Johnny Cash: The Redemption of an American Icon (born 1932)

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Up next, a unique take on the life story of Johnny Cash, who was himself an American original. This story is an insider’s look at the man whose music sprung from the way he lived. Our storyteller is none other than Greg Laurie. Laurie is the pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship in Orange County, California, and Maui.

Speaker 2: Gregor is here to tell the…

Speaker 1: …story from his recent book, Johnny Cash: The Redemption of an American Icon. Let’s take a listen.

Speaker 3: Going back to the earliest days of my childhood, I had an awareness of Johnny Cash. One of the reasons for that is our family is from Arkansas, not far from where Johnny’s family was raised, and my grandparents, who I lived with for a number of years because of my mother’s crazy lifestyle. She’d been married and divorced seven times and was having a lot of boyfriends in between and was running around, and so she left me with my grandparents, Charles and Stella McDaniel, who we called Daddy Charles and Mama Stella. So I remember as a little boy watching Johnny Cash’s television show, and I remember hearing my grandfather say to my grandmother when he’d be reading the paper, ‘Well, Stella, your cousin’s in trouble again.’ Because Johnny had a lot of problems early in his life, after he had his initial success, he was arrested numerous times. He never served time in prison. He never murdered anybody. Sometimes people think that because of lyrics from his songs, such as ‘I shot a man in Reno just to watch die.’ Johnny never shot anyone, but he had a problem with amphetamines that he got addicted to when he first started out his career on the road. But anyway, I was always aware of Johnny Cash. So, as it turns out, my grandmother’s maiden name, Estella Fowler Cash, and so I’m distantly related to Johnny Cash. But there was something always about Johnny that was different from any other musician. His contemporaries would have been Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, many others, but Johnny was Johnny. He was called the King of Country Music, but in a way he was more like the king of his own music, because his music transcended all forms of music, from country to rock and roll. I mean, in some ways he was a pioneer of what they called rockabilly. When he was in the studio, there was Sam Phillips, who also discovered Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins, and they developed this sound that evolved into rock and roll. Elvis ran with it, but Johnny couldn’t have continued with that boom-chicka-boom sound. He would play his guitar; he’d put a card in the frets of the guitar because at one point he didn’t have a drummer to provide percussion, so he would get that sound that you hear on so many Johnny Cash records. Right. So Johnny should have never become who he was. But it was all a part of a plan, and in my mind, it was a part of God’s plan. He was raised in abject poverty. His father, Ray, was a cold, distant man. He was a sharecropper, never really succeeded in life, and he favored one son over the other. Johnny had an older brother named Jack, and clearly Ray favored Jack over Johnny. And I’m getting a little ahead of myself in the story. But when Johnny’s brother Jack was tragically killed in an accident in the sawmill, Ray was quoted to have said later, ‘I think God took the wrong son to Johnny.’ Really. All throughout his life, when Johnny did find some success in music and then huge success, even being invited to the White House, he would always invite his father Ray. I think he was trying to impress him well into his adult years. So that was a very strange relationship between father and son. Well, Johnny’s mother, Carrie, was a very nurturing, loving woman, and Johnny’s father, Ray, was a very distant, aloof, uncommunicative father. So Johnny and Jack were as thick as thieves, very, very close brothers. Johnny looked up to his brother, who, though still very young, was almost like a proper father figure for him. He gave Johnny guidance, encouragement; and Jack knew that he wanted to be a preacher one day, and Johnny, he wanted to be a singer. They often went fishing together, and done one particular day, Johnny was going to go fishing; he invited Jack to come and join him, but Jack said, ‘I’ve gotta go work down with the sawmill to make a few extra dollars for the family.’ That’s because Jack was such a responsible young man. And so Jack was there working, and tragically, he was pulled into the saw. Somehow, amazingly, he survived it, but he stumbled out into the field, and he was literally holding his vital organs in, so he was taken to the hospital. So meanwhile, Johnny’s out there fishing, and his father shows up with a minister and Jack’s bloody shirt, and he says, ‘Get in the truck,’ and he threw his fishing pole in the back, and they went down to the hospital, and there on that bed was Johnny’s brother Jack, who was very close to passing into eternity. So in my book, Look Johnny Cash, The Redemption of an American Icon, I described the scene as follows, and I’m reading from my book.

Speaker 2: J.R.

Speaker 3: J.R., that would be Johnny, took Jack’s hand and brought his cheek close to his brother’s. ‘Goodbye, Jack’ is all he could get out. Jack looked at his father and asked, ‘Will you meet me in heaven?’ Ray Cash did the most unexpected thing. He fell on his knees and prayed, asking Jesus Christ to be his Lord and Savior. Then Jack looked at Carrie. That would be Jack’s mother. ‘Why is everybody crying over me? Mama, don’t cry over me. Don’t you see the river? On one side of the river,’ he said, ‘was fire. On the other side was heaven. I thought it was going toward the fire, but I’m headed in the other direction now. Mama, can you hear the angel singing?’ Jack squeezed her hand; tears of happiness rolled down his cheeks. ‘Mama,’ he said, ‘listen to the angels. I’m going there, Mama.’ A moment later, Jack said, ‘What a beautiful city and the angel singing! Oh, Mama, I wish you could hear the angels singing!’

Speaker 1: Then he was gone. And you’ve been listening to Greg Laurie share the story of Johnny Cash. The Redemption of an American Icon continues here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we’re bringing inspiring stories from across this great country—stories from our big cities and small towns. But we truly can’t do the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give. And we continue with Our American Stories.

Speaker 2: Here on Our American Stories.

Speaker 1: And we return to Our American Stories and to Greg Laurie, telling the story of Johnny Cash and his faith journey. Let’s pick up where we last left off. We last left off hearing how in 1944, Johnny Cash’s older brother, Jack, with whom he was very close, died at twelve years of age in a tragic table saw accident, with Johnny by his bedside. His final words were, ‘Will you meet me in heaven?’ Let’s return to Greg Laurie.

Speaker 3: And those words are inscribed on Jack Cash’s tombstone: ‘Will you meet me in heaven?’ our preacher to the very end. This made a powerful impression on Johnny, who missed his brother so deeply, and on through his life he continued to think about his brother. And in fact, his brother would appear to him in dreams, he said, and what’s interesting is, as his brother appeared to him over the years, he was an older version of what his brother might have looked like. And actually, Johnny used as sort of a point of reference throughout his life: ‘What would Jack have done? What would Jack have thought? About?’

Speaker 2: This?

Speaker 3: So the influence of his brother impacted Johnny Cash for the rest of his life. Johnny grew up picking cotton out in the fields. It sounds like a story from the Old West, and in many ways it was, because Johnny was just like any other poor young boy working with this family, no real sense of what his future would be. But one thing that Carrie loved to do out on the cotton fields was singing old hymns that they would hear at church.

Speaker 4: It is what I was raised. It was a thing that inspired me as a child growing up on a cotton farm where work was drudgery and it was so hard that when I was in the fields all the time. And usually gospel songs, because they lifted me up above the black dirt.

Speaker 3: After supper, they loved to sit around the radio and listen to the Grand Ole Opry and the songs. And Johnny, the young boy, began to dream that maybe one day he could do that. And so they were out in the fields one day, and Johnny came in singing the song, and Carrie turned and said, ‘Who just sang that?’ Well, it was Johnny, but his voice dropped, and it was that more familiar Johnny Cash timbre. And she said, ‘God has given to you a gift, my son.’ So I think it was at that point that Johnny’s dreams really caught fire, where he thought that he could one day maybe be on the Grand Ole Opry. He could be on the radio; he could have a hit song. But before that would happen, he would serve a stint in the Air Force. So during his stint in the Air Force, Johnny found himself very adept at working as a Morse Code operator. And I think Johnny was beginning to discover his relationship with sound, with pitch, and later with music. He was a Morse Code operator, and actually he was the one who intercepted the news—a top secret message from the Russians that Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin had died from a stroke on March 5, 1953. And this is an amazing thing because Johnny retained this skill well into the later years of his life, because his son, John Carter Cash, said, ‘The old man still had it.’ When it came to retaining his skills, he proved it by writing out the 23rd Psalm in Morse code on a piece of paper. So this sense of understanding of sounds was something that would help Johnny when he began to write songs. And he was writing a lot of letters to the love of his life at that time, Vivian, and he also began to compose songs about places he’d never been to before. But his imagination was running wild, and really that skill set that would later be fully realized was being developed as he was stationed there over in Germany. So after Johnny got back from Germany, he took various odd jobs—from selling appliances to other things—none of which really interested him. He wanted to be a musician. He knew of the success of Elvis Presley, so he started calling Sun Studios, wanting to talk to Sam. He could never really get hold of him, and one day he did communicate with him. And so Sam invited him down, and Sam actually said to him, ‘Oh, you’re the one who keeps calling. So, you know, there’s something to be said for persistence.’ And when Sam heard Johnny, he didn’t really know what to make of him because a lot of people were trying to sound like Elvis, but Johnny didn’t sound anything like Elvis. He was his own guy. And you know, you really have to stop and be amazed by this collection of talent at one moment in time and the ability of Sam Phillips to pick that talent. I mean, Jerry Lee Lewis—also known as ‘the Killer’—Carl Perkins, who wrote ‘Blue Suede Shoes,’ and of course, Elvis and Johnny. He saw something that others did not see.

Speaker 5: What is cool?

Speaker 3: And I think what he saw was an authenticity. And this, to me, is the key to really making your mark. I think it’s really the very definition of what cool is. By the way, Johnny was called the ‘godfather of cool.’ Why is it then, when his musical career was resurrected later by producer Rick Rubin, that a whole new generation, Generation X, thought he was the coolest thing to ever come along? Answer: Because Johnny was Johnny. Johnny was authentic. Johnny was an American original. Being cool is not dressing in the latest fads, or the latest clothing, or using the latest phrases. Being cool, by my definition, is being an authentic version of yourself—being real. And I think people can see that, and I think people could hear it in the songs of Johnny. But it’s not just the way he’s singing; it’s the way he spoke, you know, the timbre of his voice. He was described as ‘the voice of America.’ I like Kris Kristofferson’s definition of Johnny Cash. He said he was like Abraham Lincoln with a wild side, you know. So that was Johnny. No one sounded like Johnny; no one sang like Johnny. Of course, he had his own dress code, which ultimately became black, and so he was known as ‘the Man in Black.’ So how Johnny came to write the song ‘Cry, Cry, Cry’ is pretty interesting. So he was listening to the radio, and he heard DJ Eddie Hill glibly intone, ‘We’ve got good songs, love songs, sweet songs, happy songs, and sad songs that’ll make you cry, Cry, Cry.’ And hearing those words caused Johnny to pick up his pencil and start writing down the lyrics to what would become a hit song, ‘Cry, Cry, Cry.’ The finished product clocked in at two minutes and twenty-nine seconds. So Johnny now had a hit on his hands, and he had radio airplay happening. And now he’s out on the road, and he’s touring. So while Johnny was out on one of his first tours that happened to be with Elvis Presley, he met a man named Sonny James, and Sonny was an outspoken Christian. And Johnny, of course, was a Christian as well. And now he’s having his first success, and he’s wondering, ‘How do you handle this? How do you live a Christian life out here on the road?’ And I love the advice that Sonny gave to Johnny. He said, ‘Johnny, the way I do this is by being the way that I am. I’m not just an entertainer who has become a Christian. I’m a Christian who chose to be an entertainer, but I’m first a Christian. Who you are and what you are in life sings louder than any song.’ And then Sonny told Johnny, ‘And don’t forget to pray.’ And you know, I think Johnny did follow that advice. He did have lapses. He did things he should have never done. He trashed hotel rooms like a proper rock star. He got drunk; he got banned from certain stages for his crazy antics. But Johnny always turned to the Lord. And later, when he was really having his greatest success with his television show, I think Johnny really lived out this advice of Sonny James, speaking openly about his faith without embarrassment. In fact, that became a source of great tension with him and the network, and some believe that’s the reason they ultimately canceled his television show that was very successful. But Johnny was always wanting to express his faith openly and publicly, and I think deep down in his heart he still wanted to be a gospel singer, just like he was when he originally went to see Sam Phillips over at Sun Studios.

Speaker 4: Gospel music is so ingrained into my bones. You know, I can’t do a concert without singing a gospel song. I have a calling. It’s called to perform and sing, and a gospel song is a ministry in a way.

Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Greg Laurie tell the story of Johnny Cash’s faith life. Johnny Cash: The Redemption of an American Icon is the book, by the way. It’s also a terrific documentary. ‘I’m not an entertainer who is a Christian.’ He was advised by someone he looked up to. ‘I’m a Christian who is an entertainer.’ And what a difference that will make in Cash’s musical life and his spiritual life as well. When we come back, more with Greg Laurie and Johnny Cash: The Redemption of an American Icon here on Our American Stories.

Speaker 2: Here on Our American Stories.

Speaker 1: And we return to Our American Stories and to Greg Laurie, telling the story of Johnny Cash and his faith journey. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

Speaker 3: So now Johnny’s out on the road. He’s touring endlessly, and the road is wearing him down. He’s exhausted. So one night he shared a bill with a guy known as the ‘Hillbilly Heartthrob,’ Faron Young, who said, ‘I’ve got something that will fix you right up.’ From a pocket, he pulled out a handful of cream-colored pills and held one out to Cash, and he said, ‘Take this. He won’t be tired for long. You’ll get through the night with no problem whatsoever.’ Johnny grabbed the pill, he swallowed it, and he gave quite a show. And that was the beginning of Johnny’s addiction to amphetamines. Now, in fairness, a lot of people touring at this time were taking these amphetamines. And there were commercials on television advocating how these can help you give you more pep. And I’m not justifying the addiction that Johnny developed, but he was not the only one, and they actually were quite mainstream. Well, Johnny loved Vivian. He wrote all these love letters, so many to her over the years, and then finally they were married and they had children together. But Johnny’s career was exploding, and Vivian would not see him for long stretches of time. And then she went to one of his shows, and she saw the girls. She saw the girls and their interest in Elvis and in Johnny, and it began to cause her to be very concerned. All culminated when Johnny actually played at the Hollywood Bowl, and she was there with their children, their daughters. And Johnny got into a car with June Carter Cash—excuse me, June Carter at that time, now Cash—and he drove away instead of Johnny driving away with Vivian, and she knew that trouble was afoot. And of course, Johnny had fallen in love with June Carter and decided he wanted to marry her and announced it to her, and so this ultimately resulted in the complete dissolution of his first marriage to Vivian. Something he deeply regretted. It was wrong. Johnny was making wrong decisions. Johnny was doing sinful things, and he knew it. But looki…