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Back during my broadcasting days, our radio station co-sponsored a Johnny Cash concert at the local community center.
When a radio station sponsors a concert, it means they give a lot of publicity to the upcoming event, and then during the concert, everyone works to help pull off the event successfully. As part of my chores that evening, I had the rare privilege to go back stage and keep Johnny Cash company for a couple of hours. His plane connections had caused him to arrive in town a couple of hours ahead of his band members, who were traveling by bus. Johnny was effectively stuck backstage, because as you can probably imagine, he couldn’t very well go down to the corner drug store, or he would have no doubt been mobbed.
This awesome experience became one of those events in life that you just never forget. His voice was so deep, his hair was so black, his eyes so dark, his chin so square and his bones so big, that he seemed larger than life. As I sat there in my chair beside him that evening listening to his calm, soft-spoken stories, I was simply blown away. I asked him just how he got in this predicament.
Johnny told me that as a child they went to church every Sunday morning and he loved to sing in the choir and learned to chord the guitar from one of the other kids. He wanted his own guitar pretty bad, but his parents were share croppers down along the Mississippi in eastern Arkansas, and “Believe me,” he said. “We were poorer than dirt while I was growing up.” However, with the help of his mother and one of her friends, he finally got his own guitar, and that changed his whole world.
“To get out of the cotton fields, I joined the Air Force as soon as I was old enough and took my basic training at Lackland Air Force Base down in Texas. There, I teamed up with a couple of other musicians, and we formed the very first band I was ever in, and man, was that ever fun. We were playing a gig in San Antonio when I met 17-year-old Vivian at a roller rink. After a couple weeks however, I was shipped off to Germany for three years, but she wrote me some pretty tantalizing love letters every single day, so when I came back to Texas I married her. We had four little girls, one right after another. However, I had too many ups and downs during that period of my life and she divorced me. It wasn’t until I married June Carter that I finally got some respectability.
Back during my broadcasting days, our radio station co-sponsored a Johnny Cash concert at the local community center.
When a radio station sponsors a concert, it means they give a lot of publicity to the upcoming event, and then during the concert, everyone works to help pull off the event successfully. As part of my chores that evening, I had the rare privilege to go back stage and keep Johnny Cash company for a couple of hours. His plane connections had caused him to arrive in town a couple of hours ahead of his band members, who were traveling by bus. Johnny was effectively stuck backstage, because as you can probably imagine, he couldn’t very well go down to the corner drug store, or he would have no doubt been mobbed.
This awesome experience became one of those events in life that you just never forget. His voice was so deep, his hair was so black, his eyes so dark, his chin so square and his bones so big, that he seemed larger than life. As I sat there in my chair beside him that evening listening to his calm, soft-spoken stories, I was simply blown away. I asked him just how he got in this predicament.
Johnny told me that as a child they went to church every Sunday morning and he loved to sing in the choir and learned to chord the guitar from one of the other kids. He wanted his own guitar pretty bad, but his parents were share croppers down along the Mississippi in eastern Arkansas, and “Believe me,” he said. “We were poorer than dirt while I was growing up.” However, with the help of his mother and one of her friends, he finally got his own guitar, and that changed his whole world.
“To get out of the cotton fields, I joined the Air Force as soon as I was old enough and took my basic training at Lackland Air Force Base down in Texas. There, I teamed up with a couple of other musicians, and we formed the very first band I was ever in, and man, was that ever fun. We were playing a gig in San Antonio when I met 17-year-old Vivian at a roller rink. After a couple weeks however, I was shipped off to Germany for three years, but she wrote me some pretty tantalizing love letters every single day, so when I came back to Texas I married her. We had four little girls, one right after another. However, I had too many ups and downs during that period of my life and she divorced me. It wasn’t until I married June Carter that I finally got some respectability.
“We moved to Memphis, as soon as I got out of the service and I went to broadcasting school to become a disc jockey. At night I played guitar with Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant.”
Perkins and Grant were the Tennessee Two.
“I scurried over to Sun Records and sang some gospel songs for Sam Phillips, but he was less than impressed,” he said, “However, he let me hang around.”
Johnny Cash hung around with the likes of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins. “We were in the studio one day and the four of us started an impromptu jam session,” he said. “Sam Phillips left the tapes running and the recordings, almost half of which were gospel songs, survived and that sort of turned the tides for me. My first record on the Sun label, ‘Hey Porter,’ met with reasonable success on the country hit parade, but it was my first big smash hit, ‘I Walk the Line,’ that put me back stage in this predicament.”
