Johnny Cash's life was one of breathtaking highs and unfathomable lows.
Despite his legendary talent and all the respect he commanded because of it, Cash was a man
who frequently succumbed to his temptations - and tested the faith others had in him.
This is the tragic, real-life story of Johnny Cash.
Johnny Cash was the fourth of seven children, born February 26th, 1932, in Kingsland, Arkansas,
to Ray and Carrie Cash.
In his memoir, Johnny Cash: The Autobiography, Cash recalled that the house in which he was
born didn't have any windows, and in winter, his mother had to hang blankets to keep them
warm.
The Depression hit the Cash family hard, but when Johnny was three years old, they moved
to the Dyess Colony in northeast Arkansas, taking part in a federal farming program in
which the family farmed 20 acres of cotton and other crops.
When he was five, Johnny started working in the fields alongside his parents and siblings.
He started at first as a water boy, carrying drinking water out to his family.
By the time he was eight, he was picking cotton with them, dragging a heavy canvas sack that
started empty, but by the end of the day held 200 or more pounds of cotton.
Cash wrote in his memoir:
"It wasn't complicated.
You just parked the wagon at one end of the rows and went to it."
He said the work was exhausting and painful; he had back pain, even as a child, and the
cotton bolls he picked were sharp, which cut his hands.
Cash remembered:
"[W]e just worked and worked and worked."
One Saturday morning when Johnny Cash was 12, he asked his older brother Jack to go
fishing.
Jack declined, since he had a job cutting oak trees into posts and working at a table
saw.
In his autobiography, Cash remembers begging his brother to skip the work, but Jack said
no.
Cash went by himself, but the time he spent there felt listless, and he eventually left
and headed for home.
On his way back, his father met him on the road, in a panic - there had been an accident,
and Jack was badly hurt.
He had been pulled into the saw and cut from his ribs through his stomach to his groin.
Jack clung on to life for close to a week before finally succumbing.
Cash later remembered:
"After Jack's death, I felt like I'd died, too.
I had no other friend."
As he grew up, Cash felt his brother's influence on him.
Cash wrote:
"The most important question in […] my life has been 'Which is Jack's way?
Which direction would he have taken?'"
Jack even showed up in Cash's dreams from time to time - usually when Cash was either
doing something he shouldn't have been doing, or about to do something he shouldn't have
been doing.
In the dreams, Jack would know what Cash wanted to do, and would look at him with an admonishing
smile.
According to Cash:
"There's no fooling Jack."
When Cash was in the Air Force, he incessantly wrote letters to a woman named Vivian Liberto,
whom he had met at a roller rink, and would later marry after leaving the service.
Their domestic situation was a relatively normal one, in the sense that he got a job
and they started a family, but that all changed when Cash started playing and recording music.
Cash had a hit record, "Cry, Cry, Cry," that compelled him to go out on tour, and that
spelled trouble for their marriage.
Eventually, according to biographer Steve Turner, Cash was away from home up to 80 percent
of the year, travelling some 300,000 miles in the process.
Unfortunately, during this time he also began to succumb to his addiction to amphetamines
and alcohol, and also developed an eye for the attractive, "sassy" women he'd often meet
on the road.
Around this time, he also met and began flirting with June Carter, who would go on to become
his second wife.
Cash's time on the road made his time at home difficult to bear.
His eldest daughter Rosanne would later remember:
"It got to where it was like somebody else was coming home, not my daddy.
The drugs were at work.
He'd stay up all night.
He and my mom would fight.
It was so sad."
According to another of his daughters, Cindy, Vivian would often put her children in the
car and go looking for a drunken Cash around town.
She finally filed for divorce in 1966, and it was granted the following year.
In 1961, Cash and his wife Vivian moved with their four daughters to Casitas Springs, in
Ventura County, California - where Vivian hoped he could be convinced to give up the
pills and alcohol that had become an integral and dangerous part of his life.
Instead, his problems got worse, particularly with amphetamines.
His daughter Rosanne later said:
"In my pre-teen years.
my father's drug addiction was really consuming him and my parents' marriage.
[…] There was just this background tension and anxiety to all of those years."
The pills would leave his voice a mere croak, and it got to the point where he was having
trouble performing.
Often, he never showed up to his gigs at all.
Eventually, Cash stopped taking amphetamines, but his vigilance would sometimes wane.
After all, he was still an addict and an alcoholic.
He couldn't take just one pill; he needed a handful.
He couldn't have just one drink; he needed to empty out his hotel room's mini-bar.
Cash's struggles continued in the '80s, when he was prescribed pain medication for various
surgeries and illnesses and continued to take them after he no longer needed them.
Luckily, Cash didn't face these demons alone.
The singer's struggles required a steadying influence in his life; so when he couldn't
manage himself, he leaned on his second wife, June.
"She's not only a lady who I shared a life with, but she may have been, uh, the person
responsible for me still being alive."
Strangely enough, the man who sang so convincingly about shooting a man in Reno "just to watch
him die" was never once in his life incarcerated in an actual prison.
He was, however, arrested several times, for a variety of offenses usually related to drugs
— either for procuring them or for his many escapades under their influence.
Steve Turner's Cash biography tells the story of October 1965, when Cash took a flight to
El Paso, Texas, then caught a cab to take him across the Mexican border to Juarez, where
he bought 668 Dexadrine and 475 Equanil tablets on the black market and hid them in his guitar.
Unfortunately for him, the dealer was under surveillance for allegedly selling heroin;
Cash was arrested at the airport, and held overnight on drug smuggling charges.
He also faced charges back in El Paso for possession of the pills.
Earlier that year, in May, Cash was drunk and out well past curfew in Starkville, Mississippi
when police arrested him and put him in a holding cell overnight to sober up.
According to Rolling Stone, Cash kicked his foot against his cell door so hard that he
broke one of his toes.
And in November 1967, while under the influence of pills, Cashwent on a joyride through Georgia
- before banging on the door of a rural home until the police were summoned.
His arrest that time netted him a night in jail.
Cash often told a story about a time in which he was so deep in the throes of drug-related
despair that he found himself completely robbed of the will to live.
According to Cash, he trekked up to Nickajack Cave, in Tennessee, in the fall of 1967.
In his autobiography, he wrote:
"Nickajack contained the remains of many cave explorers, amateur adventurers who'd lost
their lives in the caves over the years, usually by losing their way, and it was my hope and
intention to join their company."
Cash said he crawled through the cave for several hours until his flashlight batteries
gave out, at which point, he laid down in the pitch dark, ready to die.
He said he'd never felt so far from God - but as he lay there, an epiphany came over him
that perhaps it wasn't his time to die.
He got up and found his way out of the cave in the dark, guided by a small draft of air,
and subsequently promised to quit drugs that very day.
Cash recounted this story many times - it's published in his memoir and in a number of
magazines and books that cover his life.
But the story has many detractors.
For example, Marshall Grant, Cash's friend and former bass player, says it never happened.
And Robert Hilburn, Cash's biographer, notes that the Nickajack Cave was underwater in
the fall of 1967; since the Army Corps of Engineers had dammed it up.
He also wrote:
"Cash did not quit drugs that day."
In April 2003, June Carter Cash had been diagnosed with a leaky heart valve and, after a battery
of tests, doctors determined that valve replacement surgery was the only option to fix her problem
and prolong her life.
According to Steve Turner's biography of her husband, she initially balked at the prospect
of going under the knife, claiming that, at 73, she was too old for the operation.
Johnny Cash begged her to have the surgery; claiming he wasn't ready for her to leave
him.
June finally relented and had the surgery on May 7th, but early the next morning she
went into cardiac arrest.
It took doctors 20 minutes to resuscitate her, after which they put her on life support.
Three days later, doctors performed more tests to see if she responded to stimuli - an indicator
of whether she had any brain function.
No one was certain how long her brain had been deprived of oxygen during the cardiac
episode and resuscitation efforts.
Johnny Cash gave permission for life support to be switched off; and June's bodily functions
were expected to shut down over the course of three or so hours.
Instead, she lingered for three days.
On May 15th, with her family standing vigil around her bed, June Carter Cash passed away.
"We're friends, and we’re sweethearts and lovers, and we’re married, and we're happy."
Within four months of his wife June's death, Johnny Cash would also be gone - but not before
doing one last bit of work.
In the days immediately following June's funeral, Cash reflected on his wife's life and their
time together - which added up to 35 years of marriage, with very little of that time
spent apart.
He tried to keep busy, too; mere days after June's funeral, Cash was back in the recording
studio with legendary producer Rick Rubin, adding to the collection of songs the two
had stockpiled for the American Recordings series.
But his ill health continued.
In his final weeks, he would be hospitalized with pancreatitis and, two weeks after leaving
the hospital, Johnny Cash died of complications from diabetes.
He was 71 years old.
Cash's legacy as a singer, songwriter, song interpreter, and shaper and re-shaper of country
music is unquestioned.
There are few figures in country whose shadow looms as long as Cash's; when he was alive,
he was larger than life.
But that status came at a cost - his problems loomed large too, and as he suffered, so did
those around him.
Still, when Johnny Cash spoke, millions listened; when he sang, millions sang along; and when
he died, millions mourned him.
"My dad was full of laughter, he was full of joy, full of spirit, and he would always
rather laugh than cry."
That kid who grew up poor on the cotton farm sure made a hell of an impact.
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