May and topped the country chart while reaching the upper tier of the pop chart. He returned to the format in 1969 with At San Quentin, which became his first number-one album on the pop chart and yielded the hit A Boy Named Sue. The success carried him to network television with The Johnny Cash Show, which ran on ABC from 1969 to 1971. This was his first full comeback.

The second comeback came after a long fallow stretch. Following relapses, fading sales, and his 1986 release by Columbia, Cash was approached by hip-hop and rock producer Rick Rubin, who had seen him as a still-vital artist. The resulting album, American Recordings, released in 1994, presented Cash stark and unadorned and reached a young alternative audience. The series ran for years and peaked with his haunting 2002 cover of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt, on American IV: The Man Comes Around, whose video won wide acclaim and a Grammy and introduced him to a whole new generation before his death in September 2003.

The Turnaround

Legacy

Cash died on September 12, 2003, in Nashville, of complications from diabetes, less than four months after June Carter Cash's death in May. He left behind a catalog that spans the birth of rock and roll at Sun Records to the alternative-rock era of the American Recordings series.

His prison albums remain landmarks of live recording and helped cement an enduring image: the man in black who sang for the imprisoned and the forgotten. The Folsom and San Quentin records are still cited among the most important live albums in American music.

The American Recordings years, and especially the Hurt video, gave Cash a final artistic statement that introduced him to listeners who had never owned a country record. That two distinct generations rediscovered him, decades apart, after he had twice been counted out, is the heart of his second-act story.

Lessons

References

• Johnny Cash Wikipedia
• At Folsom Prison Wikipedia
• American Recordings (album) Wikipedia
• American Remembered: Rick Rubin On Johnny Cash NPR
• This week in Texas music history: Johnny Cash arrested in El Paso Texas Standard