Johnny Cash: The Life (4 page)

After just three lessons, Fielder was frustrated by the teenager’s lack of progress. To make him more comfortable, she changed her strategy. She asked him to pick a song. He thought immediately of Hank Williams, whose “Lovesick Blues” was all over the radio in the early months of 1949. The chance to sing one of his favorite new songs freed J.R., and his voice was so engaging, the teacher closed the lid on her piano and told him the lessons were over. He shouldn’t ever let anyone change his style,
“ever,”
she repeated forcefully.

These words gave J.R. enough confidence finally to stand in front of the church congregation without quivering. He started becoming more active at school, too, widening his group of friends and even showing his poems and other writings to some of his classmates. He gained such a good reputation as a writer that several of his friends paid him—usually about fifty cents—to write their homework poems or essays. “He was good with words,” recalls J. E. Huff. “He was smarter than we were. That’s for sure.” Classmate A. J. Henson liked a poem that J.R. wrote for him so much that he could still recite it more than five decades later:

A.J. got an A on the assignment.

Still, J.R. couldn’t shake the pressure of needing to find a job after high school. All the years his father told him he was foolish to waste his energy on music had left an impression.

As their senior year approached, J.R. and his friends spent many an evening trying to figure out how to escape the toilsome life their parents led. “The only thing we knew for sure was we weren’t going to be farmers,” Huff says. The government program in Dyess had given people like Ray Cash the chance to survive, but never to flourish. The land was worked so hard that it had already lost what richness it had had, making it almost impossible for families to break even. Many of the long-timers left the delta settlement for Memphis, just fifty miles away, or other parts of the country where they could find better pay and easier work. Ray Cash began taking odd jobs in nearby towns to supplement his income.

With his pals, J.R. weighed the merits of the main career paths that young men from poor families in the South often chose in the 1940s: head north to the auto plants in Michigan or join the military. There was also a third option—head to California in hopes of claiming agriculture jobs—but no one in Dyess wanted anything further to do with harvesting crops. Henson was the first of the three to make the break. While J.R. and J.E. returned to school, A.J. joined the Army.

On the outside, things were good at school during J.R.’s last year, though his grades, as usual, were only a little above average in most classes, even his favorites, English and history. He was elected class vice president, appeared in school plays, and was chosen to sing at the commencement exercises—not a country song, but “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,” an expression of faith with lyrics from a seventeenth-century poem by Ben Jonson. In the yearbook, the editors made a special mention of him: “It was in this year that one of our number showed so much talent on the stage, both as an actor and with his voice, that we think he should be publically recognized: this boy was J.R. Cash.”

But the good feelings of his final school year didn’t last long. Deep inside, J.R. couldn’t shake the fact that he had no idea how to break into the music business. He thought about heading to Nashville, the home of country music, but he knew he didn’t have the courage to do it, and that left him despondent. By graduation day, even the joys of his solitary walks had faded.

Desperate to demonstrate his independence from his father, J.R. heard there were some jobs available in west Arkansas picking strawberries, and, despite all his years of dreading picking cotton, he headed for the town of Bald Knob. The trip proved a bust; the strawberry crop was too small for him to make any money, so he headed home after three days. Not knowing what to do next, he happened to bump into Frank McKinney, a barber in Dyess. McKinney was thinking about taking the bus to Michigan to try to find a job in the auto industry, and he invited J.R. to go along. J.R. agreed so quickly that he spent much of the bus ride wondering if he was making a mistake.

In Michigan, J.R. got a job the first day as a punch press operator at the Fisher body plant in Pontiac. He walked a mile and a half to work each morning, but this wasn’t like the gravel road in Dyess. He couldn’t sing on the city streets, and he didn’t have enough spirit left to daydream. He felt trapped. The only thing to keep him company was his chain-smoking. From the first day, he found the work tedious and repetitious—far worse than picking cotton back home, because he wasn’t surrounded by the love of his family and community. For the first time, he also felt the sting of being branded an outsider, someone who was considered inferior—and this experience led him to begin to question some of the racist attitudes prevalent in Dyess.

While J.R. was working on a Pontiac one day, the fender slipped and cut his arm. When he went to the medical office, a doctor looked at his file card and smirked when he saw the words “Dyess, Ark.” “All you Southern hicks are always just looking for a way to get off work,” he said. J.R. tried to explain that it was an accident, but the doctor was unbending. Cash recalled the doctor’s response: “How long you gonna work here? You gonna get yourself a good paycheck or two and then split like they all do?”

A few days later, Cash came down with stomach flu, but he wouldn’t go back to the doctor; he didn’t want any further abuse. The landlady at his boardinghouse gave him a big glass of wine and told him to get some sleep—he’d feel better in the morning. He did feel better the next day, but he decided he was going home. Between the monotony of the work and the anti-Southern bias, after a couple of weeks he’d had enough of the car factory. He hitchhiked back to Dyess.

His mother was thrilled to see her son, but she was also alarmed by how skinny J.R. was. He had always been slender, which is why he hadn’t joined the sports teams at school with most of his pals. But he was now down to 140 pounds, low for a six-foot teenager. Carrie did her best to stuff him with home cooking around the clock.

Despite his craving for independence, J.R. was so desperate to get a job that he accepted his father’s offer to try to get him taken on at the oleomargarine plant near Dyess, where Ray was working. Predictably, J.R. hated the regimentation and he quit after a few days. Ray just shook his head once again. J.R. wondered if his father wasn’t right after all. Maybe he wouldn’t amount to anything. Maybe he was lazy and unfocused.

With nowhere else to turn, he decided to follow his father’s lead one last time and do what Ray had done three decades earlier. He would join the military. J.R. always enjoyed hearing his father talk about his adventures in World War I and about such appealing perks as going to Paris and seeing the Eiffel Tower. Besides, this was one way to finally please Ray. He first thought of joining the Army, like the elder Cash, but the Air Force seemed more glamorous and probably safer in case all the talk about war in Korea proved true.

On July 7, 1950, J.R. drove the family’s 1945 Ford to Blytheville and enlisted in the Air Force. Because regulations required a first name rather than initials, J.R. wrote down John, though no one had ever called him that. When asked for a middle name, he wrote simply R. He was just six weeks past high school and, after many false starts, he was finally saying good-bye to Dyess.

In his mind, however, J.R. would return to his hometown frequently—not just the house on Road 3 and his family, but also the wider community and all that it had meant to him. He’d sometimes imagine himself walking out of the movie theater in the town center and turning to the right, where he could see the porch of the administration building where Eleanor Roosevelt had stood. He would turn left, walk one block down Main Street, and see the old Baptist church, head another block down Main and picture the school library and the assembly hall where he’d seen the Louvins. A little farther along Main and J.R. could imagine the spot on the riverbank where he often fished and another spot on the river where he was baptized. It was a short stretch of land, just 250 yards, but he knew that the lesson of Dyess was one of inspiration and hope.

As J.R. said good-bye to his family at the station in Memphis and boarded the train for Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, the initial excitement of joining the service quickly gave way to nervousness. He found himself staring out the window, avoiding conversation with the other enlistees, some of whom seemed to relish the adventures ahead. One of his worries when he’d signed up had been getting sent into battle in Korea. He was now fretting over another kind of survival.

As with the trip to Michigan, he soon began asking himself if he hadn’t made a mistake. If anything, the failure of the Pontiac experience made him even more apprehensive. Would this trip, too, end in disaster? Was he smart enough to compete with the boys from the big city? Would the recruits from the North treat him with contempt like the doctor in Pontiac?

What about his spiritual values? He wasn’t used to being around alcohol, and he had never had a serious relationship with a girl. Would he be able to stay on the right path, or would he let Jack and his mother down? Could he actually flunk out? Would the Air Force send him home if he didn’t measure up?

The thought of that possible humiliation numbed him. He couldn’t shake his fear of what lay ahead. J.R. finally just laid his head against the seat and hoped, as he often did in moments of stress, to find that comfort in the escape of sleep.

JOHN R. CASH
, as he was now starting to think of himself, was one of thousands of men rushed through the revolving door of basic training at Lackland in the late summer of 1950, the normal thirteen-week training schedule cut to seven as the country mobilized for war in Korea. For someone whose high school class had numbered just twenty-two, the size of the operation was overwhelming.

After being trucked from the train station to Lackland, the new arrivals were quickly introduced to Air Force routine. They were given GI haircuts and issued dog tags, clothing, and supplies, then taken to the mess hall for dinner. Afterward, they were assigned places among the double-deck bunks that lined the main section of the two-story wooden barracks. Most of the recruits stayed up late memorizing their Air Force serial numbers, learning how to make their beds military-style, and getting to know one another. They didn’t get to sleep until shortly before being roused for a six a.m. roll call.

In rapid order that week, John and the others were administered typhoid and smallpox vaccinations. They were ordered to ship all their civilian clothes and shoes home, then given explicit instructions on just how to arrange their belongings in the footlockers by their bunks. The regimentation reminded him of the auto factory. He asked himself,
Four years of this?

Even so, his immersion into Air Force life proved a blessing. Between the grueling physical training, intense classroom sessions, and battery of aptitude tests, Cash didn’t have time to brood over possible rejection or failure. He was so exhausted after the long, demanding days that he spent much of his Sundays, his only time off, sleeping. He rarely ventured out of the barracks except to go to church or pick up necessities from the PX.

While others in his training squadron grumbled about the lack of free time, John embraced the nonstop schedule. Though he hadn’t shown much interest in sports in school, he proved to be fairly athletic, mastering the various exercises designed to turn young men into soldiers. He did so well on the classroom instruction that others turned to him for help, just like the students had done at Dyess High.

Near the end of the stay at Lackland, John’s squadron took yet another round of aptitude tests, and he showed potential in several areas, including air police, aircraft mechanic, and radio operator. He didn’t know exactly what the last entailed, but he liked the sound of “radio.” When his application for that school was accepted, John was overjoyed. He had stood up against the big city boys and, in most cases, outshone them.

When he went home to Dyess for a few days before reporting to Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, for more training, he felt like he belonged in his blue Air Force uniform. Even his father offered a rare handshake. During the third week of September, John R. Cash’s family again said good-bye to him in Memphis, but this time his mood was entirely different. John’s earlier nervousness was gone. On this trip, he didn’t stare anxiously out the window. When he finally went to sleep, he wasn’t looking for escape. He was looking forward to the six months in Biloxi. He was eager to get to know his classmates better, maybe play some music, and maybe even meet some girls.

Located on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, Keesler was popular among the airmen because it was just ninety miles from the bright lights and good times of New Orleans. Where better to spend a weekend pass than the most party-minded city in the South? Soon after he arrived at the base, John started hearing about the great bars and fast women in the Big Easy. Many in his barracks spent their first free weekend exploring both. But John stayed in Biloxi. Despite his excellent showing at Lackland, he wasn’t about to take his class work for granted. It felt good to excel. He even found himself doing something he had rarely done in high school: during his off hours, he actually studied. Besides, his Baptist upbringing raised a red flag about New Orleans.

John’s dedication to his studies increased as he learned about the important role radio intercept operators played in the Air Force. He wasn’t studying something mundane like repairing radios or constructing relay towers; he was learning how to eavesdrop on enemy radio transmissions. This was the Cold War, and the threat of Communism was being felt across America. It was challenging work, as foreign military strategists went to elaborate lengths to prevent their messages from being intercepted. They frequently sent out meaningless, distracting noises on the same frequencies before slipping in the real Morse code signals.

If eventually accepted as an intercept operator, John would have to listen to the competing signals through headphones for up to eight hours at a stretch, trying to distinguish the real transmissions from the decoys. Once the Morse code was isolated, he would then jot down the letters and pass them along to a group of translators who would try to decode them. The more John learned about the intercept mission, the more motivated he was by the touch of glamour and adventure associated with it. He even imagined himself living out some of the World War II spy movies he had enjoyed back in Dyess. He liked the thought of being a hero. Wait until he told his dad about
this.

John finished the Morse code course weeks ahead of schedule, which made him the envy of many of the others in his training group. Ben Perea, a New Mexico native who was in the same class at Keesler, had heard of John but wouldn’t get to know him until they traveled on the same ship to Germany. “He stood out at Keesler,” Perea recalls. “He was the model—the one the instructors would point to. Everyone knew he was very smart.” It was a word—
smart
—that many of his fellow airmen would use in describing Cash.

As rumors of his accomplishments spread around the base, other airmen began searching out the young man from Dyess. They wanted to hang out with him, and he enjoyed the attention. They invited him to go with them to New Orleans, telling him again about the music, the food, and, mostly, the women. Confident about his progress, John surprised himself by actually toying with the idea of joining them.

John had been so focused on basic training at Lackland that he couldn’t remember even listening to the radio for the seven weeks he spent there, so it felt good finally to be able to relax enough to tune in the popular country stations at Keesler. He even found a new favorite singer, Hank Snow, whose rollicking “I’m Moving On” topped the country charts for five months in 1950.

Like Cash, Snow was a huge Jimmie Rodgers fan, and he was at his best on story songs—as much reciting the lyrics as singing them. Both qualities were later typical of Cash’s recordings. He was enamored by “I’m Moving On” because the lyrics employed railroad imagery (“That big eight-wheeler rollin’ down the track”) to express feelings of wanderlust and independence, the same sentiments Cash would turn to years later when writing the song that helped him get his first record contract, “Hey, Porter.”

It wasn’t, however, the only record John would later recall from his days at Keesler. He also favored Ernest Tubb’s “(Remember Me) I’m the One Who Loves You.” Hank Williams’s “Long Gone Lonesome Blues,” Red Foley’s good-natured “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy,” and a pair of Eddy Arnold hits, “Anytime” and “Bouquet of Roses.” He especially admired the pure romanticism in Arnold’s singing, how his crooning delivery made love seem natural and uncomplicated—just the kind of relationship John wanted.

By mid-October, John had met a couple of Southern boys who also enjoyed singing what they referred to as “hillbilly” songs. The three often got together in the barracks and took turns singing lead on hits of the day. Others teased them about all the fun they were missing by not going with them to New Orleans. Increasingly, the tales of sexual conquests began to tempt John. Finally, he headed off with them on a trip to Bourbon Street.

Caught up in all the boasting on the ride down, John bragged about his own experiences with women. From the way he talked, you’d think he was a real ladies’ man. In truth, John had dated a few girls in Dyess, even gone steady with a couple of them for a spell. But he hadn’t come close to a serious relationship, much less sexual intimacy with any of them.

Still, he was no virgin.

When he was fifteen, J.R. and some other boys hooked up one night with a girl who was known around the small town as “easy to get.” At her urging, Cash insisted, they took her to a riverbank, where she lay on a blanket in the moonlight and had sex with each of them. Even though the girl seemed eager, the experience was unsettling and left John with such a deep sense of shame that he never referred to the incident in either of his autobiographies or in any of his formal interviews.

But he did speak of the night to a friend in the late 1990s. From the way he described the girl, it was possible she was at least somewhat mentally challenged, and John was still so sensitive about that night that he apparently changed the girl’s name to avoid embarrassing her or her family as he discussed it with the friend. According to A.J. Henson, J.R. never mentioned the name or the incident to him.

The only other time J.R. tried to have sex in Dyess, he told the same friend, was with a “nice young girl” he met while working at the roller rink in town. He somehow talked her into going to bed with him, but he was so nervous that he “couldn’t get it up.” The girl thought that was hilarious, leaving J.R. too embarrassed even to try to get intimate with any other girls during high school.

Now on the way to New Orleans, he listened to the other trainees talk about all the women who would be waiting for them—just like John had seen in so many of the war movies. He wanted a girlfriend, even if only so he could show off her picture to the other guys and look forward to her letters. Expecting to go to a dance or perhaps the local USO social club, he was shocked when his pals took him to a brothel. All the stories about “conquests” in New Orleans had really just been trips to houses of ill repute.

John’s first instinct was to walk away, but hormones took over. He went to a room with one of the prostitutes, and the experience reminded him of the night on the riverbank. It wasn’t just that it was against his Baptist teachings; the encounter was cold and clinical. He wanted to have sex again. He wanted it badly. He was still only nineteen, after all. But he realized what he wanted most of all was sex with a genuine connection. John returned to New Orleans a few times, but there is no indication that he visited another brothel. Mostly he stayed on the base, reading and singing country songs.

During his final weeks at Keesler, John was rewarded for his hard work when he was approached about joining a new, elite group of radio intercept operators. The USAF Security Service was set up in the fall of 1948 in response to the increasing complexity of enemy communication techniques. Security Service bases were located in Alaska and several foreign countries, including Japan, Korea, and Germany.

After interviews and a detailed security check, John was formally invited to join the unit and given his choice of duty in remote Adak, Alaska, or Landsberg, West Germany. They were choice outposts, reserved for the most promising intercept operators. The selection process didn’t focus just on test performance, but also weighed character, intelligence, and emotional stability. John opted for Landsberg because he wanted to see the sights of Europe.

To his great frustration, the security operation was so top secret that he was prohibited from telling anybody, including his family, about the delicate nature of his assignment. All he could say was that he was going to be stationed in Landsberg. But first he had to go through four more months of intense training to sharpen his intercept skills. On April 27, he headed back to San Antonio, this time to Brooks Air Force Base.

By late May, John was settled enough to begin thinking about life overseas, and again, he daydreamed about having someone special back home. Six months earlier he would not have had the nerve even to approach a girl he didn’t know. But his success in the training classes emboldened him—to a point. He began looking for a girl of his own everywhere he went in San Antonio, from movie theaters to cafés. It was easier said than done.

While his Air Force blues caught the eye of young girls, his shyness and his insecurity over his dirt farm roots resurfaced, making it hard for him to introduce himself to them. How, he kept asking himself, could anyone from Dyess stand up to a sophisticated big city girl? Even if he got a girl’s attention, John found himself unable to keep the conversation going for long. “Surely,” he kept thinking, “she’ll see right through this Air Force uniform and dismiss me as some hillbilly.”

After all the setbacks, John had little reason to believe that July 18, 1951, a Wednesday, would be any different. He and a friend were heading back to Brooks after a movie when John spotted the St. Mary’s roller rink, and it reminded him of the good times he’d had skating in Dyess. Specifically, he remembered the way girls used to show up eager to meet boys.

Dragging his friend along, John headed for the rink. It was near closing time, but he rented a pair of skates anyway and watched groups of young girls skating by. That’s when he spotted someone he would later describe as the prettiest girl he had ever seen. She was petite—no more than five feet, ninety-five pounds—and she was skating with a girlfriend. He watched her for a few minutes, hoping she’d stop so he could introduce himself. But the pretty brunette kept circling the rink. The pressure on him increased when the announcement came over the loudspeaker that the rink was closing in fifteen minutes.

Almost before he knew what was happening, John started skating slowly toward the girl, not stopping until he actually bumped into her. To anyone watching, it would have looked like a scene from a screwball comedy. When the girl fell to the ground, John reached down to help her up, apologizing profusely. Though he wouldn’t find out until later, Vivian Liberto had been watching him, too, hoping he would come over and say hello. She might even have exaggerated the impact of their encounter and fallen on purpose.