Johnny Cash: The Life (9 page)

Marshall liked the “Hey, Porter” poem, but it was just a poem. How were they going to turn it into a song? They thought about taking the melody of some old song and putting the words to it, which was a common practice in country, folk, and blues music. John had done it on the songs he fiddled with in Germany. But they couldn’t think of anything that worked with “Hey, Porter,” so they tried to make up a tune themselves. They just started hitting the strings to see where it would take them. Roy was still a regular, cheering them on.

They all looked to Luther’s guitar as the heart of their sound; but he was unable to move beyond that simple
tick-tack-tick-tack
—or hunt-and-peck—style. “John played the first note and the second one and asked Luther if he could do that. Luther worked and worked on it…must have been an hour or two, and he finally got it,” Marshall said. “That’s about all we achieved that first night.”

Over the years, rather than apologize for their limitations as musicians, Marshall saw those limitations as a secret weapon. “Our inability had a lot more to do with our success than our ability,” he said. “If we had done what we wanted to do in those days—which was play like all those great musicians in Nashville—we would have sounded like everyone else, and that would have taken away from the character in John’s voice.”

Though long embarrassed by his lack of range on the guitar, Luther, too, grew to be proud of the sound he brought to the group. “You know how all those hot-shot guitarists race their fingers all over the strings?” he’d say time and again. “Well, they’re looking for the right sound. I found it.”

By the time they were comfortable with “Hey, Porter,” it was December and everyone was caught up in the holidays. Sam Phillips was rushing to release Elvis’s third single. John had been telling Vivian that a Sun contract would be the best Christmas present of all, but it wasn’t going to happen.

There was one milestone for the group that month, though. A neighbor heard them rehearsing and asked if they would play some spiritual music at her church one evening. It would just be for a few ladies, and they wouldn’t be able to pay them. But the guys jumped at the chance. Setting aside “Hey, Porter,” they worked up a half-dozen or so gospel tunes for the church performance, including “I Was There When It Happened” and “Belshazzar.” Soon, they realized their band needed a name.

“You’re the best with words, John, you come up with something,” Marshall told him.

In almost no time, Cash had a playful name. “Well, let’s see, you’re from North Carolina [Marshall], you’re from Mississippi [Luther], and I’m from Arkansas…how about the Tennessee Three?”

He offered Tennessee Trio as an alternative, but Luther and Marshall liked the sound of the Tennessee Three. After all, they did live in Memphis now, and they liked the Southern connection.

The church show wasn’t a glamorous affair, but it was a start. The Tennessee Three played for about twenty minutes to about a dozen elderly ladies in the basement of the Galloway United Methodist Church.

John couldn’t wait to tell his mother about the performance when the family got together for Christmas. Roy, ever the cheerleader, told everyone that John was going to make a record for the Sun label. John then sang “Hey, Porter.” Carrie was surprised it wasn’t a gospel song, but she loved it anyway—particularly the part about coming home.

John wasted no time in getting back to Sam Phillips in the new year, and Sam gave “Hey, Porter” a thumbs-up. He said he’d record the song as soon as John came up with another original song for the back of the single. John again brought up “Belshazzar,” but Sam reminded him of the no-gospel rule. Once again, the Tennessee Three returned to the drawing board.

John had wanted Vivian to come to the audition, but she was five months pregnant and still feeling the effects of morning sickness. Instead, she paced the floor while he was gone. Despite all John’s hopes, she couldn’t quite imagine how a band could jump from Marshall’s home rehearsal garage to a record contract. So she was all the more excited when Cash raced up the walk with a big smile on his face and told her, “Baby, we’re cuttin’ a record.”

In contrast to the anxiety he’d felt over finding a job after high school and his entrance into the Air Force, John was absolutely certain that he was on his way to a life in country music once Phillips said he liked “Hey, Porter.”

As George Bates had done, Phillips was fast becoming something of a father figure to Cash, one of several who would serve in that role over the years. In time, he’d speak of both men as his “angels.” There was something about Phillips that made Cash trust him implicitly—at least in the beginning—whether he was talking about music or giving advice on money matters. Though the record company owner was only nine years older, John called him “Mr. Phillips,” even after he left Sun. “I’ve got a lot of respect for him,” Cash declared. “He’s really a man of vision.…[H]e can see something happening that nobody else could.”

Never one to shy away from hard work, Cash threw himself into following through on Phillips’s career suggestions in the early months of 1955—including trying to book some live shows so that he’d be comfortable when he started touring behind “Hey, Porter.” Phillips said it didn’t matter where he played—schoolhouses, town socials, rural roadhouses—just as long as he got some experience in “hooking” a crowd.

Most of all, though, Phillips kept reminding John about the need for new songs. Sam had opened his own publishing company, Hi-Lo Music, and he made sure that all the Sun artists signed with it. By owning the publishing rights, he made a few more cents per record—and every penny counted in those early fledgling days. But Phillips also believed that Cash’s ability to write would give him a big advantage against the Nashville singers, most of whom depended on a network of songwriters for material. Cash began working on lining up live shows and songwriting—all the while trying to honor his responsibilities to Home Equipment. George Bates sensed that John would be giving up his job soon, but he was so fond of the young man that he would regularly ask for updates about the band’s progress.

Ever the dreamer, Cash was already feeling so much a part of the music business that he was bringing home copies of the magazines and trade publications, including
Billboard
and
Cash Box.
He loved seeing photos of the new artists so he could picture them when he heard them on the radio. Luther and Marshall, by contrast, still couldn’t imagine giving up their mechanic jobs. This was fun, they told each other, but you couldn’t count on getting your weekly $60.

Progress was slow on the live show front. John didn’t turn out to be any better at selling his music than at selling aluminum siding. On his days off, he—sometimes with Marshall or Luther or both—would drive his green Plymouth through small towns outside Memphis, hoping to find places that would let them set up a show. They stopped at movie theaters, social halls, schools, food markets, and roadhouses. No place was too small.

Hoping to impress the various businessmen, John always mentioned that he was going to have a release on Sun Records. The problem was that most of the merchants hadn’t heard of Sun Records, and the ones who had told him to come back when he had the record. He became so frustrated that he even started offering to do shows for free—and he still couldn’t find any takers. Finally, he gave up and just concentrated on his songwriting.

In looking for song ideas, John rummaged back over the pieces of songs he had been trying to put together ever since Landsberg. He also replayed in his head many of his favorite records—all the way back to Dyess days—in hopes of finding something to trigger his imagination.

That meant a lot of Jimmie Rodgers recordings. Rodgers was still Cash’s main inspiration—and he wasn’t alone in his feeling for the man’s music. As Rodgers’s plaque in the Country Music Hall of Fame declares, he “stands foremost in the country music field as ‘the man who started it all.’ His songs told the great stories of the singing rails, the powerful steam locomotives and the wonderful railroad people that he loved so well. Although small in stature, he was a giant among men, starting a trend in the musical taste of millions.”

Just as Sam Phillips often used the word “different” when dishing out praise, John employed the word “authentic,” and his model, in many ways, was Rodgers, who started making records in 1927 at the age of twenty-nine. Partly because Rodgers’s millions of fans knew about his life as a railroad brakeman, but mostly because he sang with natural, almost storytelling intimacy, those fans believed he was singing about himself and his experiences. Though commonplace in the rock world of the 1960s and beyond, this idea of “personal singing and songwriting” was revolutionary in Rodgers’s era, especially among best-selling music makers, who depended on Tin Pan Alley compositions.

Even in the blues and country fields, where songs tended to be more conversational and anecdotal, the recordings were less autobiographical than one might now assume. They were usually reflections on common experiences rather than the consistent chronicling of a writer’s or singer’s own life. Rodgers blurred the distinction between common experience and personal testimony because he sounded so convincing, whether he’d actually written the song he was singing or not.

In 1931 Rodgers wrote one of his most evocative tunes, “T.B. Blues”—at a time when he was actually battling tuberculosis, which would kill him two years later. During his final recording sessions in New York City, the story went, Rodgers was so ill that he had to sit in a chair or, sometimes, lie on a cot between songs.

“When Jimmie Rodgers sang ‘T.B. Blues,’ his audiences knew that he meant it—and that was one of the things, amid all the hillbilly hokum of the day that distinguished him….It was what country music fans mean today when they bestow their highest accolade on an artist by calling him ‘sincere,’” writes Nolan Porterfield in his biography
Jimmie Rodgers.

Cash could have used “sincere” as well to describe what he prized in an artist, but he wasn’t talking just about how convincing a record sounded; he wanted to know that something in the singer’s background showed he was singing from his heart about experiences he had lived. To him, that was the greatest test of an artist—and that’s what made him so proud of “Hey, Porter.” He was being authentic to himself and his own life.

As Cash listened to Rodgers’s records, he identified with the man who had grown up in hard times and found in music both a comfort and a personal salvation. It was those records that also instilled in Cash much of his fascination with railroads and their imagery in song. Whenever Cash reached deep inside for his best songs, whether it was in 1955 or decades later, he was usually reaching back to that Jimmie Rodgers tradition.

But Cash was still learning how to write songs. He spent hour after hour listening to country music on the radio, hoping to hear a theme or lyric that would inspire him to create a song of his own. As he listened, he kept a pencil and a pad nearby so he could jot down his thoughts. Many a night Vivian sat with him, listening to the music, until she would fall asleep, but John would go on for several more hours. He’d bring some of the scribbled notes with him when he got together with Marshall and Luther, but most of the pages ended up in the trash.

John’s and Marshall’s accounts of this period often differed when it came to the order in which the songs were written, but it appears that one of the first serious songs after “Hey, Porter” was one that Cash had been thinking about ever since Landsberg: “Folsom Prison Blues.”

The genesis of what would become one of Cash’s signature compositions was “Crescent City Blues,” the Gordon Jenkins song that Cash had heard in the barracks at Landsberg. According to Marshall, John first mentioned “Crescent City Blues” at one of the rehearsals soon after Phillips agreed to make a record with them. “Just before he played it for us for the first time, he told about how he wanted to write a song about a prison ever since seeing the Folsom Prison movie, but he didn’t figure out a way to do it until he heard the Jenkins song.”

The concept of “Folsom Prison Blues” appealed to Cash on several levels. First, there was a long history of prison songs in country music. As a writer, too, he was drawn to melancholy themes.

What caught Cash’s ear in the “Crescent City Blues” recording was the desperation in the female singer’s voice as she longed for the man who had gotten away. Jenkins’s line about a lonesome train whistle reminded him of so many country tunes, notably Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” and he loved the bit about wanting the train whistle to blow her blues away. It gave Cash the blueprint he needed—even if it took more than a year after he first heard Jenkins’s song for him to turn it into his song.

First the Jenkins version:

And here’s how Cash turned “Crescent City Blues” into “Folsom Prison Blues”: