Johnny Cash: The Life (2 page)

The youngster didn’t just listen to country and gospel, however. Some stations played country and pop, and the music-hungry boy looked forward to hearing anything by Bing Crosby or, later, the early rhythm and blues of the Ink Spots. As he got older, J.R. would expand his listening habits to include the fifteen-minute mystery dramas, such as
I Love a Mystery
and
Inner Sanctum.
He also followed comedy and quiz shows such as the Jack Benny show and
Truth or Consequences.
But his first loves remained country and gospel music.

As it happened, the first country singer J.R. recalled hearing was Jimmie Rodgers, who was known to millions of fans in the South and Southwest in the late 1920s and early 1930s as the “Singing Brakeman,” because he had worked on and frequently sang about the railroads. Thanks to an appealing bluesy-country approach and songs about a wanderlust lifestyle that stirred the imagination of his mostly rural audience, Rodgers was the first country music superstar. The first Rodgers song J.R. heard was “Hobo Bill’s Last Ride,” a melancholy tale of a lonely man dying in a boxcar on a freezing night far away from home. J.R. was about five, and the record reminded him of his own anxious journey from Kingsland as well as the times he’d watched his father hop off a freight when returning from one of his job hunts.

Rodgers’s music felt so intimate and immediate that J.R. actually believed Rodgers was singing live through the radio speaker just to him. The family didn’t have a phonograph, so he didn’t understand that he had been listening to a record—something that could be played again and again. He was thrilled a few days later when he heard that magical Rodgers voice again on the radio. He raced around the house, trying to get everyone to sit with him and listen to this story about the lonely, dying man. So impressed was he with the singer that years later, J.R. would tell some of his schoolmates that he was named after Jimmie Rodgers. In truth, the initials had grown out of a stalemate between his parents over a name. Cash’s mother wanted to name him John after her father, John Rivers. His father said it should be Ray. So they just settled on the initials. (In some childhood writings Cash signed them simply JR, but J.R. was more common.) The youngster was also especially fond of the mostly sunny, sing-along styles of the Carter Family and Gene Autry. But the other radio tune from childhood that touched him the most was Vernon Dalhart’s “The Prisoner’s Song,” which was the first million-selling country recording. Like “Hobo Bill’s Last Ride,” Dalhart’s 1924 hit was a lonesome underdog tale. Both songs reflected the themes of heartache and strife that would play a prominent part in many of Cash’s own compositions. He later told me he found something uplifting in songs about hard times, speculating that maybe he got that feeling just because someone cared enough about troubled people to write songs about them.

Ray, always a serious-minded man, picked up early on his son’s fascination with music and tried to quash what he considered a frivolous pastime. Cash remembered his father often saying, “You ought to turn that stuff off.”

The first real crisis for Dyess residents came early in 1937. Torrential rain pelted much of the delta for days, swelling the Mississippi and other rivers in the region and flooding many of the surrounding farms and towns. It began to look like their dreams of a better life were going to be literally washed away. Adding to the trauma, the rain didn’t just keep coming, but sometimes gave way to clear skies, raising momentary hopes in the colony that the town would be spared. Then the rains returned harder than ever on January 21, and emergency workers began leading families to higher ground. By nightfall, some seven or eight hundred people were housed at the community center. But it wasn’t water from the Mississippi that threatened the residents of Dyess, as Cash often said later. It was the water of the less-well-known Tyronza River, which ran through the heart of the colony.

By noon the next day, the number of people at the community center had doubled. As conditions worsened—it was so cold that the rain froze as it hit the ground, making it difficult to operate trucks and tractors—residents who could stay with relatives elsewhere in the state began leaving Dyess by train. The water began rising during the night more rapidly than before, and by the morning of the twenty-third it was clear that a near-complete evacuation was necessary; there hadn’t been any electricity for three days.

Carrie and the younger Cash children were among the first to leave, returning by train to Kingsland to stay with relatives, not knowing if they would ever return. Ray Cash stayed in Dyess with Roy in hopes of safeguarding the house and to help in rescue work. Despite all the fear and upheaval, only two deaths were reported in the area—and the water soon started receding. By February 3 the roads were dry, and the word went out that it was safe to return. The Cashes were back home within two weeks—in plenty of time to celebrate J.R.’s fifth birthday on February 26.

The drama of the time was still vivid in J.R.’s mind nearly a quarter century later when he wrote a song about the flood, “Five Feet High and Rising,” that became one of his signature tunes. Looking back on the song, which appeared on a 1959 album titled
Songs of Our Soil,
Cash saw the struggle of the flood as another example of the power of faith and a community working together.

“My mama always taught me that good things come from adversity if we put our faith in the Lord,” he said, explaining the genesis of the song. “We couldn’t see much good in the flood waters when they were causing us to leave home. But when the water went down, we found that it had washed a load of rich black bottom dirt across our land. The following year we had the best crop we’d ever had.”

Thanks to the rich new layer of soil, on February 8, 1938, Ray was able to repay the government $2,183.60 to cover the cost of the land and the cash advances. The twenty acres of delta land were now his, and life in Dyess started to feel good. The whole family thanked God for His blessings three days a week at the First Baptist Church near the town center. That two-story building was as important in young J.R.’s life as the radio.

J.R. was taught to believe the literal message of heaven and hell, salvation and eternal damnation. He was also warned to be suspicious of other religions. Catholics, he was told, didn’t answer to God but to a mysterious tyrant in Rome, and the Jews killed Christ. Cash later rejected that backward thinking, showing enough tolerance for others’ beliefs that he married a Catholic, Vivian Liberto, and agreed to raise his daughters in that faith. When one of his daughters, Rosanne, married a Jew, record producer and guitarist John Leventhal, her father warmly welcomed him into the family. Racism was also rampant in Dyess, and it took a while before he was able to shake its venom.

J.R. joined the rest of his family at the church every Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday night. Unlike other kids, who complained about having to go to church, he looked forward to the music, the sermons, and the sense of community. Just as music had warmed his home, church was an early comfort. By the time J.R. was nine, he had two more siblings—a sister, Joanne, born in 1938, and a brother, Tommy, born two years later. Nothing in all he heard about the Bible and God’s Commandments struck him as more important than honoring thy father and mother—and he prayed that he’d have a loving wife and family someday. He even pictured the kind of wife he wanted and the way he would raise his children. She would have to be as sweet and loyal as his mother, and he wanted to give his sons and daughters the same affection she showered on him. When he thought about the man he’d like to be, though, he thought of his older brother Jack, and never his father.

Everyone in the family looked upon Jack, who was named after heavyweight boxing champ Jack Dempsey, as the golden child. Handsome, intelligent, outgoing, and generous, Jack made up his mind early that he would serve the Lord by joining the ministry. Even other residents of Dyess spoke about his inspiring spirit and message, and how he had seemed, even at the age of eleven, to behave like a preacher. Jack was especially thoughtful to people in need, counseling adults who drank too much and comforting anyone facing illness or a death in the family. J.R. marveled at how his brother, who was just over two years older, could make adults three times his age feel better about themselves.

J.R. noticed that his friends’ older brothers discouraged their younger siblings from hanging out with them in town or at school, but Jack always welcomed J.R. Even Jack’s positive influence, however, couldn’t keep J.R. from developing a rebellious streak as he approached his teens, when he began to show what his father branded an “attitude.” He was moody, sometimes snapping back at his father and his teachers. He started smoking cigarettes at the age of ten—an ultimate act of rebellion at the time. He didn’t have money to buy any, so he would sneak some of his father’s tobacco and roll his own, or he would bum them from other kids.

“Looking back, that was the first sign of John’s addictive personality,” his sister Joanne says. “The other boys might smoke an occasional cigarette, but John smoked all the time—except when he was at home.” There’s no way he would have worried his mother by smoking in front of her.

Jack, who didn’t smoke, learned about J.R.’s habit, yet he wasn’t judgmental. That was one of the things that J.R. liked best about his brother. J.R. felt such a tight bond with Jack that he even delighted in going fishing with him, which surprised everyone else in the family because J.R. usually preferred fishing alone. He liked his solitude. As he did on the gravel road, the youngster would sometimes lie at the water’s edge, staring at the sky and singing his favorite songs—though most often silently to himself to avoid disturbing the fish.

On Saturday, May 13, 1944, J.R. was planning to go to his favorite fishing spot in one of the colony’s drainage ditches just off the two-and-a-half-mile route to the town center. Most of the time, fourteen-year-old Jack was too busy to spend the day fishing. If he wasn’t helping someone in the community, he was trying to raise money for his family—delivering the
Memphis Press-Scimitar
or doing odd jobs. On this day, too, he planned to earn money by making some fence posts at the high school agricultural building. He knew the family could use the extra $3.

Years later, Cash remembered an exchange in the family living room that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

“[Jack] said he felt like something was going to happen and my mother said, ‘Well, don’t go,’” Cash said. “Jack stared at the door when an expression of death came over his face.”

J.R. pleaded with Jack, “Come, go fishing.” But Jack felt a duty to the family.

As Jack headed toward town, J.R. went to the fishing hole, but his heart wasn’t in it. He felt restless. Instead of staying most of the day, he stood up after a couple of hours and headed home. That’s when he saw the mailman’s car coming toward him with his father in it. As soon as he saw his father’s ashen face, he knew something bad had happened.

Jack had been cutting the fence posts out of oak logs at the school workshop on a table saw without a guard on it, and the blade had ripped into the boy’s stomach. Stunned and bleeding, Jack tried to push his intestines back into his abdomen as he staggered from the shop building. He was spotted by a school official, who rushed him to the hospital. The teenager was alive but unconscious when J.R. and his father arrived. The family gathered around the golden child, their world cruelly and instantly shattered. Though the doctors held out little hope, Jack remained alive, but barely.

Neighbors who had been helped over the years by Jack stopped by the hospital to join the family in prayer. The outpouring overwhelmed J.R. All these people loved his brother as much as he did. It taught him a lot about compassion, he said later. He hoped someday that people would care for him like they cared about Jack.

When the boy’s condition worsened on Wednesday, a special service was held at the Baptist church, drawing people from all over Dyess. Learning the next morning that Jack’s condition had improved dramatically, Ray and Carrie Cash believed it was a miracle. But the euphoria was short-lived. The family was told on Friday morning that the end was imminent, and they crowded into the hospital room.

“[Jack] started to groan and asked Mama to hold his hand,” Cash said, remembering the farewell scene late in life. He said his brother closed his eyes and told Carrie he was at a river. “One way goes to the bad place; the other way goes to the light. I’m going to the light.” Then he said, “Can you hear the angels singing? Look at this city, this beautiful city, the gold and all the jewels, the angels. Listen, Mama, can you hear them?”

He died Saturday morning.

Pretty much the whole town came to the funeral on Sunday and joined the family in singing favorite hymns. Jack was buried in a cemetery in nearby Wilson; the words on the gravestone read “Meet Me in Heaven,” Years later, Cash would use the phrase in a song. At the height of his stardom in 1970, Cash would also dedicate his songbook,
Songs of Johnny Cash,
to his brother.

Still reeling, the Cash family was back in the fields on Monday picking cotton. The crops wouldn’t wait. The loss of her son, however, was too much for Carrie.

“I watched as my mother fell to her knees and let her head drop onto her chest,” Cash recalled in his 1997 autobiography. “My poor daddy came up to her and took her arm, but she brushed him away. ‘I’ll get up when
God
pushes me up!’”

Finally, slowly and painfully, she got back to her feet and resumed picking cotton. She still had a husband to care for and children to raise.

Through the week, J.R. kept thinking about his brother’s words—about a crossroads between the lightness and the dark. “I made my choice after his death which way I was going to go,” Cash decades later told a friend, producer-director James Keach. “I answered a call to come down the aisle [in church] and shook the preacher’s hand and I accepted Jesus Christ as savior that next Sunday.