Johnny Cash: The Life (17 page)

Vivian, who had already moved to one new city for Johnny, dreaded the prospect of having to relocate again, especially to a city even farther from her folks in San Antonio. The timing was also bad because the couple’s third child was due in late July. But Vivian wanted to be supportive, so she said it was Johnny’s decision. Marshall and Luther similarly put their fate in his hands. And his decision was: go.

Before heading west, Cash went into the studio in Nashville with Law for his first Columbia session on July 24, a week before the new contract took effect. Cash had held most of his new songs back from Sun so that he wouldn’t start off at Columbia empty-handed.

For all his talk about wanting to do things his way, however, Cash unveiled no bold blueprint. As at Sun, he was simply a gifted young man who swung back and forth between commercial and creative impulses—only no longer with someone like Phillips, at least early in their relationship, around to help point out the good and the bad. He soon found that working with Don Law was going to be far different from going into the studio with Phillips and Clement.

According to Grant, “even though they respected what John wanted to do, there was always the feeling at Sun that Sam and Jack made the final decision about the recordings.” At Columbia, Law didn’t even screen the songs ahead of time. Law had promised Cash full creative control, and he wanted to stay as far away as possible from the decision-making process to ensure that Cash didn’t feel confined.

When W. S. Holland later joined Cash as his drummer, he noticed the difference right away. “John would come in with a song and John would play it and Don would say, ‘Oh, that’s good,’” says Holland, who played on Carl Perkins’s records at Sun. “I don’t remember Don ever telling anybody what to do the way Sam had done.”

There was, however, some forward movement. Now free to record gospel music, Cash went into the session with two spiritual-minded tunes, his own “It Was Jesus” and Ira Stanphill’s “Suppertime,” which Cash first heard in a recording by Jimmie Davis. The other four songs recorded that day were all secular Cash originals. Of them, Law was most impressed by “What Do I Care,” a modest love song that would become one side of Cash’s first Columbia single. It wasn’t, however, a great Cash song—not even close to the convincing, personal vein of “I Walk the Line” or “Come In Stranger.” The only other song from the session that Law would put on the first Columbia album was “Suppertime,” whose old-time country feel was accentuated by the steel guitar styling of Don Helms, who had been a member of Hank Williams’s band.

Needing enough material for an album and two singles, Cash and Law went back in the studio on August 8, when they recorded not only a song for the other side of the single, the sprightly “All Over Again,” but also four songs that would appear on Cash’s first Columbia album. The most notable of the tunes was “Run Softly, Blue River,” a Cash song with some of the same imagery and lilt of “Big River.” The other key song that Law earmarked for the album was a reworking of the old folk song “Frankie and Johnny” (retitled in this case “Frankie’s Man Johnny”).

The third session, on August 13, was even more promising as Cash brought in three songs, each of which would remain part of his concert repertoire for years. The first was “I Still Miss Someone,” a sweet love song with the simple but devotional feel of “I Walk the Line.” Surprisingly, the song was mostly written by Cash’s nephew Roy Jr., who was by then a student at Memphis State University. Roy wrote it in class as a poem, and then put a melody to it while strumming a guitar his uncle had given him. Cash helped him rework the lyrics, and the two shared credit on the song, which begins:

The other songs in that session reflected Cash’s fondness for storytelling, one drawing upon his love of the Old West, the other his own Dyess memories. The narrative of “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town” wasn’t original; it could have been drawn from any of a number of western movies Cash saw as a boy. and it fit into the tradition of such earlier country hits as “Streets of Laredo” and “High Noon.” Still, Cash’s vocal authority brought a freshness and appeal to the story of a young man who ignores his mother’s warnings and ends up dead on a saloon floor after a gunfight. “Pickin’ Time” has a more personal edge, a sentimental tale of a family on the farm thanking God for their blessings.

At the end of the three sessions, Cash and Law were both pleased. Law felt that “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town” was the best song, but “All Over Again” and “What Do I Care” were safer commercial choices. He put them back-to-back on the first single, which they rushed out in September even though both Sun releases—“Guess Things Happen That Way” and “The Ways of a Woman in Love”—were both still in the Top 10 in the country field.

Columbia celebrated with a
Billboard
ad that proclaimed the “First Columbia Smash from Johnny Cash,” replacing all the “S’s” with “$’s.” The ad also noted, “Johnny, who’s been on the charts for over a year now, records exclusively on high-fidelity records by Columbia.”

Cash was feeling good about his decision to go to Columbia. When he performed that month at the label’s national sales convention in Estes Park, Colorado, he received an enthusiastic standing ovation and a warm welcome from Goddard Lieberson, the debonair president of the label. Though his background was mostly in classical and Broadway cast albums, Lieberson was a big supporter who saw Cash more as a folksinger than a country singer.

To underscore the point, he later gave Cash some folk and blues recordings, including folklorist Alan Lomax’s 1947
Blues in the Mississippi Night.
That album was tailor-made for Cash: a series of songs by Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim, and Sonny Boy Williams that spoke about brutal racism in the South—including levee camps and prison farms—with such candor that the musicians were given false names in the liner notes to protect themselves and their families. Cash listened to it endlessly for months.

Back in Memphis, Phillips was not rolling over for Columbia. He put out his own trade ad, which was, in effect, an open letter to record store owners and DJs that declared, “Sun has patiently recorded Johnny Cash with always potent material, first in the country category and gradually manipulating his material and approach to songs to gain him a fantastic following in the pop field, yet not losing his earthy country feel. However, Johnny Cash has signed with Columbia Records as of Aug. 1, 1958. Upon learning that he was anticipating this move, we spent the next five months producing some of the finest sides for future Sun releases on Cash that we have ever had the pleasures of cutting. Please believe us when we say you are in for some tremendous releases on Cash on SUN for at least the next two years.”

The ad was signed “Appreciatively, Sam C. Phillips.”

To follow through, Sun released four of the Hank Williams songs that Cash recorded that May 15 evening with Clement in a mini-album (or EP) titled
Johnny Cash Sings Hank Williams.
By October, it was the third-best-selling pop EP in the country, trailing only volumes one and two of Elvis Presley’s
King Creole.
Aggressively, Phillips came back less than two months later with another EP, this one titled
Country Boy,
again drawing from material recorded with Clement in May. Thanks to his large backlog of Cash recordings, Phillips was able to keep releasing new Cash singles well into 1961.

But Columbia had reason to celebrate as well. “All Over Again” went to number four on the country chart and number thirty-eight on the pop. With the album due to ship in December, Cash felt relieved. Some music critics over the years have suggested that Cash and Law weren’t all that pleased with the album because it had been recorded so quickly, but most country acts in the 1950s worked that fast. Few groups would even spend much time rehearsing the material; they’d often just slap the arrangements together during the session.

In fact, Cash felt he had passed the first test in a move toward creative control. The album,
The Fabulous Johnny Cash,
contained three songs with spiritual themes. He also looked forward to the second single, “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town”/“I Still Miss Someone.”

As long as Columbia and Sun were taking out ads in
Billboard,
Carnall and Neal decided to take one out as well. In a play on the popular TV show
Have Gun—Will Travel,
Carnall came up with a line that they featured at the top of the ad: “Have Guitar Will Pick.” The purpose of the ad was to announce that Cash Enterprises was now based in the center of Hollywood in a strip of business offices on Sunset Boulevard named “Crossroads of the World.”

The move was happening. Around September 1, following the wrap of his first recording sessions with Law in Nashville, Cash said good-bye to Memphis. He, Vivian, Rosanne, Kathy, and month-old Cindy moved across the country and into a house on Coldwater Canyon Avenue in Studio City, just blocks from Republic and Universal studios. And within days, as Vivian was trying to get the place in order, Cash was back on the road.

On September 18, Cash headlined the West Texas Fair in Abilene, where he performed two evening shows before a total of 10,700 fans. Reporting on the event, the
Abilene Reporter-News
noted the next day that Cash played mostly his hits. Then near the end of the story was a throwaway line that probably caught the eye of more than a few members of the Cash entourage: “Between the two shows, Johnny Cash and Lorrie Collins managed to tour the carnival as well as sign hundreds of autographs.”

There had been growing concern among some of Cash’s inner circle that the twenty-six-year-old Cash and the now sixteen-year-old Collins were spending a lot of time together. But no one knew quite what to make of it—or do about it. At a time when Jerry Lee Lewis’s downfall was on everyone’s mind, the biggest fear was the potential for scandal. Yet that was a huge leap—from occasional hand-holding to Jerry Lee Lewis. Certainly, they told themselves, Johnny had too much at stake to go any further.

But Cash remained smitten with Lorrie, and he needed to talk to someone about his feelings. Marshall was too judgmental, and Cash didn’t feel comfortable confiding in Carnall or Neal. He chose Johnny Western, a singer-songwriter who co-wrote the theme song for
Have Gun—Will Travel.
A featured performer for years with Gene Autry, Western was a good-natured guy who loved country and folk music. Cash had brought him on tour to emcee the show and sing a few songs. He trusted Western enough to open up to him about Lorrie during a drive in the desert outside Los Angeles.

“There was something different to Johnny about this little Oklahoma girl,” Western says. “She had the figure, fresh face—beautiful, very photogenic onstage—and John told me how crazy he was about her. I just knew it was a total disaster for him, and I came up with the metaphor of the cowboy in the movies who has to ride away into the sunset. I told him he’s got to ride away and that if he doesn’t, he’s going to lose everything—his family, his career. He said, ‘You’re right. I know you’re right. But damn, I’m just crazy about her. I feel like a schoolboy around her.’”

As signs of the relationship grew, there was increasing alarm in the Cash camp, but Western resisted any further efforts to caution him. Thanks to the income from touring and the two record labels, Johnny was feeling on top of the world. After struggling to make ends meet on $50 a week in 1954, he was on track just four years later to make a quarter of a million dollars.

When Johnny Carson told Cash he was selling his Encino house to move to New York, Cash bought it on the spot for $75,000. Encino was a trophy-house suburb of Los Angeles, just minutes from Hollywood and a favorite of film stars, notably John Wayne and Clark Gable. The house, at 4259 Hayvenhurst Avenue, was just up the street from where Michael Jackson’s family would later make their home. Cash also used his new wealth to indulge himself by buying everything that had ever interested him—from Civil War artifacts to vintage guns—and he began combing antique stores and junkyards on the road as one way to combat the boredom of touring. Typical of his excessive nature, Cash—who had enjoyed firing guns ever since his Dyess days—wouldn’t buy just a couple of guns; he’d purchase a half dozen or more at a time.

On tour, he and the guys would find some isolated spot along the highway and fire at tin cans or whatever else they could find. In their most crazed moments, Cash and Gordon Terry would put blanks in their guns and even stage mock gunfights in hotel hallways or lobbies.

Through the touring and the relationship with Lorrie Collins, Cash continued to hone his musical direction. In an interview with the
Los Angeles Times,
Cash seemed to be wrestling with that very question. “Personally, I like a song with a story and a meaning,” he said. “Much of the so-called country-western music that I sing is actually folk music.” After weighing his options, Cash decided it was finally time to do a full gospel album. At various times, he gave different reasons for the decision. He sometimes spoke of a gospel album as a way of making up for having gotten away from gospel music at Sun. At other times he mentioned it as part of his pledge to carry on his brother Jack’s work. He almost always said he did it for his mother.

The move wasn’t unprecedented, because gospel had deep ties to country music, but it was a daring move at a time when Cash was on such a commercial roll. The record company and his fans would have much greater interest in a collection of pop-country hits, but Cash took a big step toward defining his artistic independence in moving forward with the album. When he told Law of his plans, Cash was relieved to hear “That’d be fine.”

After a tour that took him to Colorado, Oklahoma, Missouri, Texas, Alabama, Florida, and Tennessee, Cash was back in Los Angeles in time to headline the Town Hall Party, sharing the bill again with the Collins Kids on November 15.