Cash: The Autobiography (29 page)

Louise, my oldest sister, is still married to Joe Garrett, her sweetheart who went off to war soon after Pearl Harbor and didn't come back until 1945, after more than three years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. He didn't say much about life in the camp, but remembering what he did say still disgusts and anger me. He was very lucky to have even made it to the prisor camp. He was on the cruiser Houston when it was bombed and sunk, but he managed to make it into the water and survive the first day's shark attacks. The fol- lowing day, he and the rest of the men in the water were picked up by a Japanese navel vessel, but not with rescue in mind: all of them were stripped naked, whippe bloody, and then thrown back into the sea for the sharks. Only a handful from the hundreds who got off the Houston were still alive when a different Japanese shit picked them up and took them to a camp in Thailand. The Japanese never informed the Red Cross or anyone else that Joe was still alive. Louise waited and waited, but three years went by without a word, and finally she married a man who looked just like Joe, Loys Fielder. She and Loys got along for a while, but then they started having trouble that ended with Louise filing for divorce. Right about the time the divorce came through, a few weeks after V-J Day, Mr. and Mrs. Garrett got a call from somebody in the government telling them that their son had survived the camp and had been transferred to a hospital in Japan: nothing else, just that he was alive. I was sitting on the steps of the church in Dyess one Sunday evening, waiting in the cool air before the service started, when a car pulled up and the skinniest man I ever saw climbed out. Joe is over six feet tall, but that day he didn't even weigh a hundred pounds. I had no idea who he was.

He walked up to me and said, “Hello, J.R. You don't know who I am, do you?” I had to agree with him. “No, sir,” I said. “I'm Joe Garrett,” he said. “Is Louise here?” “No, sir, she's not,” I replied, afraid to say any more. Even after he'd told me who he was, I couldn't see him in that walking skeleton. I knew it had to be true, though, because he sounded just like Joe. I got up and ran into the church, shouting “Joe Garrett's back! Joe Garrett's back!” Joe and his family were among the best-liked people in Dyess, so that was wonderful news for everybody. They all crowded around him, hugged him, welcomed him home. Then we took him back with us to our house for dinner. We got through the whole meal without mention of Louise. I'd already been sent to bed when I heard Joe and Daddy still together at the table. Joe was asking every question about everybody and everything he could think of, and Daddy was replying, until finally it couldn't be avoided anymore. Joe put the question, and Daddy told him. “Well, Joe, she's been married, but she's divorced now. She's living over in Osceola.” Louise and Joe were wed shortly thereafter. Joe took on work as a carpenter and upholsterer, a jack of all trades and a master of many, and they raised a big fam- ily. Today they live in Gallatin, Tennessee. I like Joe, and I'm partial to a good love story. I'm thinking back to Dyess and my little brother, Tommy. The first time I ever really took notice of his feelings was after Jack's funeral, when we were sitting together on the back porch at home. There was a big age difference between us; I was twelve and Tommy was only four at the time. Tommy started crying. I hadn't cried that day. I put my arm around him and held him while he sobbed, realiz- ing for the first time that we'd both lost Jack; it wasn't just me. What I'm trying to say is that for the first time I was really aware that Tommy was my brother exactly as Jack had been. He was more than just a little kid. I haven't seen nearly as much of Tommy as I'd like, partly because he, too, lives the road life. As you might know, he rounds out the trio of Cashes to have gone to the top of the country charts (with “Six White Horses” in the mid-'6os), and he's always done very well as a club and concert performer, particularly in Europe. On stage, he's had to deal with being my brother just as much as Rosanne has had to handle being my daughter, and probably more. His response when someone asks him to sing one of my hits is, “No, Johnny and I don't sing each other's songs. We leave that up to each other. I can't sing them the way he can, so I shouldn't even try. Thank you very much for ask- ing, anyway.” Tommy's not the only one I regret not seeing more. With one brother, three sisters, seven kids, and twelve grandchildren, I sometimes find myself fretting, wonder- ing how I can ever spend enough time with any of them without retiring and making it a full-time job. That's silly, though. If I leave it alone, it seems to work out all by itself. We see each other when we should. I went back to the old homesite in Dyess a few years ago. The house itself was very far gone, falling slowly into the Delta mud, and the land all around it, as far as I could see, was just huge flat fields, probably given over to rice or wheat in rotation, probably owned by some big agricul- tural corporation somewhere. I didn't remember the land being that flat. I remembered little hollows where the cot- ton wouldn't grow well if you got too much spring rain and little hills of sandy loam where Daddy planted water- melons. From our land back then you couldn't see the water tower two miles away in the center of town because of the lay of the land when you looked from some angles and the intervening trees when you looked from others. I stood at the old home place on that last visit and saw the tower as plain as day. The land had been flattened, and the trees were all gone. So much life, so many people I love, sprang from that place.

We're not in Wisconsin anymore. Since Ashland I've been to New York, to New England, to South Carolina, to North Carolina, to Georgia and Alabama, over to Jamaica, and back to Tennessee. Now I'm in Oland, Sweden, where tonight we're play- ing an outdoor concert in the ruins of a twelfth-century castle. At this moment I'm in my hotel room, and I think it might be hard for me to get my afternoon nap. This is a resort town, and it's jumping. A gale of rock 'n' roll music from the beach is beating against my window. Travel broadens my mind, you know, but not so much that I can't get my head out the door (with respects to Elvis Costello, who conceived that notion). In recent years June and I have made a point of arriving in places like this a little sooner than we absolutely have to and being tourists for a day or two, sometimes even more. If we're in Paris or Cologne, someplace with a great cathe- dral, we'll be sure to go there and sit in admiration, absorbing the beauty of man's work in God's name and being quiet, being still. We always move on feeling strengthened, restored, and renewed. Notre Dame just stuns me, every time. If we're in New York we'll go to the movies, maybe even two or three a day. I enjoy “good” movies, but I also want to see the big hits like everyone else. I'm the same way with books. I have my own special tastes and interests, and I get into themes—a string of biblical novels, a spell of Vietnam war chronicles—but I certainly don't want to let the cream of the New York Times best-seller list pass me by. I'm not one of those public personalities who “can't” go to the movies with everyone else. I walk die streets and shop in the stores and buy my movie tickets at the box office. People don't “leave me alone.” They recognize me, and when I'm standing in line we talk, and if they want an autograph I give them one. Then we all say 'bye and go watch the movie. Of course, if I'd turned out to be Elvis or Marilyn Monroe, or Michael Jackson or Madonna, I might not want to do things that way. Comparatively speaking, being Johnny Cash isn't that tough a job. * * * As for other performers, Alan Jackson is one of the cur- rent country singers who, in my opinion, is a keeper. He has staying power. So, obviously enough, does George Strait. Marty Stuart, Collin Raye, and Travis Tritt are also in it for the long haul, I believe, and Dwight Yoakam is doing a wonderful job. All these men, particularly Dwight and Marty, are keeping the traditions of country music alive while also pushing it into some very cool new places. They're not just trying to sound like George Jones and Lefty Frizzell, as too many other promising younger singers are doing. I wish these boys would try sounding like themselves and that their producers would let them. You know, I was working in a studio in Nashville one time, standing behind the board in the control room listening to a playback, when a man from Randy Travis's record company came in. “What's going on over there at Warner Brothers?” I asked him. “Oh, well, you know how it is,” he said. “We're just looking for the new Randy Travis.” “What's wrong with the one you've got?” was my response. I know exactly how it is, not just at Warner Brothers but everywhere else in town, too, and it really annoys me. Someone who sounded absolutely, unmistakably, incom- parably like himself was Roger Miller. And what a self that was: brilliantly creative, incredibly witty, and a kind and gentle human being. I was in Las Vegas once, suffer- ing from that old amphetamine laryngitis, when he just showed up and told me he was going to do my show for me until I could handle it myself. “You can't sing, and I can,” he said. It was that sim- ple. He saved all kinds of trouble and expense. At the end of that engagement, June went home and Roger and I drove to L.A. together. Out in the middle of the desert he told me to pull over, then jumped out, and ran off behind a Joshua tree with a pad and pencil. When he came back he had a fully written song. It was “Dang Me.” He'd hidden behind that tree to write it because he knew it was just too hot a song to be created with me or anyone else anywhere near him. He had to bring it into the world all by himself, like an Apache woman giving birth. When he came back and sang it to me off the pad, I saw his point. Bill Monroe is the only man I've ever known who invented a whole new style of music. They didn't call him “Daddy Bluegrass” for nothing, you know. I could sing his songs when I was a kid with a high tenor, before my voice broke. Later, when he came to the guitar pulls at my house, I'd back him on rhythm guitar and baritone har- mony while he played mandolin and sang lead. “Will you second me on this one, John?” is how he'd always say it. Johnny Paycheck and I had some serious good times together back when he was still calling himself Donny Young. So did Ray Price and I. We stayed up all night together in Miami once, while he had “My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You” on the charts. What a great song. People gave Ray a lot of flak for recording “For the Good Times” with an orchestra, and I enjoyed how he handled that. When he got to the microphone at the CMA awards show after being handed the Entertainer of the Year award—the big one, for those of you unfamiliar with CMA ratings—he said, “Everybody's been wonder- ing what I was up to with the orchestra I've been singing with.” He paused a beat to punch up the drama, bran- dished the award above his head, and said, “Well, this is it.” Then he just gave them a big, broad smile and walked off the stage. I never did understand the resentment about country artists “going pop.” Either you've got what it takes to appeal to a whole lot of people, or you don't. Speaking of which, I once had a big night with Jim Reeves, too. I was down in San Antonio, visiting with my first parents-in-law, the Libertos, and he was playing a club. I went to catch his show and we ended up hanging out for hours and hours, way past dawn's early light. His “Gentleman Jim” image didn't stop him from consorting with the likes of me. Linda Ronstadt. I had her on my TV show four times. Her first appearance was her TV debut, and the first song she sang was Bob Dylan's “I'll Be Your Baby Tonight.” What a moment. I don't know how many people fell in love with her that night, but I'll bet they numbered in the thousands, at least. Which brings me to some other wonderful women country singers. There's Connie Smith, the favorite of many Nashville people even though she hasn't had a record out in years. She married Marty Stuart just a few days ago—Jay Dauro got the news from Kelly Hancock via e-mail and passed it on to the rest of us—and I must say, we were all very glad to hear that. Ever since Marty started going with her, there's been a bunch of us hover- ing around, telling him he'd better not hurt her. Connie is like our little sister: Waylon's, mine, everybody's. Tanya Tucker, of course, isn't the little-sister type, but she too is a fair bit more than all right. And that brings us to Trisha Yearwood. She moves me. She's a really fine interpretive singer, and she has great taste. I don't think anything as good as “The Song Remembers When” has been on the radio in a long, long time. I want to sing with her. Her friends the Mavericks are a pretty hot band— very stylish, very interesting, very smart. Bobby Reynolds, the Maverick who married Trisha, is especially smart. The light's beginning to fade in Oland. I'm thinking about all the many other places I've been and seen, the stops along my road. The pictures flit by in my head. A border checkpoint between Communist Poland and East Ger- many when June, Mother Maybelle, and I had to sing for the guards before they would let us pass. A castle in Scotland where we stood in the twilight and watched thousands of crows arrive and fly around the keep, as they've been doing at the dimming of the light every day for hundreds of years, who knows why. A morning in downtown Bangkok when I asked why there were no birds anywhere and was told that air pollution had killed them all. A concert for the remnants of the great Sioux Nation near the ground on the Rosebud River where they won their last victory, over George Armstrong Custer and his men. A morning in Greenwich Village with Rosanne, talking and singing with her at her childrens' school. A night in London watching Nick Lowe, Martin Belmont, and several other hardened, drunken rock 'n' roll Limeys playing George Jones's recording of “We Ought to Be Ashamed” and bursting into tears. Dyess, Arkansas, with Jack in the barn where we dried the peanuts from our fields, picking out the ones ready for roasting, then bag- ging them in brown paper sacks from the co-op store to sell outside the movie theater, a nickel a small bag, a dime for a big one. It's about time for me to go to work, or if you like, to go play. That's what we music gypsies call it, after all. I'll put on my black shirt, buckle up the black belt on my black pants, tie my black shoes, pick up my black guitar, and go put on a show for the people in this town.