In 1967, one of America’s most iconic figures, Johnny Cash, stood at a harrowing crossroads. Plagued by addiction and profound despair, he made a fateful journey into the eerie depths of Nickajack Cave in Tennessee, intent on ending his life. This was a man wrestling with two sides of himself – the legendary ‘Cash’ and the troubled ‘Johnny’ – caught in a relentless struggle that had pushed him to the brink. His personal battle, spiraling out of control, led him to this dark, silent cavern, where he sought only to disappear.
Deep inside the cave, lost in absolute darkness, a profound shift occurred. What seemed like the end became an unexpected beginning, as an inexplicable presence and a distant flicker of light guided him back towards the surface. This was more than just a physical escape; it was the harrowing first step on Johnny Cash’s long road to redemption, a powerful testament to the human spirit’s capacity to find hope even in the deepest despair. Join Our American Stories as we explore this pivotal moment and the remarkable journey of an American icon finding his way back.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Speaker 2: I would say, at this point in his life, Johnny’s trying to live in two worlds.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: His sister Joanne put it this way: Johnny was like two people. She said Johnny was one person, and Cash was the other. And she said Cash caused all the trouble, and he was always struggling with different things throughout his life and reaping the consequences of it. And I think Johnny had too much of the world to be happy in his relationship with God, and too much of a relationship with God to be happy in the world. He was in sort of this no-man’s-land, trying to live in two places at the same time, and it was causing a lot of internal and external conflict and problems in his life.
Speaker 3: Well, I guess Kristofferson pretty well summed it up. In the song he wrote about me, “He’s a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.” And Patrick Carr in a story about me, he said, “Johnny Cash, the Indian and the white man’s camp.” Maybe that’s it, or maybe I’m the white man in the Indian’s camp.
Speaker 2: So Johnny got to a point where, with the collapse of his marriage to his first wife, Vivian, his addiction to drugs, his life spiraling out of control, he effectively decided to take his life. So he made his way to a cave about 30 miles from Chattanooga called Nickajack Cave. He had actually been there before as a young man looking for arrowheads and other things, but now he just thought he would keep walking as far in as he possibly could walk and never return again. And that’s exactly what he did.
Speaker 3: If you had a picture of me at that time, you wouldn’t believe it was me. There’s a cave near Chattanooga, Tennessee, that I like to explore.
Speaker 4: I’ve been there several times with my friends.
Speaker 3: Every time I’d get high, I’d get in my Jeep truck and head for Chattanooga to those people.
Speaker 4: That I thought would put up with me.
Speaker 3: You know, I knew I’d just about worn out my welcome at everybody’s house in Nashville from keeping them up all night and this and that. But finally, even my friends in Chattanooga couldn’t really put up with me much longer. And I saw it, and, uh, I had tournament back on June on my own mother, and she had given up on me and driven back to California where she lived and had a slight heart attack on the way. At that time, that didn’t bother me in the least, because there’s one thing about, uh, someone addicted to pills or alcoholics, you know, they’re very selfish. You know, they don’t care about anybody but themselves in the way they happen to feel right now.
Speaker 4: And that’s all I cared about. All the talk about how I…
Speaker 3: Feel, what I want for me, you know, and, uh, disregarding my four daughters in California, my mother and June found out where I was and came to my friend’s house in Chattanooga looking for me.
Speaker 4: I found out she was coming, so I went to the cave 20 miles away, and I had been up for three days and nights when she got there.
Speaker 4: So I took my beer. I was drinking a case of beer a day and took it up to 100 pills.
Speaker 3: Uh, half amphetamines and half barbitu, which keep me going up and down, keep the cycle going. But I remember sitting in the mouth of that cave crying, and then taking a little two-cell flashlight and started walking into that cave. And I decided I’d walk as far as I could go and then lay down. And I guess I probably one a mile through one of the caverns, and my flashlight completely burned out, and it was black, black dark, so dark you could feel it. And I laid down flat on my back and said my goodbye prayers. You know, “I can’t handle it myself. I’m giving up. I’m going…” I must have dozed off because I felt I felt a presence to make me sit up and look around.
Speaker 4: I couldn’t see any light.
Speaker 3: But, uh, this is awfully corny, but the no le Indian trickish to wet your fingers, stick it up, see which way the wind blows. I tried everything to see, and then I finally did that, and I felt cool air on one side of my finger, and I knew that.
Speaker 4: I kept following it as long… you know, crawling.
Speaker 3: Sometimes I’d follow 20 or 30 feet into a pit, but I clawed my way back up, and just as I was about to give up, I saw a little fleck of light way off in the distance, and I started crawling and clawing toward that entrance, and I finally made it there, and I collapsed in the mouth of the cave. When I woke, June was there with my friends from Chattanooga. June was washing my face, and she said, “You’re almost dead, aren’t you?” And I said, “You, and I want to live.”
Speaker 2: So after this, another event happened in Lafayette, Georgia, on November 2, 1967. He was visiting a friend there and went up by himself at evening and got lost, and in an effort to get directions back to his friend, he knocked on the door of an elderly woman who lived alone, and she called the police on him. Deputy Bob Jeff responded, and patting Cash down, discovered prescription drugs on him, which were legal, and he took Cash to jail and he spent the night in his cell. The next morning, the sheriff woke up Johnny and brought him into his office. Jones opens up a George, takes out the money and the pills he had taken off Cash the night before, held them out and said, “I’m going to give you your money and your dope back because you know better than most people that God gave you free will to do whatever you want with your life. Cash could throw the pills away or go ahead and take them and kill himself.” And Sheriff Jones added, “Whichever one you want to do, Mister Cash, will be all right with me.” And as they were talking, Johnny realized that this man really cared about him. In fact, he told him they were huge Johnny Cash fans for over a decade and at every record he had made. The sheriff said, “We love you. We’ve always loved you. We’ve watched you on television, we’ve listened to you on the radio, we’ve got your album of hymns. You were probably the biggest fan you’ve ever had.” This made a deep impression on Johnny.
Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to Greg Laurie, the story of Johnny Cash’s redemption and a turning point in his spiritual life. Here on Our American Stories. Here are Our American Stories. We bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith, and love. Stories from a great and beautiful country that need to be told. But we can’t do it without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love Our Stories in America like we do, please go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot, help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com.
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