Johnny Cash: The Life (18 page)

Thanks to
Johnny Cash at Town Hall Party,
a DVD released in 2002 by Bear Family Records, it’s possible to see Cash’s performance that night. He did two short sets, dividing his time between some of his favorite Sun material—including “Get Rhythm” and “I Walk the Line”—and some of the songs on his just-released Columbia album. Notably, three of the eleven songs were spiritual, including his early favorite, “I Was There When It Happened.”

Cash, clear-eyed and comfortable in the Town Hall setting, joked with the audience about how he and the Tennessee Two had just moved to California and were trying to reestablish themselves in the music business. Then he slipped in a plug for his new album,
The Fabulous Johnny Cash.
“We’ve got a whole variety of songs in it,” he said. “Some slow ones, some fast ones. Some old ones, some new ones. Little bit of everything.”

After the show, he was back on the road, including a stop in Shreveport to visit the Hortons and appear at the Louisiana Hayride. Billie Jean says he told them then about his feelings for Lorrie, and Billie Jean wondered, “Was he really going to leave Vivian?” She didn’t have to wait long for an answer.

Four days after he and the Collins Kids closed the year with a New Year’s Eve show at Town Hall Party, Lorrie, still sixteen, eloped with Carnall, who was thirty-five, to Las Vegas, where they were married by a Lutheran minister before returning home the same night. According to one account, Cash accompanied them.

Everyone in the Cash camp was shocked—not just because of the age difference but because no one could remember Collins and Carnall being at all close. Everyone had been watching Collins and Cash. To make things even more puzzling, Lorrie returned to the family home in Van Nuys the night of the wedding and didn’t tell anyone about the marriage for several days. The news was broken publicly in a Harrison Carroll showbiz column in the
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner,
apparently on a tip from Carnall, who conveniently added a year to Lorrie’s age and took nine years off his own.

The column read in part: “One of the idols of the rock ’n’ roll set, 17-year-old singer Lorrie Collins, has been secretly married since Jan. 4 to Stewart Carnall, 26.” It identified Carnall as Johnny Cash’s manager and said even Lorrie’s parents didn’t know about the elopement until “a few days ago.” Someone else who didn’t know about the wedding until then was Ricky Nelson, who thought he and Lorrie were still engaged. The suspicion among some of the Cash musical family was that Carnall married Collins to prevent a full-blown scandal with Cash, one that could even involve criminal action because of Lorrie’s age.

Years later, Lorrie told me she didn’t think Carnall married her to protect Cash; if anything, she felt Stew, a fiercely competitive man, may have been trying to “outdo” Cash by wooing her. She loved Cash and believes Cash loved her, and they even talked vaguely about marriage. But the relationship frightened her because of her age, Cash’s marriage, and their respective careers. In fact, she says she refused to be intimate with Cash for those reasons. “We had situations where we were alone, but I was scared to death. It could ruin both our careers…a lot of lives…and I loved his kids.”

Unknown to the Cash camp, Carnall spent a lot of time with the Collins Kids when Cash was on the road because he also booked the duo. “After a while, he started teasing me about getting married and the great life he could give me,” Lorrie told me. “It was very impulsive.”

The couple stayed together some twenty years, but she looks back with mixed feelings on the relationship, particularly because of the pain it caused her family, including Larry. He went on to become a successful songwriter (his credits include cowriting the Tanya Tucker hit, “Delta Dawn”), but he would always blame the marriage—and Carnall—for taking away the Collins Kids’ trajectory.

“I have two beautiful daughters that I love more than life, but the way that I did it…the people I hurt and why? It was rough at first, but I eventually learned to love Stew. He could be funny, caring and loving.” But, she says, Carnall’s drinking problems eventually led to their divorce.

Larry Collins says he spoke with Cash several years later and Lorrie’s name came up. Cash told him, “You know Larry, I really loved Lorrie.”

BEFORE ENTERING THE STUDIO
on January 23, 1959, Cash spent weeks going back and forth over the songs for his long-awaited gospel album. At first he thought about focusing on the hymns he’d heard during all those hours in church in Dyess. He also considered doing something like Elvis had done in an EP—a collection of mostly contemporary gospel songs that were proven favorites in the late 1950s, songs such as Thomas A. Dorsey’s “Peace in the Valley” and the Frankie Laine hit “I Believe.” Cash eventually dismissed both options as too predictable. He wanted to make his own statement; he most certainly didn’t want to look like he was copying Elvis.

To start, Cash, always conscious of his role as a songwriter, wrote four songs, most notably “I Call Him,” which he co-wrote with his nephew Roy Jr. Reaching back, he also chose two public domain tunes, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “The Old Account.” To fill the remaining six slots on the album, Cash turned to a couple of new songs from Nashville publishers and a few that he had heard on records, including “Lead Me Gently Home” from a Sons of the Pioneers album.

With the songs gathered, Cash and the Tennessee Two went into the studio with a few extra musicians and a vocal group and recorded eleven of the songs in the one day. The twelfth song, Cash’s “It Was Jesus,” was left over from the
Fabulous Johnny Cash
sessions. Everyone was in high spirits because
Fabulous
was shaping up as a big pop success. It had already entered the pop Top 20 and would eventually spend nearly three months on the national sales charts.

There was a tendency in Nashville, especially, to do what Cash would call “showbiz gospel,” but Cash brought a reverence to the vocals during the session that bordered on somberness. This wasn’t the boisterous call-and-response jubilation that was commonly found at the time in black gospel or the rolling-thunder drama of the popular white gospel groups of the day. Instead, Cash brought his Sunday morning churchgoing voice. He sang with a deliberateness and sincerity that suggested he was singing right to his biggest fan, his mother.

But Law had trouble framing Cash’s voice on the album. On some tracks, the Tennessee Two step forward with a touch of
boom-chicka-boom,
while on others it’s Marvin Hughes’s piano that shapes the arrangement; elsewhere the background vocalists come alarmingly close to the corny pop punctuation that Cash found so objectionable on “Teenage Queen.” Despite the shortcomings,
Hymns
was a step forward in Cash’s slow but steady search for his own voice and direction.

On the day after the session, Cash headed to Kansas City for the start of a tour that would keep him on the road in the Midwest until he headed to New York for his first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. As usual, he called home every night to speak to Vivian and the girls. He also sent them letters and postcards regularly. Cash may have been uncertain about his marriage, but he did his best to keep anyone in Encino—the girls especially—from knowing. He was trying to make it work.

The Cashes lived in the Hayvenhurst house for only three years, but Rosanne and Kathy, the two oldest daughters, have sweet memories of the place. They remember their dad being around a lot when they were preschoolers and turning the house into a combination zoo and cotton patch: to liven things up, Cash bought a monkey and a parrot, which he named after the country comedy duo Homer and Jethro; he also planted a few rows of cotton on the front lawn to remind him of Dyess. Vivian felt reassured. She even tried to reach out to his musician friends by hosting weekend barbecues. “Vivian was lovely,” Johnny Western says. “She made all of us welcome at her home. Some of my fondest memories of Johnny were at the Encino house.” Kathy Cash recalls how her folks went around holding hands and hugging each other. “It was so sweet,” she says.

Vivian’s sister Sylvia envied their marriage at the time. “It was just something special to watch, like if Johnny was writing and Vivian was tired, she would not go to bed without him,” she says. “She might lie on the couch and fall asleep while he sat in the chair.”

Marshall Grant didn’t have such good memories of the Hollywood years. His wife was homesick, and he hated the long, long drives to the East Coast dates. The extra distance didn’t bother Cash, because he was flying to the start of each tour and then flying home at the end. To save money, Marshall and Luther continued to drive. After a few months, Luther’s wife, Bertie, gave her husband an ultimatum: she was going home to Memphis with or without him. Perkins stayed in Los Angeles—a sign that Cash took as confirmation of their deep friendship. The decision did lead to the end of Perkins’s marriage.

Grant was also troubled by Cash’s increasingly erratic drug-fueled behavior away from his family. “You never could tell when John was going to be straight or when he wasn’t because he could change at the drop of his hat,” he recalled. Cash could stay straight for days at a time. It was when the demands of the road or the pressures of his personal life built up that he would turn to amphetamines.

The one person Cash could consistently relax with was Johnny Horton, which is why Cash headed to Shreveport a couple of days before their joint Louisiana Hayride appearance on March 7. There was much to celebrate. Cash’s “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town” single was number one on the country charts and number thirty-three on the pop charts. Horton’s “When It’s Springtime in Alaska,” meanwhile, was number three on the country charts. Plus, it was good fishing weather.

Like many country singers from poor backgrounds, Cash kept asking himself whether he deserved all the fame and attention. Had he been singled out by God, as his mother once told him? Or had he just been lucky, and it was all going to fade away tomorrow? Horton’s was a good shoulder to lean on because he wasn’t nearly as ambitious as Cash. Horton was so laid-back that Billie Jean had to remind him he needed to go out and make some money.

One other thing Cash liked about Horton was the singer’s deep-rooted fascination with spiritualism. Cash loved to listen to Horton’s theories about the afterlife and reincarnation. He also appreciated that Horton didn’t pass judgment on the Lorrie Collins affair. Cash found himself depending more and more on Horton’s friendship. The downside of his visits to Shreveport was that he would be reminded by Horton and Billie Jean of the kind of relationship he wished he had with Vivian.

Cash set aside only one day in Nashville—March 12—to record his third Columbia album, which he wanted to build around a song that was a breakthrough in his writing. “Five Feet High and Rising” was Cash at his pure storytelling best—the depiction of the Dyess flood that sent the family rushing for higher ground. While written in the same general style of “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town,” it was more original and better crafted. The song sounded like a folk song that had been handed down for generations, but it was totally Cash’s vision.

Law loved “Five Feet High and Rising,” and he paired it with another song Cash recorded at the same session as a future single, “I Got Stripes,” a raucous prison tale Cash wrote with Los Angeles disc jockey and friend Charlie Williams after listening to Lead Belly’s “On a Monday.”

Though Cash once felt uneasy borrowing freely from existing songs, he now realized it was common practice. Even with the songs he considered his original compositions, he often leaned on melodies he had heard over the years. More than ever after “Five Feet High and Rising,” he told himself his specialty was words and stories.

Cash’s other songs at the session weren’t up to the creative level of “Five Feet,” but “Old Apache Squaw” was noteworthy because it was Cash’s first step into reflections on the struggles of Native Americans. Cash had been intrigued by their plight ever since reading about the Old West in high school. He had even been telling people for years that he was part Cherokee, though there was no evidence to support the claim, and he eventually quit making it. Johnny Western saw the song as part of a larger sympathy: “Because of his poor background, Johnny had this underlying feeling for the underdog, and there was nobody more an underdog than the American Indian.”

Despite some weak material, Law was satisfied with the album, which John titled
Songs of Our Soil
to draw attention to its folk sensibilities. But it would have to wait its turn. First, Columbia had to release
Hymns by Johnny Cash,
which didn’t make the pop charts. On the singles front, Columbia and Sun were both making the country best-seller list with Cash records—the old faithful “Luther Played the Boogie,” and another Jack Clement–written tune, “Katy Too,” from Sun; “Frankie’s Man Johnny” and “I Got Stripes”/“Five Feet High” from Columbia.

All these singles helped make Cash an even hotter property on the road, and Carnall tried to fill every booking request, even if it meant a numbing schedule that stretched from Nashville to Jacksonville to Grand Rapids to Yuma, to a festival in Australia—all in just six weeks. He and Cash were having too much fun to want to slow down.

In early April, Cash, the Tennessee Two, and Carnall were driving to a show in Michigan when they spotted a hatchery. Someone came up with the bright idea of stopping and buying some baby chicks to take along on the tour and then bring home. For his part, Cash thought they’d be fun for the girls, and they could have fresh eggs every day. So Cash and the others loaded a few dozen of the little critters, along with food and water, and headed on down the road. The guys left the chicks in dresser drawers in the hotel while they did their shows.

When Cash went to the Detroit airport with a box full of chicks, however, an airline agent said he couldn’t bring poultry on board.

Not one to be denied, Cash made up an elaborate story about how these weren’t just ordinary chicks but expensive chickens imported from France.

After several minutes, the beleaguered agent turned to the flight’s captain for a ruling. Cash went through his story again. The captain finally agreed, but only on the condition that Cash keep them in the box on his lap. Cash thanked the man profusely and proceeded to his seat. Just after the plane took off, however, he opened the box—either by accident or from sheer mischievousness—and the chickens wriggled out and started racing around the plane, causing some women, who apparently thought there were mice running around at their feet, to start screaming. When the captain appeared, threatening to land the plane, Cash told him the chicks got out by accident and promised to round them up and put them back into the box. He spent several minutes going up and down the aisles, trying to gather them all.

Cash took the chicks home, where he raised them in his backyard. They were a big hit with the girls, though there was one problem. A couple of them turned out to be roosters, which meant they welcomed the break of day with loud crowing. The neighbors weren’t happy. Cash and Carnall loved it all the more.

Carnall had grown up near the Santa Anita racetrack, and he loved playing the horses almost as much as he loved being around show business—maybe more. He combined his passions that spring, telling a publicist buddy while at Hollywood Park, a rival track across town from Santa Anita, that Cash had written a song for Silky Sullivan, one of the most popular racehorses of the 1950s in Southern California because of his colorful racing style.

Silky would start off slowly, falling twenty, thirty, even forty lengths behind. Just when it appeared he had no chance, he’d suddenly take off—as if the big red horse had rocket boosters attached—and seemingly fly down the track, often catching the leader at the wire. It made for thrilling watching—and betting. The publicist told Carnall that if he’d bring Cash to the track, he’d have a photographer take his picture with the horse and invite some newspaper reporters to attend.

Carnall returned to the track a few days later with Cash to pose with Silky Sullivan for the photographer. As Cash stood next to the horse at Stall 50 in the track stables, the photographer asked him to sing to the horse. Surprising everyone, Cash nodded and started singing “Guess Things Happen That Way”—not the Silky Sullivan song. When he finished, one of the reporters asked, “What about the Silky Sullivan song?” Sheepishly, Cash said he didn’t remember the words.

While it’s not clear whether he had really written a song about the horse before Carnall told him about the publicity opportunity or not until afterward, Cash did write something called “The Ballad of Silky Sullivan,” which included the line “Silky came up for the kill / passed ’em all like standing still.”