Johnny Cash: The Life (3 page)

“[Jack’s] been with me all these years, and sometimes when I [was] so messed up, in such bad trouble, in jail somewhere, I would say, ‘I know you’re really ashamed of me.’ I’m still talking to him. A lot of things might have been different if it weren’t for him. He knew about the entertainment world. He knew about the trash that went on. My father would always talk about the evil stage, the evil show business. But Jack didn’t. He encouraged me.”

J.R. tried to avoid his father’s eyes in the months after Jack’s death because he didn’t want to see the disappointment and the blame. His father had told J.R. the accident would never have happened if he had kept his brother from going to the school shop that day, but really, what could he have done?

During this time, J.R. became increasingly distant, showing little interest in school or hanging out with his pals. More than ever, he treasured his time alone, whether it was at the fishing pond or the school library. Even when he was around friends, they’d often notice a lonely, melancholy quality about him. Rosanne, his daughter, believes a part of that sense of sadness never left her father. “Dad was wounded so profoundly by Jack’s death, and by his father’s reaction—the blame and recrimination and bitterness,” she says. “If someone survives that kind of damage, either great evil or great art can come out of it. And my dad had the seed of great art in him.”

It was around this time that J.R. saw a movie that left a lasting impression on him. For most kids,
Frankenstein,
the 1931 film about a mad scientist who creates a monster by putting a criminal’s brain into his man-made being, was simply a scary horror story. But Cash felt sorry for the monster, who was killed by a mob that thought he’d murdered a young girl, when in fact the monster had tried to befriend her. Explaining his sympathy for the monster, Cash said he was someone “made up of bad parts but was trying to do good.”

James Mangold, who directed
Walk the Line,
the 2005 film about the relationship between Cash and June Carter in the 1960s, talked to Cash about
Frankenstein
and came away from the conversation with the belief that Cash identified so strongly with the movie because he worried, in the aftermath of Jack’s death and his father’s reaction, that he, too, might have bad parts. “He certainly felt terribly misunderstood by his father.”

In his increasing loneliness and grief, J.R. started writing down his thoughts, sometimes in the form of a poem, a short story, or even a song. He found he loved to express himself in words. “I’d never known death either in the family or among friends, and suddenly I realized that I wasn’t immortal—that I too could die someday,” he said. The writings reflected a darkness that would reappear in Cash’s music throughout the years.

J.R. also tried to lose himself in books, showing a particular fondness for American history and the Old West. The stories and accounts stimulated his increasingly active mind, and he often took them with him to the fishing hole. He also developed a great appetite for poetry that never left him.

Like many kids, he loved the work of Edgar Allan Poe as he got older, but he responded most to poets who, like his beloved gospel music, offered inspiring messages. He especially prized one poem—Joaquin Miller’s “Columbus.” His face would still light up years later when he described the story of Columbus crossing the ocean and facing a series of seemingly impossible hurdles, only to respond each time with the words “Sail on!”

“Some people might think that’s corny stuff…how Columbus says, ‘Sail on,’” Cash acknowledged late in life. “But it always thrilled me to death. I love that stuff.”

Through all this, however, nothing comforted him more than those solitary late-night walks on the gravel road, though he was now singing hymns along with Jimmie Rodgers and Ernest Tubb songs.

It was on one of those walks that J.R. had a revelation that caused him to race home to share it with his mother. For months he had been trying to figure out how to keep Jack’s spirit alive and, perhaps, gain some smidgen of affection from his father. He even thought briefly about the ministry, but he couldn’t convince himself, even at age twelve, that it was the right choice. The breakthrough came as he walked down the road singing gospel tunes. That was it. He could spread Jack’s message through music; he would be a gospel singer.

Joanne Cash remembers her brother running into the house to tell his mother the news. Carrie smiled and hugged her son. When she told Ray about the boy’s latest dream, he scoffed. The reaction hurt J.R., but the youngster was used to being disappointed by his father.

J.R.’s demeanor differed greatly from that of his more outgoing brothers and sisters, and his parents interpreted it in opposing ways. J.R.’s father saw the boy’s daydreaming and love of music as lazy and unfocused. Ray Cash later explained, “I wanted him to start preparing for the day when he’d be on his own and have to take care of his family.” Ray even complained about J.R.’s facial expression or lack of it. Whereas he’d seen enthusiasm and warmth in Jack’s face, Ray found it hard to tell what his younger son was thinking—or if the boy was even listening to him—because his eyes didn’t reveal any emotion. Carrie Cash thought her son’s daydreaming and quiet demeanor were signs that he was thoughtful and sensitive. “He hardly ever said anything,” she said years later. “But he listened. He was drinking it all in.”

The boy tried hard to be loyal to his father; it was the Commandment that meant the most to him, and he did appreciate the way his father worked tirelessly to provide for the family. Yet, he said later, there was no getting around it: Ray Cash could be cruel, especially when he drank too much. Many of J.R.’s relatives and schoolboy chums would challenge that description of Ray. They said old man Cash was simply gruff, like most hardworking men in Depression-ravaged rural America. But J.R.’s list of complaints against his father went further than not hearing “I love you” regularly.

J.R. was forever wounded when he came home from grade school and found his dog lying dead in the woods near the house. To J.R.’s horror, he learned that his father had shot the animal after it broke into the chicken coop and killed a half-dozen chickens. Most of their neighbors would have done the same thing, but other farmers would have found a more humane way to tell their youngsters, perhaps simply saying the animal had run away. J.R. sensed that his father almost felt glee in telling him about the shooting.

Years later, Ray Cash said he wished he had handled the incident differently. “I wouldn’t have killed that dog if I had thought about it,” he told Christopher S. Wren for a biography,
The Life of Johnny Cash: Winners Got Scars Too,
in the early 1970s. “I dragged the dog back into the woods. I hated the killing, but it was done. J.R. found the dog and he came and asked me why I shot him. I told him. He never said anything about it to this day.”

Though the elder Cash never said anything on the record about his thoughts regarding J.R. and Jack, there remained a lingering resentment over the tragedy.

“Grandpa always kind of blamed Dad for Jack’s death,” says Cash’s daughter Kathy. “And Dad had this real sad guilt thing about him his whole life. You could just see it in his eyes. You can look at almost any picture and see this dark sadness thing going on. Dad even told me…that one time when his daddy had been drinking, he said something like, ‘Too bad it wasn’t you instead of Jack.’ I said, ‘Oh, my God, Dad. What a horrible thing to say.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I think about that every time I see him.’”

J.R. was walking down a colony road one day more than a year after Jack’s death when he was surprised to hear music coming from one of the wooden houses. He didn’t know at first if the voice and guitar strumming were from a record or someone inside. Curious, he walked up to the door, where he saw a boy about his age singing and playing an old Ernest Tubb hit called “Drivin’ Nails in My Coffin.”

The boy, Jesse Barnhill, invited J.R. inside; he was delighted someone else was interested in music. J.R. had seen the teenager around school, but he had never spent any time with him. Jesse suffered from polio, which made walking difficult and clumsy. His paralyzed right arm was only half as long as his left, and his right hand was withered. J.R. marveled that the boy could play the guitar.

Jesse tried to teach J.R. how to play, but J.R. didn’t catch on. Even so, J.R. longed for one of the guitars he saw in the Sears Roebuck catalog, especially the Gene Autry model, thinking it would be fun to hold while he was singing. But the family couldn’t afford it, so he mostly just sang along while Jesse copied the guitar parts from the records.

Not only did J.R. start spending a lot of time with Jesse, but also he helped his friend overcome his hesitancy and brave the outside world—ignoring the kids who made fun of him. With J.R. leading the way, they’d go to the town center, usually to see a movie or listen to the jukebox in the tiny café. They’d often be joined by Harry Clanton, who was in J.R.’s class. J.R. liked Harry because he had a wonderful sense of humor, and J.R. loved a good joke. Together, J.R. and Harry became known as cutups and pranksters in class—going to elaborate means to entertain the other students with such antics as leaving a dead squirrel in the teacher’s desk drawer or causing havoc in the library by pulling out scores of books and putting them back in the wrong places.

When J.R. was feeling especially aggressive, the pranks would take on a harder edge. He loved, for instance, to break bottles he’d find stacked up behind stores in town or sneak into a field at night and set fire to a farmer’s haystack. In the Dyess High School annual at the end of his junior year, Cash was called “historian” for his interest in the subject, while Clanton, who was known throughout the school as the mastermind behind all the pranks, was simply “The Schemer.”

After his weekly trip to the movies, Cash never had enough money to play the jukebox, but he did a good job of talking others into pushing the button next to the name of Eddy Arnold, who had become a new favorite. Arnold was the hottest thing in country music in the mid-1940s, thanks to such records as “I’ll Hold You in My Heart (Till I Can Hold You in My Arms).” Unlike the rawer honky-tonk style that J.R. usually preferred, Arnold sang with a crooning, pop-flavored approach that made him sort of the Bing Crosby of country.

One day in the summer of 1947, J.R. heard on the radio that the cast of one of his favorite radio shows, the
High Noon Roundup,
was coming to Dyess for a concert. The whole Cash family listened to the show, which was broadcast live over Memphis station WMPS, during their lunch breaks from the fields. J.R. arrived at the school for the concert two hours early with Jesse and Harry. He puffed anxiously on a cigarette, hoping to figure out a way to meet the Louvin Brothers, who were the stars of the weekday program.

J.R. recognized Charlie Louvin when he got out of a black Cadillac, and the teenager’s knees shook as Louvin walked toward him. All Louvin wanted was directions to the restroom, but J.R. took advantage of the request to escort the radio star there. He wanted to ask Louvin how he could get into the music business, but he didn’t have the nerve. Just walking alongside Louvin, however, made the whole idea of being a professional singer seem more possible.

After the show, J.R. and his friends watched as the musicians put their equipment into their car and headed back to Memphis. J.R. would have given anything to be in the car with them. When Louvin waved at him as they pulled away, it was his biggest thrill since Eleanor Roosevelt shook his hand. In the weeks after the concert, J.R. started thinking of country singers and the Roosevelts in the same light. They both brought people together and made them feel good, and people cheered them. He assumed, of course, they must all be Baptists.

As J.R. moved through high school, he began to feel increasingly anxious about his future. For all the time he had spent thinking about being on the radio, he realized he didn’t have any idea how to make that happen. There was no station in Dyess where he might try to persuade someone to give a local boy the chance to show what he could do. J.R. still talked to his family and a few friends about being on the radio someday, but privately he was starting to worry.

Truth be known, Ray wasn’t the only one in the Cash family who had doubts about J.R.’s musical dreams. Carrie wanted to support her son, but his voice was high-pitched, not at all husky and deep-rooted like the singers on the radio. Besides, he was shy. How could he be a singer if he couldn’t stand before an audience? Carrie had tried to help J.R. with his insecurity by arranging for him to sing in front of the church congregation. Cash later called it the “most horrible experience of my life.” It might have been all right in church if his mother had been onstage with him, but he found himself standing next to the preacher and a stranger on piano. He felt as if he “totally bombed,” but his mother didn’t give up; she kept pushing him to sing before the congregation, and every time J.R. felt embarrassed. It wasn’t the singing—it was the people watching him.

That wall of shyness began to crack one afternoon in the summer of 1947. Carrie and Joanne were doing the dishes in the kitchen when they heard a voice through the open window singing a new gospel song that had been sweeping the country, “Everybody’s Gonna Have a Wonderful Time Up There.”

Carrie looked out the window and saw fifteen-year-old J.R. pumping water into a bucket.

“Is that you singing, J.R.?”

He spun around and smiled, “Yes, Mama. My voice has gotten a little lower.”

Carrie called her son into the kitchen and she cried as she hugged him.

“You’ve got a gift, J.R. You are going to sing,” she told him. “God’s got his hand on you. You’re going to carry the message of Jesus Christ.”

Carrie was so caught up in J.R.’s “gift” that she vowed to do what she could to nurture him. She wanted J.R. to take singing lessons, but he resisted for almost two years. Finally, Carrie insisted. She was making $5 to $6 a week using the family’s new washing machine to launder the clothes of some of the schoolteachers. She set aside $3 for once-a-week lessons with a young teacher in Lepanto, a larger town eight miles away. J.R. went along grudgingly each week to see LaVanda Mae Fielder. It might have been okay if she had let him sing songs he knew, but he had to sing songs the teacher thought were good vocal exercises, such as the Irish ballad “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.”