The Multifaceted Man In Black By: PETER COOPER Staff Writer Somehow, Johnny Cash is dead. Battling ill health for years and without his longtime companion since wife June Carter Cash's death in May, Mr. Cash's frailties of body and heart made him seem no less indomitable. Fans and fellow musicians likened him to a force of nature: an iconic, elemental figure, more granite and fire than flesh and blood. But Friday morning about 2 a.m., Mr. Cash passed away at Baptist Hospital, succumbing to respiratory failure brought on by complications from diabetes. He was 71 years old, and his life altered the course of American popular music. "No body of work comes close to what his particular body of work is," said Emmylou Harris, whom Mr. Cash called his favorite female singer. Speaking at a 1999 tribute concert, rock star Bruce Springsteen asserted that Mr. Cash "took the social consciousness of folk music, the gravity and humor of country music and the rebellion of rock 'n' roll and told all us young guys that not only was it all right to tear up all those lines and boundaries, but it was important." Mr. Cash was a 1950s rockabilly who fused country and folk music in the '60s and made stark country albums with rock 'n' roll flourishes at the end of his career. He was an admittedly flawed man who battled drug addiction yet emerged as a high-profile Christian. He was a social activist who remained beloved by the right-leaning, country traditionalist set. He was a 1980s industry washout — considered too old-fashioned for the country charts — who signed with Rick Rubin's American Recording Company in the 1990s and experienced an unprecedented career resurgence, winning Grammys and filling hip California venues such as The Viper Room and the House of Blues. He was a Country Music Hall of Famer and a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer. He was easy to appreciate and often hard to figure. Longtime friend Kris Kristofferson came closest to the latter in a 1971 song called The Pilgrim, Chapter 33: "He's a poet, he's a picker/ He's a prophet, he's a pusher/ He's a pilgrim and a preacher, and a problem when he's stoned/ He's a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction/ Taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home." Mr. Cash confounded expectations at every turn, delighting listeners with his staggering rumble of a voice even as he confounded radio programmers and industry gate-keepers. His 14 No. 1 country hits — I Walk the Line and Ring of Fire, among them — don't approach marks made by Merle Haggard, George Strait, Conway Twitty and others. But his artistic and personal legacies go far beyond chart positions or records sold. "I wonder if I ever really did leave, how many would there be to grieve? How they'd react to the word," Mr. Cash once wrote and sang. The answers now return: Thousands, and with considerable sorrow. Chapter 1: A hardscrabble youth Kingsland, Ark., is a tiny little town now chiefly known as "Birthplace of Johnny Cash." When Mr. Cash was born there — on Feb. 26, 1932 — no one called him "Johnny." To his parents, and on his birth certificate, he was J.R. Cash, as no one could agree on a name at first. In 1935, father Ray Cash moved his family to a five-room house near Dyess, Ark., to take part in a rehabilitation project run by the Roosevelt administration. "Actually, it was a socialistic setup with a co-op store and a co-op cotton gin, the intention being that the farmers would share any profits from the gin and the store," Mr. Cash wrote in his first autobiography, Man In Black. The share-cropping family sang country songs while picking cotton, and work in the fields was not halted even by death. Mr. Cash's older brother, Jack, was killed in a table-saw accident in 1944, an event that haunted Mr. Cash throughout his life. But the next day, the family was back chopping cotton. Mother Carrie Cash fell to her knees in the field that morning, as her son related in a second autobiography, Cash: "Lest you get too romantic an impression of the good, natural, hard-working, character-building country life back then, back there, remember that picture of Carrie Cash down in the mud between the cotton rows on any mother's worst day," he wrote. Carrie Cash saw musical promise in J.R., the fourth of five children. She saved enough money for the teen to take a few singing lessons, though the teacher refused to mold his distinctive voice into something that could fit within a choir's confines. Though J.R. loved the gospel music he heard at the Pentecostal Church of God in Dyess, he was most smitten with the Grand Ole Opry and the country music he heard on the radio at lunch breaks during the week. A brief encounter with Charlie Louvin of the Louvin Brothers before a concert in Dyess further enraptured the teen: "I didn't even feel the gravel on my bare feet that night when I walked the two-and-a-half miles home in the dark, singing all the songs I'd heard from the stage at the school auditorium," he wrote in Man In Black. Chapter 2: From service to Sun Though it was music that thrilled Mr. Cash, it seemed incapable of removing him from Arkansas. Upon graduation from Dyess High School in 1950, he moved to Michigan, intending to work in an automobile plant. Making car hoods on an assembly line didn't suit him much better than cotton farming, so he joined the Air Force. The military refused to accept "J.R." as a first name, and he became "John R. Cash." During basic training in Texas, he met a high school senior named Vivian Liberto. His assignment to a base in Landsberg, Germany (he was a radio intercept operator charged with cracking Russian Morse code transmissions) did not deter their burgeoning romance, as he wrote to her regularly. While in the service, he began strumming a guitar, composing music and verse and playing in a country band. His time in the Air Force was of great musical significance, as it was there that he learned some guitar chords, and saw a film called Inside Folsom Prison that spurred his now-famous song, Folsom Prison Blues. In the service, he also was struck by an intriguing drawling sound that occurred when his reel-to-reel tape machine was improperly loaded and played. An attempt to replicate that sound, coupled with his feelings of fidelity toward Vivian Liberto, was the genesis of another classic song, I Walk The Line. Upon his 1954 discharge, Mr. Cash moved to Memphis, married Liberto, worked as a door-to-door appliance salesman, enrolled at the Keegan School of Broadcasting and put together an upstart country group to help him become a gospel singer. He set his sights on Sun Records, a Memphis operation that was seeing success with a new artist named Elvis Presley. "Sun Records was between my house and the broadcasting school," Mr. Cash told journalist Peter Guralnick. Mr. Cash visited the studio often, hoping for an audition with Sun owner/producer Sam Phillips. After being repeatedly told that Phillips was unavailable, Mr. Cash happened once to be sitting outside Sun as Phillips came to work. He forced his way into an audition, and Phillips was duly impressed. "I don't feel like anyone discovered me because I had to fight so hard to get heard," Mr. Cash told Guralnick. A rock 'n' roll pioneer whose records with Elvis Presley were making pop inroads, Phillips had no use for a gospel artist. He asked Mr. Cash to write or find some secular material. The hopeful artist went back to the studio with his Tennessee Two (guitarist Luther Perkins and bass man Marshall Grant) with homesick train song Hey Porter! and Folsom Prison Blues, a song that borrowed liberally from Gordon Jenkins' Crescent City Blues recording (Jenkins successfully sued Mr. Cash, citing similar words and an identical melody, in the late 1960s). Not yet convinced that the man he called Johnny Cash had composed a hit, Phillips charged Mr. Cash to write "an uptempo weeper love song," and he filled the order with Cry! Cry! Cry!, which would be paired with Hey Porter! as Mr. Cash's first single. Released in 1955, Cry! Cry! Cry! was a pop and country hit that ultimately peaked at No. 14 on Billboard's country music charts. Phillips accentuated Perkins' stark electric guitar work and kept Mr. Cash's wisened, slightly spooky vocals high in the mix. It's remarkable to note that — despite all manner of excesses and unimaginable fatigue — Mr. Cash's vocal quality would not change a whit in four decades following Cry! Cry! Cry! "Musicians scoffed, but Cash and the Tennessee Two possessed the quality that had been lacking in country music since Hank Williams died: originality," wrote Colin Escott and Martin Hawkins in Good Rockin' Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock 'n' Roll. Mr. Cash was among a group of Sun rockabillies including Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, but he and his Tennessee Two had a propulsive yet distinctly Southern "boom-chicka-boom" sound that set them apart. Mr. Cash sometimes compensated for the lack of a drummer by threading wax paper through guitar strings, and Luther Perkins' spare electric lead guitar work was as crudely appropriate as a dirty joke at an all-night poker session. "Marshall Grant was mostly right when in later years he said that we didn't work to get that boom-chicka-boom sound ... it's all we could play," Cash wrote. "But it served us well, and it was ours." In January 1956, Mr. Cash followed the tradition of Elvis Presley and Hank Williams by joining the Louisiana Hayride radio show. Six months later, he was given a slot on the Grand Ole Opry. Opry star Carl Smith introduced Mr. Cash by calling him "the brightest rising star in the country music of America." That December, Mr. Cash again made headlines when he and Presley were photographed with Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins during a Sun session. That photograph is said to capture "The Million Dollar Quartet." Mr. Cash's sound garnered No. 1 hits I Walk The Line and There You Go, as well as now-classics Home of The Blues and Big River. "I taught the weeping willow how to cry/ And I showed the clouds how to cover up a clear blue sky," Mr. Cash sang on Big River. A young man named Robert Zimmerman heard that song on the radio. Years later, when he was known as Bob Dylan, the man told writer Nicholas Dawidoff that the lines of Big River struck him as "just words that turned into bone." Not all of Mr. Cash's Sun material was recorded in the stark manner of Big River. Jack Clement, a lifelong friend and collaborator of Cash's, produced some of the Sun sides with pop flourishes and prominent background singers. Top-charting singles Guess Things Happen That Way and Ballad Of A Teenage Queen, both of which scored with pop and country listeners, are but two examples. Mr. Cash worked an exhausting touring schedule, and began taking amphetamines to help cope, starting a habit that would cause problems throughout much of his life. The pills did not rob him of his ability to connect with audiences, including those of the captive variety: On New Year's Day 1959, Mr. Cash's travels took him to San Quentin prison, where he played a concert for the inmates. Eleven years later, the performer would record a live album at San Quentin, but this initial appearance was notable in that one of the prisoners was future country legend Merle Haggard. "Prison is a good place to find out the truth, because them convicts won't lie," Haggard said. "They ain't got no reason to give you any clout that you don't deserve. And we saw the truth that day." Unhappy with several matters, including Phillips' refusal to let him record a gospel album, Mr. Cash left Sun in 1958, moving his family (which by then included two daughters) to California. Phillips was angered, charging that the young singer had secretly signed a deal with Columbia Records while still under contract to Sun. The two later reconciled, and Mr. Cash was an honorary pallbearer at Phillips' funeral in July. While his decades on Columbia would see Mr. Cash rise to greater wealth and fame, many Cash-watchers consider the finest of the Sun recordings to be the artistic apex of his career. On Get Rhythm, Train of Love, Home of the Blues, I Walk The Line, Big River and others, Phillips' recording techniques present Mr. Cash's voice as an unprettied wonder, and Phillips' interest in producing something singular and identifiable helped Mr. Cash to find his own way as an artist. "When it dawned on me that I didn't sound like anybody else naturally, I let it come naturally," Mr. Cash told journalist Bill Flanagan in 1998. "Of course, that was the secret of my success. It ain't no secret: Be yourself." After Phillips' death, Mr. Cash said, "He didn't just create rock 'n' roll. He helped create me." Chapter 3: To the Top A July 1958 session in Nashville with producer Don Law marked Cash's ascendance to the major label ranks, as he began work on songs that would comprise his Columbia debut album, The Fabulous Johnny Cash. A western song from that album, Don't Take Your Guns To Town, topped the country charts for six weeks in 1959, and Mr. Cash entered a new decade as a well-established artist in his prime. "The 1960s were probably my most productive time, creatively speaking," he wrote in Cash. "Often I wasn't in my best voice, because the amphetamines dried my throat and reduced me, at times, to croaks and whispers, but that wasn't the story all the time, and my energy and output were high." Energy and output weren't the only things high, as Mr. Cash's drug use escalated. He destroyed hotel rooms, cancelled shows, started fires, wrecked cars, was busted for illegal acquisition of pills, bashed out the Grand Ole Opry footlights and alienated himself from his wife and four daughters. "I'd begin to feel good after two or three days without drugs," he wrote. "Then, though, I'd get home, usually on a Monday, and I'd find the stress of my marriage so hard that I'd drive to that druggist, get two or three hundred pills, head out into the desert in my camper, and stay out there, high, for as long as I could." On Feb. 11, 1962, June Carter joined the Johnny Cash road show. She was a daughter of acoustic guitar great Mother Maybelle Carter and member of the Carter clan, a group known as "The First Family of Country Music." Mr. Cash had for some time been enthralled by her beauty, humor and talent, and she quickly recognized both Mr. Cash's magnetism and apparent need for a caretaker. In addition to flushing pills and soothing nerves, she wrote Mr. Cash a song that described anxious feelings about their escalating relationship. It would become one of his best-known hits: Penned by Carter and Merle Kilgore, Ring of Fire hit No. 1 in 1963. "A song like that goes on forever," Mr. Cash told The Tennessean in 2002. While much of musical Nashville ignored the burgeoning folk movement, Mr. Cash embraced some of the folk artists and ideologies. He appeared at the New York Folk Festival in 1965, recorded a duet with Carter on Bob Dylan's It Ain't Me Babe in 1964, recorded a concept album about Native American life called Bitter Tears and publicly supported the civil rights movement. "When I was young, I saw my dad speaking out against the Vietnam War, speaking out against the Ku Klux Klan, and that's where my social activism is rooted," daughter Rosanne Cash told The Tennessean. "He never bent. He never even almost bent." A thoughtful voice of inclusion and a conduit for crosspollination between folk and country artists, in the mid-'60s Mr. Cash also could be an angry and violent man prone to benders and outbursts. "The mixture of amphetamines and alcohol was a maddening poison," he wrote in Man In Black. "My wife and children feared the strange man I had become." In early 1967, he and Vivian divorced, amid much pill-fueled debauchery (though the hit records continued, including his fiery Jackson duet with June Carter), but by late 1967, Mr. Cash committed himself to getting off drugs, though his Jan. 13, 1968, show at Folsom Prison was proof that he was still quite in touch with his dark side. At Folsom, he delighted prisoners, cursing and joking and singing about egg-sucking dogs and the Cocaine Blues with a carnality and wildness that was at once thrilling, entertaining and empathetic. The show's recording, released as Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, now is considered one of the most significant albums in country music history. For Mr. Cash, 1968 offered moments both wonderful and tragic. He proposed to June Carter onstage Feb. 1, and married her a month later. He set about making up concert dates he'd missed when he was too strung out, and he released two chart-topping hits. But in August 1968, longtime bandmate and "boom-chicka-boom" innovator Luther Perkins died in a house fire. Guitarist Bob Wooten soon joined the band, becoming a part of a group that featured Marshall Grant, drummer W.S. "Fluke" Holland and original Sun rockabilly Carl Perkins. The change in marital status and lifestyle coincided with an increased attention to spiritual matters, and Mr. Cash often spoke to audiences and interviewers about his Christian beliefs. He would later write a book about the Apostle Paul called Man In White. By the late 1960s, Mr. Cash was touring with an ensemble that included Perkins, members of the Carter Family and upstart vocal group The Statler Brothers. Such a bevy of talent ensured audiences variety, and Mr. and Mrs. Cash kept just such a scene going at home by inviting musicians over to share stories and swap songs. Mr. Cash maintained friendships with artists beyond the country world, and he and banjo innovator Earl Scruggs were two of the few prominent Nashville artists to mingle with politically left-leaning folk and pop musicians during this contentious time of civil rights unrest and war in Vietnam. One friend of Mr. Cash's was Bob Dylan: They had kept a correspondence since the early 1960s. Mr. Cash sang with Dylan on Girl From the North Country, the kickoff track to Dylan's 1969 Nashville Skyline album. Mr. Cash also contributed Grammy-winning liner notes to that album. A difficult Far East tour in 1969 found Mr. Cash sometimes playing more than 10 shows a day for military troops in locales including Saigon, Vietnam. The stress of that tour wore on Mr. Cash and he went back to pill-popping. "My liberation from drug addiction wasn't permanent," he would later write. "Though I never regressed to spending years at a time on amphetamines, I've used mood-altering drugs for periods of varying length at various times since 1967: amphetamines, sleeping pills and prescription painkillers." In February 1969, Mr. Cash again made an album at a penitentiary. This time, it was San Quentin, where he had previously visited three times. He had written a song called San Quentin for the occasion. "San Quentin, may you rot and burn in hell," he sang, and inmates shouted a dangerous-sounding mix of appreciation and unleashed anguish. Mr. Cash would often later remark that the scene was barely controlled, and that if he had shouted, "Break!," the prisoners would have rioted. Both San Quentin and Folsom Prison Blues were written in a first-person narrative that led many listeners to assume Mr. Cash himself had been to prison. He had not, though he spent a little time in jail on minor charges. A Boy Named Sue, a Shel Silverstein-penned song recorded that night, was the biggest hit from the At San Quentin album. It was a five-week No. 1 country hit and won the Country Music Association's single of the year prize. Also at the show, photographer Jim Marshall captured what would become a notorious shot of Mr. Cash: He grimaces toward the camera as he lifts a middle finger. June 1969 brought At San Quentin's release, and it marked the beginning of ABC-TV's The Johnny Cash Show. Mr. Cash recorded most of the show's 56 episodes at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, and he insisted that guest performers would include then-controversial artists including Dylan, Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie. The atypical blend of country, rock, folk and jazz was intended to spotlight conjunctions, not collisions, and the program helped broaden Mr. Cash's fame among those who hadn't listened to country music. Mr. Cash would sell more than 6 million records in 1969, making it the most successful year of his career. In October, the Nashville Banner reported that Mr. Cash was selling more records than any other band or performer, in any genre. Vietnam was raging, Richard Nixon was president and Johnny Cash, a 37-year-old native of Kingsland, Ark., was bigger than The Beatles. Chapter 4: A Fall By the turn of the decade, Mr. Cash's music, aside from its commercial success, had become a meeting ground for formerly disconnected camps. "I wondered how it was possible for a man to maintain constituencies in the widely separated countries of Bob Dylan and Billy Graham," wrote journalist Dorothy Gallagher, who profiled Mr. Cash during this period. Mr. Cash's biggest 1970 hits were an indication of his expansive musical vision. He and Mrs. Cash made it to No. 2 on the Billboard country chart with a version of folkie Tim Hardin's If I Were A Carpenter (for which the Cashes won a Grammy), and Mr. Cash scored a No. 3 hit with What Is Truth, Mr. Cash's examination of divisions between youth culture and the older guard: "This whole world's waking to a brand new day, and I solemnly swear it's gonna be their way," sang Mr. Cash. "Can you blame the voice of youth for asking, 'What is truth?' " He released two No. 1 hits in 1970: One was a version of Kris Kristofferson's Sunday Morning Coming Down, an empathetic portrait of an addict. The other smash, which peaked in early 1971, was the folksy love song Flesh And Blood. On March 3, 1970, Mrs. Cash gave birth to a boy, John Carter Cash. Six weeks later, Mr. Cash performed at the White House in front of President Nixon. While a Nixon aide told Mr. Cash that the president would like to hear him sing two right-wing country numbers — Guy Drake's Welfare Cadillac and Merle Haggard's Okie From Muskogee — the singer opted to sing gospel songs and some of his own material. March 1971 also marked the final taping of The Johnny Cash Show, which was cancelled by ABC amid growing dissension between the star and network. Mr. Cash fought for more creative control and the network grew tired of fighting about a show that was not drawing enough viewers. A 1971 single called Singing In Vietnam Talking Blues detailed the horror that Mr. Cash witnessed on his 1969 Far East tour. Its conclusion of "I hope they all come home to stay, in peace," was another indication of the singer-songwriter's disgust with the war. His Man In Black single, which found Mr. Cash claiming that he would wear his signature black stage outfits as a somber nod to the needy, hungry, imprisoned, addicted and enlisted ("I wear the black in mourning for the lives that could have been/ Each week we lose a hundred fine young men"), also charted Top 5. By the end of 1971, he and Mrs. Cash had traveled to Tel Aviv, Israel, to film The Gospel Road, a movie about the life of Jesus Christ. Mr. Cash was now a filmmaker, a father, a husband, a songwriter, a touring attraction, a celebrity and many other things. His recording career was stretched thin by his other interests, and he would not notch another No. 1 hit until 1976. As Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and others turned heads and ears with a vigorous sound that signaled the onset of Nashville's so-called Outlaw Movement, Mr. Cash made a series of middle-of-the-road albums that seldom rated mention alongside '50s and '60s triumphs. Though not at his artistic peak, Mr. Cash was still Nashville's greatest superstar, an auditorium-packing concert draw, a sure-bet Country Music Hall of Famer (he would become the youngest-ever inductee in 1980) and a celebrity whose views on social issues were widely sought. The 1975 autobiography Man In Black detailed a rise to fame, numerous falls to drugs and an eventual acceptance of sobriety, marriage and godliness. The book furthered his already substantial fame. "Since the late '60s, Cash's records have been rather strange — more the recorded evidence of a great artist floundering in confusion than the masterful products of Cash's own unique mold," wrote Country Music magazine's Patrick Carr, who would later collaborate on the Cash autobiography. In that 1976 Country Music feature, Carr wrote that Mr. Cash's early 1970s output caused fear that "in place of John R. Cash the musician, we might have to settle for Johnny Cash the public figure — author, folklorist, preacher, patriot, figurehead and moral backbone." 1976's One Piece At A Time was a welcome return to a stripped-down sound reminiscent of Mr. Cash's 1950s work. The song became his final No. 1 country hit as a solo artist. After that, the only time Mr. Cash's voice appeared on a top-charting country radio single was in 1985, as a member of supergroup The Highwaymen, with Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson. Drugs maintained a pull on Mr. Cash. One early-1980s downturn occurred after one of his own ostriches attacked him. The Cashes kept an exotic animal park near their Old Hickory Lake home. Mr. Cash suffered five broken ribs, painkillers were prescribed and the cycle of addiction began again. Mr. Cash would later surmise that some level of self-loathing was involved in all of the substance abuse. Even as fans and fellow musicians celebrated his accomplishments, even with unending devotion from his wife, he was unable to make peace with himself. In 1984, he entered the Betty Ford Center and was treated for addiction to morphine. The lowest point in Mr. Cash's career may have come that same year when he failed to make the country Top 40 with an ill-conceived novelty song called Chicken in Black. In later interviews, he would call it "an embarrassment." "For this video Cash dressed in an outrageous blue and yellow mock superman outfit and looked out-of-character," wrote Peter Lewry in I've Been Everywhere: A Johnny Cash Chronicle. Columbia Records did not promote Mr. Cash's 1980s material with much fervor, though the company was quite good at selling the smart and sultry, cutting-edge recordings of his singing, songwriting daughter, Rosanne. Mr. Cash was proud and supportive, though he could not have failed to notice that not only was he no longer bigger than The Beatles, but he also was not even the top-charting Cash. Columbia Records released Mr. Cash from his contract in 1986, creating an uproar among Cash devotees such as young gun Dwight Yoakam. It seemed logical enough to Mr. Cash, who had been unhappy with Columbia's lack of promotion since his 1977 concept album, The Rambler. He also knew that he'd done some damage to his commercial viability with material like Chicken in Black. He brought an acoustic guitar and auditioned for powerful record label chief Jimmy Bowen, though Bowen proved uninterested. Mr. Cash secured a deal with Mercury/Polygram and recorded some excellent material (Beans For Breakfast, Last of the Drifters and a version of Guy Clark's Let Him Roll), but with the dawn of the 1990s, he was considering an exodus from recording. "Saying goodbye to that game and just working the road, playing with my friends and family for people who really wanted to hear us, seemed very much like the thing to do," he wrote in Cash. Chapter 5: Rising Again In 1992, Mr. Cash was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an honor that reminded many of his spare rockabilly work on Sun Records with independent-minded producer Sam Phillips. A year later, another independent-minded maverick — long-haired Rick Rubin, known for his work with rap and hard rock acts — would sign Mr. Cash to a record deal with American Recordings, setting into motion a rise back to contemporary viability. "It was Rubin who brought Cash, when no one else seemed to want or know what to do with him, to his American Recordings. It was Rubin who resurrected him," wrote Nick Tosches in The Journal of Country Music. Here was the so-simple-it's-brilliant idea, as supported by the man who had produced the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy: Record Johnny Cash unadorned, strumming an acoustic guitar with his thumb and singing. Even before the world at large was able to hear the solo/acoustic album called American Recordings, Mr. Cash's credibility was rising. The association with Rubin quickly hoisted the Man in Black from creative quicksand, and his reinvigorated spirit caught on with young hipsters. The Viper Room on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles provided a still talked-about "coming back out" party. There, Mr. Cash sang for a crowd packed with rock singers and movie stars. "It was really a magical event," Rubin told writer Tosches when asked about the Viper Room show. "It's odd to be in a place like the Viper Room, which is kind of a small but loud nightclub, and have it be so quiet. It's nothing that you could imagine happening, that kind of silence and awe in an audience in that particular kind of place." Noticing the age disparity between performer and audience at a 1994 Austin concert, Mr. Cash told the crowd, "I hope you enjoy the show, grandchildren." In April 1994, American Recordings was released. Two recordings from the Viper Room show were included, while the rest of the tracks were made at Rubin's Los Angeles studio and at Mr. Cash's cabin in Hendersonville. Response was nearly universally positive, with Time magazine's review proclaiming: "He has reasserted himself as one of the greats of popular music." Mr. Cash also was pleased, saying, "I think I'm more proud of it than anything I've ever done in my life. This is me. Whatever I've got to offer as an artist, it's here." While American Recordings did not sell in astounding numbers, it did reawaken an interest in Mr. Cash's music and expand his audience. American Recordings made it to No. 23 on the country charts, making it the highest-charting of Mr. Cash's solo albums in a decade and a half. The album won a Grammy award for best contemporary folk album, and it spawned a video for Delia's Gone that was played on MTV. After years of creative and commercial decline, Mr. Cash was cool again. Even as country radio ignored the revitalization, Mr. Cash regained a foothold in the rock 'n' roll world. He appeared on a show celebrating the opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, recorded Willie Nelson's Time of the Preacher with a backing band that included members of Nirvana and Alice in Chains, and played a House of Blues set in Los Angeles with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Petty and the Heartbreakers also were featured prominently on Mr. Cash's second Rubin-produced album, Unchained, released in November 1996. This album abandoned the all-acoustic approach, even using distorted, post-punk electric guitars for a cover of alternative rock band Soundgarden's Rusty Cage. But Rubin and Mr. Cash also included rockabilly songs, gospel material and a bracing take on Petty's ballad Southern Accents. Unchained garnered another round of positive reviews and ensured that what was happening was not a fluke. Mr. Cash was honored Dec. 8, as President Clinton and others applauded him upon receiving a Kennedy Center award. Vice President Al Gore had recommended Mr. Cash, assessing that his music examined "the entire range of existence, failure and recovery, entrapment and escape, weakness and strength, loss and redemption, life and death." Kristofferson, Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett, Robert Duvall and others joined Rosanne Cash in the televised Kennedy Center tribute, and Mr. Cash wiped tears during his daughter's performance. In Cash, he wrote that the attention was flattering but that there was a flip side. "The day after the Kennedy Center show, I came further down to earth when my daughters got together with me and voiced some very deep feelings they'd had for a very long time — told me things, that is, about the lives of girls whose daddy abandoned them for a drug," he wrote. "That was very hard." Mr. Cash was quite correctly viewed in the public as a crusader for righteous things: for tolerance, spirituality and good music. But Rosanne's song My Old Man artfully rectified the heroic myth with the virtuous, honorable but blemished man: "He believes what he says he believes," she sang. "But that don't make him a saint." Chapter 6: "Sober, honest, defiant" Less than a year after the Kennedy Center Honors, Mr. Cash leaned over during a concert in Flint, Mich., and nearly fell. He told the audience he was suffering from Parkinson's disease, at first drawing a laugh from a crowd that thought he was joking. "It ain't funny," he said, according to a review in The Flint Journal. "It's all right. I refuse to give it some ground in my life." The diagnosis of Parkinson's, which causes slowed movement, rigidity and tremors, forced Mr. Cash to cancel concerts and book promotions (At the time, the Cash memoir had just been released) through the end of 1997. By Nov. 5, the Parkinson's diagnosis had been slightly altered. Manager Lou Robin announced that Baptist Hospital tests revealed Mr. Cash had a Parkinson's-related illness called Shy-Drager syndrome. While at Baptist that month, he became gravely ill with double pneumonia. Fans and friends worried, and publications prepared obituaries as Mr. Cash lay unconscious, breathing with the help of a ventilator. But once again, Mr. Cash proved himself a survivor. Some had observed his reckless lifestyle in the 1960s and supposed he would drink and drug himself to death. Some watched his slow recovery from a late 1980s heart surgery and thought him not long for the world. And many thought the rare, ugly-sounding Shy-Drager syndrome would do him in. All were wrong. The Grammy Awards of February 1998 found Mr. Cash once again victorious. Despite country radio's refusal to play material from Unchained, the album won a Grammy for best country album. Even as he reeled from illness, Mr. Cash's pugnacious spirit made waves along Music Row, as he sanctioned an advertisement in Billboard magazine that March. "American Recordings and Johnny Cash would like to acknowledge the Nashville music industry and country radio for your support," read the text, while the page's dominant image was Jim Marshall's 1969 San Quentin photograph, with Mr. Cash raising his right hand's middle finger. As spring rolled around, Mr. Cash began reappearing. He sang two songs at a private gathering in April, but waited until June for his return to a public stage. As Kristofferson performed Sunday Morning Coming Down during a Ryman Auditorium show, Mr. Cash walked out to join him. Kristofferson cried at the sight and sound of his old friend, and told the audience, "He didn't do that at the soundcheck." A televised tribute concert in 1999 at Manhattan's Hammerstein Ballroom gave Mr. Cash a chance to once again sing and play his own songs. Musicians including Harris, Bruce Springsteen, Sheryl Crow and Wyclef Jean performed Mr. Cash's material and lavished praise on the icon, then 67, but Mr. Cash's appearance was the night's undisputed highlight. "If he felt the effects of his lingering disease, he didn't show it," Jay Orr wrote in The Tennessean. "Looking robust, his guitar slung behind him or held at a jaunty angle, Cash ambled confidently to the mike, began stroking his guitar strings up on the neck and launched into Folsom Prison Blues, with all the tics, head gestures and enthusiastic growls that characterized the performances of his prime." Through much of 1999 and 2000, Mr. Cash was quietly compiling material for a third Rubin-produced album, to be titled American III: Solitary Man. "I was very ill at the time," he later told The Tennessean. "I went into the studio on and off for a solid year, and I was never pleased with any of my performances. But then I started getting better late last year, like November, and I started working really hard on this record." In that October 2000 interview, Mr. Cash said that his health was improving and that the diagnosis of Shy-Drager had been erroneous. "My doctor told me in November that if I'd had it, I'd be dead by now," he said. "She said, 'You're getting better, so you don't have Shy Drager's. And you don't have Parkinson's." Instead, doctors told Mr. Cash he had autonomic neuropathy, a group of symptoms caused by nerve damage. Autonomic neuropathy is at times associated with diabetes, though Mr. Cash sometimes denied in interviews that he had diabetes. Friend and fellow country legend Merle Haggard appeared on American III, singing a duet with Mr. Cash. Haggard told The Tennessean, "Johnny Cash and I are as close as two men can be," but he worried about Mr. Cash's condition: "He's able to laugh and sing and joke, but he's in a lot of pain," Haggard said. "He lives in pain and chooses between pain and pain pills. The only way he can enjoy life is to put up with the pain and not have any pills, so that's what he does." American III was released October 22, 2000, and it was the first recorded evidence that Mr. Cash's voice had changed significantly. His characteristic boom had been replaced with a raspier, more fragile instrument, though the changes did not rob him of believability. If anything, tracks such as One and Field of Diamonds and were more tender and poignant than Mr. Cash could have previously summoned. "Graying at the edges, its tremor more pronounced, his voice is sober, honest, defiant," read a review from British music magazine MOJO. The Solitary Man track from American III earned Mr. Cash his 10th Grammy award, this one for best male country vocal performance, on Feb. 21, 2001. That day, Mr. Cash was released from the hospital after another bout with pneumonia. Trips to the hospital, usually for pneumonia or bronchitis, were becoming routine. While others noted Mr. Cash's 70th birthday in 2002 by singing his old songs (two tribute albums were released that year), the Man in Black chose to forge ahead with new recordings. He went back to work with Rubin, preparing for the album that would become American IV: The Man Comes Around. While the American albums were filled with worthwhile material, one thing Mr. Cash had not done in a long time was to pen a song that stood on equal footing with classics such as Big River or Flesh and Blood. He rectified that with his new album's title song, as listeners would find upon the album's Nov. 5, 2002, release. "I worked harder and longer on that song than on anything I've ever written," Mr. Cash told The Tennessean. Though the title song's apocalyptic vision was a highlight of American IV: The Man Comes Around, it was a cover version of rocker Trent Reznor's Hurt that spurred the album to a place among the top five country albums on the Billboard chart. Mr. Cash said he recorded Hurt because it was "the best anti-drug song I'd ever heard." "The needle tears a hole," wrote Reznor. "The old familiar sting/ Tried to kill it all away/ But I remember everything." Director Mark Romanek worked on the award-winning video, combining clips of Mr. Cash as a young man with footage that depicted the aged superstar, and including shots of the closed-down, flood-damaged House of Cash museum in Hendersonville. "The place was in such a state of dereliction," Romanek told MTV. "That's when I got the idea that we could be extremely candid about the state of Johnny's health: as candid as Johnny has always been in his songs." As video channels put Hurt into rotation, American IV became the most popular of Mr. Cash's four Rubin-produced albums, selling more than 200,000 copies. His new version of Sun recording Give My Love to Rose won a best male country vocal Grammy. Mr. Cash's influence on non-Nashville, non-country artists was underscored during a Ryman Auditorium concert by British rock band Coldplay earlier this year. "So many of our heroes have played here," said Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin. "From Johnny Cash, all the way through to Johnny Cash, including Johnny Cash." On May 15, 2003, Mr. Cash was faced with the loss of his wife, June Carter Cash. "My dad has lost his greatest companion, his musical partner, his soul mate," said Rosanne Cash at the funeral. Mr. Cash sat in the front pew and was lifted to his feet at service's end. He leaned over his wife's casket, then was helped back to his chair and wheeled out of the church. A Tennessean article reported that Mr. Cash looked withered by the loss of his best friend. But in the weeks following the funeral, Mr. Cash returned to recording and addressed concerns about his health with stubborn wit, saying, "I plan to outlive all my children. I'm not going anywhere." In June, Mr. Cash appeared in Maces Springs, Va., at the venue known as the Carter Family Fold. He was hoarse and weak, but he sang several songs and spoke to the crowd: "I don't know hardly what to say tonight about being up here without her. The pain is so severe there is no way of describing it." Music was Mr. Cash's primary balm in attempting to quell that pain. He was often at his studio, working on tracks for an American V album with musicians including Marty Stuart and Jack Clement. Hospitalized at Baptist for the past three weeks with a stomach ailment, he was released Tuesday amidst plans to fly to California next week for more recording dates. Late Thursday, he was rushed back to Baptist. Epilogue: Where are your mountains? In the coming days, artists of all stripes will lavish words of praise upon Mr. Cash. He will be remembered as a fallible man who sought honor and peace. He will be remembered as a force of music and of personality. He will be remembered by some as the greatest of all country music artists, and by others as the tall, wild howler who gave Hank Williams a run for his money. Questions, too, will remain. What was the source of his inner turmoil, or of his expansive yet singular musical vision? How could such a talent allow himself to fall into artistic mediocrity? How could an artist who should by 1994 have been well past his prime find within himself an explosion of creativity that made possible the American albums? How could a man constantly surrounded by friends and family embody such loneliness? How could a young, musically unschooled man pop out of rural Arkansas sounding as deep and wise and true as Johnny Cash? And as Mr. Cash once wrote of his friend Bob Dylan, "So where are your mountains to match some men?"

Originally Published In The Tennessean On September 13, 2003







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