Johnny Cash: The Life (23 page)

Days after the birth of their fourth daughter, Tara, on August 24, 1961, the Cashes moved into their new home on Nye Road in Casitas Springs, and the neighbors turned out to welcome the famous new resident. One of the well-wishers, who arrived carrying a bouquet of flowers, was the Reverend Floyd Gressett, pastor of the Avenue Community Church in Ventura. Despite his continued longing for Billie Jean, Cash hoped that this move to the country could be a turning point with Vivian.

Within weeks, however, he was back on the road, and the tour got off to a unsettling start on September 21 in Boston. Rose Maddox, who had been the featured female singer with the group for much of the year, was badly shaken when the landing gear on her plane malfunctioned on the approach to Logan Airport that day, causing the plane to slide into the waters of Boston Harbor. The accident made Cash feel protective toward Maddox, who was four years older and married. To help her overcome her sudden fear of flying, Cash encouraged her to fly with him to shows rather than ride in the car with the guys. He also stepped in when she complained that promoters were making passes at her. She would soon leave the tour, partly because Cash was having to reschedule so many shows on account of his drug problems; the cancellations played havoc with her other concert obligations.

Around this time, Cash decided to name Holiff his manager. Cash wrote notes on a yellow legal pad, outlining all the things he expected Holiff to do for him. He wanted a disciplined operation this time, not a repeat of the part-time job, part-time party approach of the Carnall years. But he ended up just giving the pages to Holiff and they sealed the deal with a handshake. Though he would always maintain a Canadian residence, Holiff moved to California to open an office for Cash, and he traveled with him on tour.

For the first time since Sam Phillips, Cash felt he was in good hands. Holiff promised Cash he’d be onstage at Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl within a year. To celebrate the signing, Cash took Holiff to Columbia Records and introduced him as his new manager. The introduction caught much of the staff by surprise; the fast-talking Canadian had raised such a fuss during his New York visit in May that people had assumed for months that he already had the job.

Another topic among Columbia staffers was how strange Cash acted during his visit. “He’d come into an office and just keep walking around the room,” one label executive told Marshall Grant. “He would mumble something and then keep pacing while you answered, even going out into the hall and returning and ask something else.”

During the tour, Cash spent a week in the cold of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, doing shows as well as taking time off to hunt moose with a reporter and a photographer who were going to do a spread on the hunt for
Field and Stream
magazine. To make a party out of it, John invited Johnny Western to go along. He was already in Newfoundland when he got a frantic phone call from Vivian. She told him snakes were slithering around the yard and fans were knocking on the door at all hours wanting to see him. She begged him to come home. Cash, who had a lifelong fear of snakes himself, flew back to California, where he tried to calm his wife’s fears. He’d have someone come in and get rid of the snakes, he promised, and he’d put up a “Private Property” sign to help discourage fans from coming up the driveway. The next day, he headed back to the moose hunt.

The erratic behavior continued. While in Nashville a month later—November 15, 1961—he and Glenn Douglas Tubb, one of the writers of “Home of the Blues,” were arrested one morning on a drunkenness charge and spent four hours in jail before being released on bond. Cash identified himself on the police blotter as an “actor.” Two weeks later in California, Cash made the news again when Ventura police clocked him going 90 mph on the Ojai Freeway at one a.m. They stopped him after a six-mile chase. He explained to the officers, “I just wanted to find out if I could still outrun a police car.” He was cited for speeding and driving without a driver’s license in his possession.

Though Cash had gone to great lengths to hide his increasingly unruly lifestyle from his parents, Carrie Cash had begun to notice his drawn appearance and strange, restless behavior even before the latest news reports. Vivian, too, had been turning to her mother-in-law, hoping she could help persuade her son to spend more time with his family and to take better care of himself. As Roy Cash Jr. recalls, “I can distinctly remember my grandmother at the trailer park wondering out loud if J.R. was ‘becoming a dope addict.’”

It was during this period that Holiff got a vivid demonstration of Cash’s unstable behavior. During an engagement at the Cave supper club in Vancouver, Cash learned that Billie Jean Horton, who had followed up on pursuing a singing career, was appearing in town as part of a tour featuring Wanda Jackson and Buck Owens. To stretch the coincidence even further, Cash and Horton ended up staying at the same hotel.

Billie Jean says that Cash showed up at her concert, wanting to talk to her again about a future together. But any slim chance that she might change her mind about marrying him was ruined when Cash arrived at the hotel later that night and pounded loudly on her door, clearly under the influence of drugs. Furious at yet another rejection, he later stormed out of her room and smashed every crystal chandelier in the hallway. After being called by the hotel manager, Holiff agreed to pay for the damage, but it wasn’t enough to keep Cash from being banned from the hotel.

Though Holiff was absolutely convinced that Cash could be a far bigger star, drug problems and all, it was hard to find much outside support for that belief. Expectations in the industry had fallen to such an extent that Cash’s new single—“Tennessee Flat-Top Box”—wasn’t even one of the twelve “spotlight” singles in
Billboard
magazine when it was released in the late fall.

In talking to Columbia about Cash’s disappointing figures, Holiff continued to blame the label for inadequate promotion. His persistent message: You need to market Cash as a pop act, not just a country one. The label’s equally consistent response: The promotion staff has limited time and money, and it has to focus its attention on records that are showing the most pop sales potential. Give us a record with that potential and we’ll be glad to get behind it.

To make things worse for Holiff, Cash was losing career momentum even in the country field. In
Billboard’
s annual poll of country DJs, Cash had fallen from fourth most popular performer in 1960 to a tie for tenth in 1961, and he wasn’t represented at all on the lists of favorite albums or single records. Cash was especially discouraged when he didn’t even make the list of favorite songwriters.

On the tour front, Holiff now had to replace Rose Maddox, and he was delighted to learn that Patsy Cline had some open dates. Cline had two of the most memorable country hits that year in “Crazy” and “She’s Got You,” which made her a powerful addition to the Cash cast. Cline was as popular backstage as she was with the audience—a real tomboy who fit in well with all the male musicians. “She was a great road buddy,” Johnny Western says. “She loved hearing jokes and loved telling them. She had the biggest laugh in the world.”

Unfortunately, Cline’s deal was just for the month of January, and Holiff knew that she would eventually want to headline her own shows, so he started searching for another female singer. Partly because she charged less than Cline, Holiff came up with a new name: June Carter.

Like everybody his age who loved country music, Cash grew up listening to the Carter Family’s music. One of the most fascinating chapters in all of pop music, the Carter Family—Alvin Pleasant Delaney Carter, his wife, Sara, and his brother’s wife, Maybelle, who was Sara’s cousin—emerged from the isolated foothills of Clinch Mountain in Virginia to help lay much of the foundation of commercial country music.

The Carters not only changed the emphasis from old-time instrumentals to smooth intimate vocals, but also brought a certain class and style to what had been wild, untamed country music, opening the door to a much wider audience. Sara sang lead vocals and played autoharp, while Maybelle sang harmony and chiefly played the guitar. Maybelle had a distinctive style—playing the melody lines with her thumb while scratching out the rhythm with her fingers—which gave the group a softer, more contemporary sound than the traditional banjo or fiddle accompaniment. A.P. sang backup vocals and sometimes took over the lead.

Most important, the Carter Family showcased, on records and radio shows, hundreds of mostly British and Appalachian folk songs that A.P. had learned on his travels throughout the region while looking for work or just rambling about. Though he didn’t write such classics as “Keep on the Sunny Side,” “Wildwood Flower,” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” Carter arranged and popularized them. Altogether, the Carters’ impact on the evolution of country music in the first half of the twentieth century was rivaled only by that of Cash’s main hero, Jimmie Rodgers.

A. P. Carter was the leader of the trio. Born in 1891 in Virginia in an area then known as Poor Valley, Carter worked at various jobs, from sawmills to construction sites. For years, music was just a personal passion. He and Sara and Maybelle would play and sing at gatherings around Maces Springs, the valley town in which they all lived. Slowly, he began thinking about trying to make some money with the trio. He was already in his late thirties in the summer of 1927 when he took a skeptical Sara and Maybelle to Bristol, Tennessee, to audition for Ralph Peer, hoping to get a recording contract with the Victor Company. He wasn’t alone at Peer’s door. When a newspaper article reported that acts could make $200 a day plus royalties cutting records with Peer, there was a rush of hopeful musicians and singers from around the region.

The Carters stood out, though, because Peer, above all things, wanted record makers who performed their own material. His reasoning was twofold. In most cases, a good new song had more commercial potential than another version of a song that had already been a hit. In addition, new songs meant that Peer could assign copyright in the material to his publishing company, which meant more money for him. An old traditional song was just as valuable if it was in the public domain because Peer could still get publishing rights. Peer liked the Carters’ sound and the prospect of all those great public domain songs that A.P. had collected. The Carters were soon in New York making a record—and on their way to making country music history.

All Cash knew of the Carter story was that as a boy he had loved the music, and he still held the Carter Family in great esteem. Cash also knew that June was Maybelle’s daughter and that she sang professionally with her mother and her sisters. Cash had first met her during an Opry appearance in 1956, and there is a famous photo with him down on one knee as if proposing to her. They both later claimed he’d told June then that he was going to marry her someday, though no one around Cash believed that the story was anything more than another one of his manufactured tales. In 1956 his “I Walk the Line” was riding the charts, and he was still deeply in love with Vivian.

Though Cash and Carter had met from time to time on the country circuit, they were pretty much strangers when Holiff arranged for her to join the show for a December 9 date at the Big D Jamboree, which was Dallas’s equivalent of the Louisiana Hayride. It was in essence a tryout to see how they would get along. Cash had been playing the Jamboree since 1955, and the audiences had always been enthusiastic. Cash was looking forward to seeing Carter, but he arrived late at the barnlike Sportatorium arena—its main attraction each week was professional wrestling matches—and didn’t see her before he had to go onstage for the first of two shows.

At the intermission, June, who was then married to her second husband, Edwin “Rip” Nix, looked for Cash, but she couldn’t find him. So she tracked down Grant. “Hey, big buddy, someone told me I needed to talk to you about a little problem I’ve got,” she said in the cornball character of her stage persona. “I’m in Oklahoma City tomorrow afternoon with y’all and I need a ride. I ain’t got no ride up there and I was wondering if I could ride with you.”

Knowing that Cash, Perkins, Western, Terry, and he were already going to be in the car, Grant said he didn’t think he could squeeze anyone else in.

“Well, I’ll sit on somebody’s lap,” she replied perkily.

Fair enough, Grant said, as long as Cash approved.

When Grant relayed Carter’s request, Cash said no problem—adding with a sly grin, “As long as mine is the lap she sits on.”

The trip proved especially cozy because they ran into sleet and snow, causing the Oklahoma City show to be canceled. June made a big impression on Cash. He told the other guys in the group that she was off-limits to them, the inference being that he had his eye on her.

For a man with a bruised ego after the Billie Jean affair, a still tense home life, and a continuing slide in record sales, June Carter came along at just the right time. She was fun, she was flirtatious, she made Cash feel special, and, crucially, she was part of the history of country music. June Carter and the Carter Family were “authentic.” They had even recorded with Jimmie Rodgers. For June, there was a need to reestablish her solo career. She had recently signed a contract, but it was with tiny Liberty Records in Los Angeles, a sign that none of the country labels in Nashville saw any potential in her. Within two months, she was added permanently to the Cash touring show. It wouldn’t be long before John, now twenty-nine, and June, thirty-two, would look across the stage at each other and ask themselves if this could be the one.

VALERIE JUNE CARTER
was known to the people of Poor Valley as Daddy’s girl. Ezra “Eck” Carter, a fascinating character himself, taught her to be driven, independent, and resilient. One of her early memories was of the time she jumped on the back of his Harley-Davidson and held on for dear life as he raced the country roads. Eck, who was known to have a bit of a wild streak, had crashed through many fences and skidded off roads while taking the turns too fast in a car or on his bike. And sure enough, Eck drove the Harley into a ditch on this day with June, hurling her into a nearby cornfield. Undaunted, the youngster jumped back on the bike and the pair continued their journey. She was five.

Another trait that Eck passed along was a thirst for the world outside the remote valley in southwest Virginia. As a boy, he loved nothing better than going to the general store and waiting for the train to roll into town. On some days the train wouldn’t even stop because there was no one who wanted to get on or off in tiny Maces Springs, but even then he counted on the train slowing so that someone could throw off the mail sack. From then on, Eck’s dream was to ride that train and to handle the mail—and the industrious young man eventually got that very job.

As a railroad mail clerk, Eck was the envy of Maces Springs while still only in his twenties, not just because he made more money than anyone else, but because he would return home with all sorts of little treasures, including phonograph records and books, both of which were rare in the valley. Eck loved to read: history, religion, and especially technical manuals that explained how things worked, whether it was cars or electrical current. He also enjoyed building things, particularly projects that benefited his neighbors. Eck’s most ambitious undertaking was bringing electrical power to the region. He started by building a homemade generator to provide current for his own house; then he dammed up the local Holston River to increase the unit’s power so that he could share the electricity with others. The Appalachian Power Company eventually bought the system from him.

All of this made Ezra Carter heroic in young June’s eyes—even with his occasional drinking problems—and she admired her mother for marrying him. Indeed, one lesson June learned from her mother was this: Once you find the right man, go after him.

Maybelle Addington was sixteen in December of 1925 when she came to Maces Springs from a neighboring valley to sing and play guitar with Sara and A.P. in a special musical program at the school. It was there that she met A.P.’s brother Ezra, and she thought he was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. Maybelle soon said good-bye to her boyfriend; Ezra, who was twenty-seven, just as quickly broke his engagement with a local schoolteacher. The couple was married three months later.

By the time June, the second of three daughters, was born on June 23, 1929, the Carter Family trio was on its way to becoming a country music institution. A.P., Sara, and Maybelle had recorded many of their most celebrated tunes for the Victor Recording Company, but only A.P. thought this could really lead somewhere. On June’s birth certificate, Maybelle listed her occupation as “homemaker,” not “recording artist.” Yet the record deal was bringing in money. At a historic session in Camden, New Jersey, in early May 1928, they recorded twelve songs, including what would become one of their signature tunes, “Wildwood Flower.” They were paid $600, enough money for A.P. and Sara to move to a much fancier home, but he chose to remain in Bristol, in his beloved valley.

As the Carters’ popularity grew, A.P. spent more and more time traveling through the region, searching for new songs and booking shows for the group, though it was a constant struggle to get Sara to go on the road. In a parallel to the distance between Johnny Cash and Vivian, A.P.’s obsession with music ultimately drove the couple apart. As the friction increased, Sara turned to A.P.’s cousin Coy Bays for comfort and, as it turned out, love. But the affair was short-lived. Bays moved to New Mexico early in 1933 with relatives who were looking both for better income opportunities and for a way to put an end to the scandalous affair. Whether because she was ashamed or because she could no longer stand living with her husband, Sara moved to the neighboring Rich Valley, where she had been raised. In 1936 she filed for divorce, and the decree was granted on October 15. But even that didn’t break up the Carter Family trio. With A.P. leading the way, the group continued to make occasional records. For one thing, they all needed the money.

Two years later, just when it didn’t look as if even A.P.’s determination could keep the Carter Family together, the trio was offered—out of the blue—its own radio show on XERA near Del Rio, Texas. Boasting the most powerful signal of any station in North America (more than half a million watts), XERA evaded U.S. radio restrictions (normally limiting stations to fifty thousand watts) by planting its transmitter across the border in Mexico. Under the six-month deal, the Carters would each be paid $75 a week. It was enough for Eck to give up his job with the railroad and move with Maybelle and their youngest daughter, five-year-old Anita, to Texas. June, age nine, and Helen, eleven, remained in Maces Springs with Maybelle’s mother so they wouldn’t have to change schools. On XERA, the Carters’ music could be heard on virtually any radio in America, including the one in the Cash home in Dyess. According to reports at the time, XERA’s signal was so strong that ranchers could listen to the station via their wire fences.

The Carter Family owed their sudden good fortune to the clever marketing and medical hocus-pocus of John R. Brinkley. He was a Kansas doctor who was making millions using the airways to advertise products and medical procedures that promised to cure a variety of ills, the most outlandish of which was transplanting goat glands into humans, supposedly to cure a lack of sexual prowess. He leased time on XERA and decided to hire the Carter Family because country music singers had proved effective in reaching potential customers. XERA had showcased so many country stars, including Gene Autry, Jimmie Rodgers, and Patsy Montana, that Del Rio picked up the nickname “the hillbilly Hollywood.”

Back home in Maces Springs, June and Helen missed their parents and Anita, but at least they could hear their mama’s voice on XERA every morning and night. They were surprised one evening in February to hear Aunt Sara suddenly speak up between songs, something they couldn’t remember her doing before. She dedicated one of the Carters’ most popular love songs, “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes,” to her former lover, Coy Bays, whom she hadn’t seen in six years.

June was too young to understand the significance of the dedication, but she would later point to the story of Sara and Coy as reaffirming her mother’s lesson of not giving up on the man of your dreams. During their six years apart, Sara had not stopped loving Bays, but she didn’t know if he felt the same way. When she noticed the radio show getting mail from every corner of the nation, she thought that maybe, just maybe, Bays was out west somewhere listening and that he still cared for her. Amazingly, Bays was listening that night with his mother. He soon drove to Del Rio. Eventually he and Sara were married.

After the final broadcast, Sara headed to California with Bays, while the others returned to Maces Springs. Sara and Maybelle both assumed they were saying good-bye to XERA, but Brinkley’s staff made them an offer that not even Sara could refuse. The station wanted the Carters back for another year, and this time they wanted the whole family—including Helen and June, and A.P. and Sara’s two children. To make the offer even harder to resist, the children would each be paid $15 a week.

For June, this step into the spotlight was scary. Daddy’s girl had learned in Maces Springs that she could do almost anything—except sing. When she was called on to join her sisters in a musical program, she would turn to comedy or dancing as a diversion. “When you don’t have much of a voice and harmony is all around you, you reach out and pick something you can use,” she wrote in her first autobiography. “In my case, it was just plain guts. Since I couldn’t sing, I talked a lot and tried to cover all the bad notes with laughter.”

After the Mexican government shut down XERA following an agreement with U.S. officials regarding radio bandwidth standards, the Carters’ radio career seemed to be over, until Harry O’Neill, the Chicago adman who had hired the Carters for Brinkley, bought airtime on WBT, a fifty-thousand-watt station in Charlotte, North Carolina, and in 1942 asked the Carters to follow him there. But Sara, wanting to be with her husband, soon returned to California, marking the end of the original Carter Family.

From time to time A.P. would talk about getting everyone back together, but it never amounted to anything. Deeply disheartened, this towering musical influence settled for running a general store in Maces Springs—his place in music history largely buried for years until folk and country historians began to appreciate his vast contributions to American musical culture.

That left Ezra as the keeper of the Carter musical flame in the form of Maybelle and the girls. Ezra wasn’t all that interested in the Carters’ musical heritage; he saw the group primarily as a means for his family to get out of Poor Valley. He lined up a daily show on a station in nearby Richmond and also arranged live shows for the group throughout the area, performing at courthouses, movie theaters, and schools. The newly named Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle gradually built enough of a following that WRVA, a larger station in Richmond, lured them to the Old Dominion Barn Dance, a country music stage show.

It was an ideal workshop for the Carter sisters. Anita’s strong voice made her a favorite with the crowd, who especially enjoyed her yodeling and the way she’d tease the audience by holding a note so long that they would burst into applause. But it was June who made the greatest strides in Richmond, slowly developing a humorous persona that leaned heavily on the sort of folksy, golly-gee backwoods humor of Minnie Pearl, who delighted Opry audiences with her trademark greeting, “How—dee!” Despite their illustrious musical heritage, the Carter girls’ act was much closer to vaudeville than to folk music purity.

Teenaged June, who was naturally outgoing, became hostess of a morning show on the station. Her ambition was so obvious that Sunshine Sue, the Barn Dance’s star, worried about the Carters upstaging her. Ultimately, Sue made things uncomfortable for Eck and the group, and they quit the Old Dominion in 1948, ending the stay in Richmond, during which June graduated from high school.

After all his hard work, Eck uncharacteristically became discouraged enough to take the family back to Maces Springs, asking himself if he shouldn’t give up this music venture. But fate stepped in again. The Carters soon got an offer to appear regularly on WNOX, a small but influential radio station in Knoxville that liked to bill itself as the “stepping stone to the Grand Ole Opry,” the major league of country music. The station was also known for having some top-notch young musicians, including a shy young guitar player named Chester “Chet” Atkins. Eck wasn’t sure he wanted to get involved in show business again, but June pushed him—the only one in the family to do so.
Yes, yes, yes,
she told her daddy.
Let’s go to Knoxville.
It was as if she was the one driving the Harley now and everyone else was holding on.

While his wife and daughters settled in at the station, Eck started working on ways to make the act more marketable. Hearing all the talk about the twenty-four-year-old Atkins, he asked the guitarist to join the Carter quartet, and Chet accepted. His stylish guitar playing and keen musical ideas spruced up the Carter Family material. Soon, Atkins was such an integral part of the group that the name was changed to the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle, Chet Atkins and His Famous Guitar.

June’s charisma and ease in the spotlight weren’t lost on Steve Sholes, the RCA Victor executive who later brought Elvis Presley to the label. After signing Maybelle and the sisters to a contract, he signed June to a separate solo deal and took her to New York in early 1949 to cut a single, “Country Girl,” and to guest on some Homer and Jethro records, including the comedy duo’s novelty version of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” a Frank Loesser composition that had won an Academy Award for best original song earlier that year. Their parody went to number twenty-two in the pop field. The duo wanted June to go with them on tour and were surprised when she refused. Daddy’s girl may have been ambitious, but she was also loyal.

The Carters stepped up the radio station ladder when KWTO in Springfield, Missouri, came calling. They were making good money again, and June took quickly to the high life. “They spent money like there was no tomorrow,” Atkins related. “Cars, clothes, anything they wanted.” In Springfield, the Carters were sharing the stage regularly with big-name country attractions, including a promising new singer named Carl Smith, who everyone thought was the handsomest man in all of country music.

The Carters were on such a roll that the Grand Ole Opry approached Eck about having them join the Opry cast. The Carters made their debut early in 1950 on the Opry stage at the famed Ryman Auditorium. They were an immediate hit. “The roof came offa that building,” as June declared later. It was easy to see why. When they stepped up to the microphone at center stage, the Carters brought with them the history of their years on the radio, the great Carter Family songs, plus youthful vitality, humor, and even a touch of sexuality. At the Opry, June continued to blossom as a comedienne, even stepping away from the group at the start of their weekly appearance to joke around with whichever country star happened to be emceeing that section of the program. Typical of her frequently flirtatious humor was this exchange, which she would repeat in various forms in city after city on tour: