Johnny Cash
A plain-spoken storyteller from the Arkansas cotton fields, Cash built a career on siding with the underdog. His late-life recordings with producer Rick Rubin brought him to a new generation shortly before his death.
Personality
Cash acted on conviction and was willing to spend his own standing to back it. When Columbia Records resisted his 1964 album Bitter Tears, about the treatment of Native Americans, he paid for a full-page advertisement in Billboard asking radio programmers where their guts were. Invited to the White House in 1970, he chose his own songs rather than the ones requested. He explained his all-black stage clothes as worn on behalf of the poor, the imprisoned and others left behind, and he called himself a believer who was also the biggest sinner of them all. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame praised his storytelling and his unflinching eye on the world.
Under pressure
Cash's most public struggle was with amphetamines and other pills, a dependence that grew from the late 1950s and, by the mid-1960s, had brought arrests and the collapse of his first marriage. With support from June Carter, whom he married in 1968, he recovered enough to enter the most successful period of his career, though he relapsed in later decades and went back into treatment in 1992. When his record sales faded in the 1980s and Columbia let him go in 1986, he kept touring and recording, and in 1994 took a chance on an unlikely partnership with producer Rick Rubin that restored his reputation.
The arc
Born J. R. Cash in Kingsland, Arkansas, he grew up in a government resettlement colony for struggling farmers, working the cotton fields and absorbing gospel music. After four years in the US Air Force, much of it in West Germany as a Morse code operator, he began recording for Sun Records in Memphis in 1955. The live albums At Folsom Prison (1968) and At San Quentin (1969) brought a major resurgence, followed by his own ABC television show from 1969 to 1971. The American Recordings albums, begun in 1994, closed his career on a high. He died in Nashville on 12 September 2003.
Legacy
Cash entered the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1980, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992 and the Gospel Music Hall of Fame, a spread that shows how far his music travelled beyond one genre. He sold more than 90 million records and received the National Medal of Arts in 2001. His songs about prisoners, labourers and outsiders gave country music a social conscience, and his spare late recordings introduced him to listeners born decades after his first hits. His life was dramatised in the 2005 film Walk the Line, keeping his story in popular view.
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