Johnny Cash: The Life (10 page)

“He will tell you in a minute that he stole the song, but he made it a more interesting song,” Grant said. “Everybody sang about love; not everyone sang about shooting a man ‘just to watch him die.’ I didn’t know if you could even put that in a song. As soon as I heard it, I remember asking, ‘John, are you sure they’ll play something like that on the radio?’”

When you compare the lyrics of “Crescent City Blues” and “Folsom Prison Blues,” it’s easy to see where he substituted the Folsom Prison setting and the reference to San Antonio. You can also understand the changing of “pheasant breast and Eastern caviar” to “drinkin’ coffee and smoking big cigars” to give the song a more blue-collar sensibility.

Still, the crucial change is the one Marshall’s comment addressed. Cash wanted to capture the ultimate loneliness, which he had sometimes felt during those long, grueling days in the monitoring room at Landsberg. He wanted to write not just about someone who was lonely for his girl, but about someone so empty inside that he felt cut off from both his family and his faith—someone so numb spiritually that he could take pleasure in killing a man just to watch him die.

The trigger to the line came from the song “T for Texas,” which was on a Jimmie Rodgers album Cash had bought in Landsberg. He’d been so excited to find it that he wrote Vivian at length about it. It’s tempting to imagine he might even have listened to “Crescent City Blues” and “T for Texas” back-to-back and realized how the startling Rodgers line,
“I’m gonna shoot poor Thelma / Just to see her jump and fall,”
could bring a real sense of desperation to the “Crescent City Blues” model. It was the heartlessness of shooting a man just to watch him die that was the central breakthrough of Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.”

It took about three weeks for the musicians to work up a version of the song. As with “Hey, Porter,” Luther had the hardest time, so John ended up teaching it to him virtually note by note.

Everyone—John, Luther, Marshall, Roy—was knocked out by the song, but Cash didn’t want to go back to Phillips with just one song. He wanted to hedge his bets by playing several different types of songs for Phillips. The guys had been playing Lead Belly’s “Goodnight Irene” just for fun, and it sounded good, so they could do that, even though it didn’t meet Phillips’s request for an original song. There was also “Wide Open Road,” the song John had written, or at least started, in Germany with Hank Snow in mind.

John’s brother Roy thought “Wide Open Road” was John’s best song yet, but John himself wasn’t so sure. He thought it was pretty standard country stuff, but in the early months of 1955 Sam had seemed at least a little interested in it, so that gave them two possible B-sides for the Sun session. The guys also worked up arrangements of two other songs John had written—“Port of Lonely Hearts” and “My Treasure”—as well as “My Two-Timin’ Woman,” a Snow song that Sam also had seemed to like when John sang it for him at the first audition.

Personally, the only new song Cash felt strongly about was “Folsom Prison Blues.” “John was a little nervous about the song because he had taken so much of the song from Jenkins, so he told Sam about the two songs,” Marshall said. “But Sam didn’t seem to care at all. Everyone was taking stuff from old songs, he said. He didn’t even ask to hear the Jenkins song.”

Though Sun’s logs don’t confirm the date, Marshall believed they went into the studio in late February or early March for their first formal session. There is a tape in the Sun vaults that includes at least part of what they recorded that day. It begins with four limp, unconvincing attempts at “Folsom Prison Blues,” two reasonable but not knockout versions of “Hey, Porter,” as well as one or two takes on the other songs they had rehearsed.

At the end of the day, the only song that Phillips accepted was “Hey, Porter.” and he wanted to set up another session to get a stronger version of it. Cash was disappointed that Phillips didn’t respond to “Folsom Prison Blues,” but he was thrilled about “Hey, Porter.” Plus, Phillips had given Cash a starting point on another song when he said he’d like a love song, a “weeper,” because country fans and DJs couldn’t resist them.

During the drive home, Cash kept thinking about the term “weeper,” and he thought of a catchy phrase that he had heard Eddie Hill, a local disc jockey, use countless times on the air: “We’ve got some good songs, love songs, sweet songs, happy songs, and sad songs that’ll make you cry, cry, cry.”

At home, John sat on the living room couch and started sketching a song built around the words “cry, cry, cry.” Vivian was astonished when he said it was finished fifteen minutes later.

Again there was no music, but the words sounded to Cash like something you’d hear on the radio. Vivian thought it was wonderful. By the time he showed it to Marshall and Luther a few days later, he had made only a couple of revisions. It was pretty much a first-draft song.

It wasn’t as personal or distinctive as “Hey, Porter,” but it sounded more radio-friendly, like a melding together of every heartbreak song he had ever heard on the air. Very much in the tradition of such Hank Williams songs as “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” the song put all the blame for the breakup on the other party and warned that she’d be sorry she’d been so cruel. It was just what Phillips had requested: a real weeper.

It began:

It took only a few nights with Grant and Perkins for Cash to put the music to the words of the song, which he originally called “You’re Gonna Cry, Cry, Cry.” It was easier for Luther to play than “Hey, Porter” because the song’s lead guitar run was much simpler. The threesome rushed back to Sun Records and played the song for Phillips, who liked it immediately. Again he used the words “different” and “unique.”

Cash was expecting to record both songs right away, but Phillips told them it would be a few weeks before they could get into the studio because he was still tied up with Elvis. Just keep working on the songs, Phillips advised, so they’d be “red hot” in the studio.

This time, Cash left Sun so excited that he went straight over to Home Equipment Company.

“I’m on my way,” he told Bates. “I’m gonna make records and I’m gonna pay back all that money.” The store owner came back with a good-natured “Well, you gotta make a lot of records to pay back all that money.” Cash’s debt was mounting, probably nearing $500, an intimidating amount for someone earning—not counting Bates’s advances—only about $60 a month in commissions.

John then stopped by Marshall’s home and went on and on about how “Hey, Porter” could be a hit all over the South, like Elvis’s records. The bass player found John’s enthusiasm “endearing” but also “pie-in-the-sky.” All Marshall hoped was for a few copies of the actual record to hang on the walls around the house and at the dealership.

Though Phillips had warned John and the others that it would be several weeks before he’d be able to work with them, John started trying to get a date from Phillips within days. Usually John had to leave a message with the office assistant, Marion Keisker. It got to the point where all he had to do was stick his head in the door and Marion would just shake her head no. To help reassure Cash that they really were going to make a record together, Phillips had a recording contract drafted. Notably, Sam wanted to sign only Cash, not the Tennessee Three.

Cash sat down with Marshall and Luther to relay Phillips’s decision. He promised they would still divide the royalties three ways, and Marshall and Luther were fine with that arrangement. John had one other thing to clear with them: Sam had also suggested putting John’s name on the record rather than just the Tennessee Three because he thought it sounded more personal. He also preferred the more youthful “Johnny.” Thus, the label would read “Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two.”

Luther and Marshall were also fine with that.

Johnny Cash signed the Sun contract on April 1. It was a pretty standard deal—a one-year pact calling for a royalty rate of about three cents per record, with Sun having the right to extend the agreement via two one-year options.

One of John’s favorite stories for years after was that he walked out of Sun that morning with just fifteen cents in his pocket and gave the change to a hobo on the street. No one remembered any hobos around Sun Studios, but Cash did give money to needy people throughout his life. The story was probably just another opportunity for Cash to encourage others to “help thy neighbor.”

When John got to Home Equipment after the signing, some of the employees ribbed him. One tried to convince John that no contract signed on April Fools’ Day was valid. After all the joking, Cash bounced an idea off Bates. He believed he could get his own weekly fifteen-minute show on radio station KWEM if Bates would sponsor the program. For years, KWEM had presented some of the region’s most talented artists, including B. B. King, Junior Parker, and Howlin’ Wolf, from its studio in West Memphis, just across the state line in Arkansas. They all had to pay for the airtime or get sponsors to pay for it. The performers used the exposure to plug local club appearances.

Once again, Bates came through.

In May, Cash got word from Sam Phillips that he was finally ready to record “Hey, Porter.” The session went surprisingly well; Phillips was satisfied after just three takes. “Hey, Porter” was a superior piece of work on every level. The song conveys convincingly the feeling of someone in love with his regional roots. Unlike most of the singers on the radio at the time, he didn’t just sing along with the beat. He treated every line as if it mattered. And that spare but steady rhythm by Grant and Perkins also stood out from the copycat instrumental format of most records.

“You’re Gonna Cry, Cry, Cry,” recorded a few days later, was more troublesome.

“We had to do thirty-five takes before we got ‘Cry, Cry, Cry’ right,” Cash recalled, surely engaging in his characteristic embellishment. But the session did drag on. The problem, once again, was Luther’s lead guitar part. “I kept changing the arrangement on him and he kept messing it up,” said Cash. “It was a comedy of errors until I finally told him to forget about the guitar break we were trying for and just [work] his way through it. That worked out fine, I thought.”

Perkins once again relied on the
boom-chicka-boom
sound.

After they had the songs on tape, Cash kept after Phillips to tell him when the record would be released. Phillips was working on Elvis, but he assured Cash that he wanted the record out as soon as possible. It sounded like a hit to him.

Soon after the “Cry” session, John wrote a letter to one of his best pals among the Landsberg Barbarians, Ted Freeman. As usual, he wrote in a playful style. He didn’t want to sound like he was bragging.

“We finally made the other side of my record,” he wrote. “We worked two and a half hours Thursday night. Finally got it perfected. Sounds like hell. No, I believe it will be purty good. The name of it is ‘You’re Gonna Cry, Cry, Cry.’ It’s a flat romping job. That ole’ clickety-clack rhythm….It’s going to be out in two to three weeks. Can’t say when ’cause I don’t know. It all depends on when the market is right. When they start making the record here, I’ll send you a copy.”

He signed it “Johnny Cash of Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two.”

A few days later, more good news: KWEM called. The station had an opening at four p.m., beginning Saturday, May 21. Cash contacted his mother and asked her to spread the word to everyone in Dyess: J.R. had done it. He had his own radio show.

TO ANYONE IN MEMPHIS
who was listening to KWEM while mowing the lawn or driving home from work on that Saturday afternoon in late May 1955, the new Johnny Cash show probably sounded even more amateurish than the other pay-to-play musical quarter hours on the station. Cash kept a tape of the show, and it is endearing, in retrospect, to hear the twenty-three-year-old finally get the chance to step behind the microphone and try to act like one of the real country music stars he had heard on the radio in Dyess.

After a thirty-second instrumental, he addressed the audience in a halting, nervous voice. Clearly the radio school hadn’t fully prepared him for the real thing: “Ah, hello folks, this is Johnny Cash and I’d like to introduce you to the other two boys here,” he said. “This is Luther Perkins over here hitting all those hard notes on guitar” (Luther actually played a couple of quick notes as if to say hello), “and, ah, Marshall Grant hitting the low notes on the bass fiddle over here.”

Even more clumsily, he told the “folks” that this was their first appearance “by way of radio” and he “sincerely” hoped that everyone would enjoy the show. He then invited listeners to write in requesting a song—assuring them that if he and “the boys” didn’t know it, they’d try to learn it. The few seconds it took to read a commercial surely seemed like an eternity, and he must have felt a huge sense of relief when he could stop talking and kick off “Wide Open Road,” one of the songs he had played for Phillips. He also sang “One More Ride,” a Sons of the Pioneers tune that he used to sing in Germany, and “Belshazzar.”

Cash didn’t play “Hey, Porter” or “You’re Gonna Cry, Cry, Cry,” since, as Grant explained years later, Phillips had asked them not to play either song because he wanted some of the city’s top DJs to be the first to air them. That form of flattery reliably led the DJs to play the song more frequently than they normally would. As usual, Cash took Sam’s advice to heart; he didn’t even mention he had been signed to Sun. He did play “Luther Played the Boogie,” a mostly instrumental tune that had come about largely by accident. During one of the endless evenings devoted to getting Luther to learn a few more licks, an exhausted Cash just sat back and laughed, saying, “Luther, you sure play the boogie strange.”

“Everybody laughed and forgot it until the next week when John came in with this song about Luther playing the boogie woogie,” Marshall recalled. “We thought it was just a joke until we started playing it, and we all liked the feel of the song. We ended up recording it and using it in the shows, but it wasn’t something Sam ever seemed to care about.”

That was the first radio show: fifteen minutes and out. Listening to the tape years later makes you respect Phillips all the more for being able to see the potential in these three novices. John hoped Home Equipment would get some business from the show to reward Bates’s faith in him, but at least at first, it didn’t generate any new customers.

Three days after the broadcast, Vivian checked in to St. Joseph’s Hospital to give birth to the couple’s first child. A few weeks before, her doctor had told the couple they were going to have twins, but he had mistaken Vivian’s heartbeat for the heartbeat of a second baby. There was only one new addition to the Cash household: Rosanne. To create her name, Vivian said, they combined Johnny’s pet names for her breasts: Rose and Anne.

When they got home with their new daughter, John and Vivian were so happy that they told each other they’d love to have eight children someday. Vivian’s younger sister, Sylvia, who came over from San Antonio to help her with the baby, found that the couple had so little money, she had to use her graduation money to buy groceries and diapers, which she washed by hand. The Cash family came over from Dyess to see Rosanne, and Carrie pulled her son aside. She wanted to thank him for carrying on Jack’s message in the radio show. “I loved it that you did a gospel song, son.”

Even though he hadn’t released “Hey, Porter” yet, Phillips brought Cash to the studio to talk about the next single. While he was there, John noticed a note on Phillips’s appointment calendar about sending “Folsom Prison Blues” to Tennessee Ernie Ford, whose folksy storytelling approach Phillips figured might be more suitable for the song than Cash’s style.

John asked him why, and Phillips, thinking about potential publishing royalties, pointed out diplomatically that Ford was hot, with his version of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.” When Cash pressed him, Phillips finally admitted that he didn’t think John and the guys were going to be able to capture the song on record.

“Give us another chance,” Cash pleaded, explaining how much the song meant to him. Listening to him, Phillips wavered. He admired Cash’s spirit, and he didn’t want to do anything to harm the confidence of this budding star. Besides, if Cash and the Tennessee Two couldn’t get it a second time around, he could always send it to Ford then.

So Cash and the guys went back to Grant’s garage and worked on “Folsom Prison Blues.” After a couple of weeks, the trio moved the song into a quicker tempo than the languid pace of “Crescent City Blues.” It wasn’t exactly a happy beat, the kind that Phillips favored, but the rhythm was becoming infectious. Before going back to Sun, Cash knew he’d need another song for the back side of the single. Marshall brought up “Luther Played the Boogie,” but John smirked. He wanted something better than that—maybe another “weeper.” In fact, he had already been working on a song called “So Doggone Lonesome” with Ernest Tubb in mind ever since Landsberg, and he was finally satisfied with it. Marshall thought the song was perfect for the group’s minimal
boom-chicka-boom
style.

By now even Marshall and Luther were beginning to tell the difference between songs Cash cared about and the ones he was just cranking out. They didn’t know precisely what it was that made John almost caress some of the tunes, but they could spot it as soon as he started playing. And clearly, the bassist thought, Cash cared about “So Doggone Lonesome.”

For his part, Cash would eventually separate his compositions whimsically between songs written by J. R. Cash and those written by Johnny Cash. The difference was between songs that he felt were in the personal, Jimmie Rodgers tradition, like “Hey, Porter” and “Folsom Prison Blues,” and those that were simply commercial ditties, like “You’re Gonna Cry, Cry, Cry” and “Wide Open Road.”

To a neutral observer, “So Doggone Lonesome” might sound like a fairly generic country tale—and there is the undeniable feel of a commercial sensibility to it. Cash had to know it was going to sound great on a barroom jukebox. Yet there was also something compelling about the lyrics once Cash began singing them. His performance was essential in bringing out the ache of the song—an early sign of Cash’s ability, like Rodgers’s, to make his best songs feel like they came straight from the heart, totally unvarnished or unfiltered. The song is about his longing for Vivian while he was in Germany.

It begins:

As expected, Sam showed little enthusiasm for “Luther Played the Boogie,” but he liked “So Doggone Lonesome” and thought the new arrangement of “Folsom Prison Blues” was much improved. “I didn’t know that it would have real mass appeal,” Phillips remembered. “But we got such a dynamic cut on that damn thing. And I got to thinking about it, that we all, in a way, are in prison, you know? I had to stretch my imagination, but I didn’t expect the public to do that.” Still, Phillips was willing to take a chance on the song. The two tracks would be Cash’s next single, but there was no need to rush into the studio. They had to get “Hey, Porter” out first.

Phillips received the first shipment of “Hey, Porter” in mid-June, and he asked Marion to call John and tell him it had arrived. She located him at Home Equipment, and he phoned Marshall and Luther so they could meet him at Sun.

Once there, John held the record in his hands and went over every word on the yellow label. He noticed that Phillips had shortened the title of “You’re Gonna Cry, Cry, Cry” to “Cry! Cry! Cry!” and had put exclamation points in both titles. Most of all, he saw the names “Johnny Cash” and, in much smaller type, “the Tennessee Two” and asked Sam to please make “the Tennessee Two” bigger in the future. Cash also saw that his songwriter credit was given as J. Cash under “Hey, Porter!” and only Cash under “Cry! Cry! Cry!” Just a mistake, Phillips said, but he continued, strangely, to go back and forth between J. Cash, Cash, and Johnny Cash on future Sun releases.

Phillips told them the record wouldn’t be officially released for another week—on June 21—but he asked John to take early copies around to some of the Memphis DJs, including Bob Neal at WMPS.

To encourage artists to bring them early copies of a record, DJs would usually interrupt their show and put the new record directly on the turntable, and that’s exactly what Neal did when Cash brought him his single. He played “Hey, Porter.” He then turned the record over and played “Cry, Cry, Cry.” Then, if it’s not just the storyteller in Cash at work, Neal dropped the fragile shellac 78-rpm record and it shattered on the floor.

Cash gasped, but Neal told him not to worry. He’d call Sam and get another copy. He shook Cash’s hand and said, “You’re going to be hearing a lot more of those songs on WMPS.”

Soon after, Marshall was driving to work, listening to DJ Sleepy Eyed John on WHHM, when he heard “Hey, Porter” for the first time.

“It was unbelievable,” Grant said. “I thought that was it. The next day about five stations in Memphis played it. The day after that, all of them were playing it. By the end of the week, they were all playing both sides.”

Despite all Cash’s efforts, it was Grant who found the first couple of bookings, even though one was just a free show for a benefit sponsored by a boat club of which he was a member. The other engagement was more memorable: their first paid gig. Marshall heard from a mechanic buddy that a Ford dealership just down Union Avenue was going to hold a gala all-day sales celebration. Marshall walked over to Hull-Dobbs and asked the manager if he had any musical entertainment lined up.

When the manager said no, Marshall said he had a band and he would love to play for the customers. The manager agreed to pay the group $50 to play on a flatbed truck for two hours. Marshall was so excited to get the paying gig that he would probably have agreed to stand on his head on the truck. John and Luther were also delighted by the booking, and they spent an evening trying to work up two dozen songs, figuring that would get them through a half hour, and they could then just repeat the set as new customers came onto the lot. They would play “Hey, Porter” and “Cry, Cry, Cry,” of course, as well as several of their gospel favorites and some numbers by Hank Snow and Hank Williams.

At the dealership, they learned they would be playing on the truck while it was being driven up and down Union Avenue with a huge banner advertising the sale. Oh, well, $50 was $50. So they got up on the truck and started playing “Hey, Porter” as soon as the vehicle moved out onto the street. Right away they realized that no one on the sidewalk could hear them for more than a few seconds before the truck moved on. So the guys threw out their half-hour repertoire and just played “Hey, Porter” and “Cry, Cry, Cry” over and over and over again.

To celebrate, the three bandmates took their wives to dinner and the movies. John, in particular, was up in the clouds. When “Hey, Porter” was released, he resumed the search for some live dates, but he found little interest among club owners in Memphis. When he bragged to one that he was on the same label as Elvis Presley, the club owner said he’d book him if he brought Elvis, too.

Hoping the hometown boy angle might help, Cash drove around northeastern Arkansas, and sure enough, he found takers in many of the towns of his youth, including Osceola, Wilson, and Lepanto, where he had spent many a night during high school at the pool hall and movie theater. The wives sold tickets at the door at various schools and theaters, usually for fifty cents, and the trio divided the profits with the venue. The conditions were often primitive; some of the facilities didn’t even have a sound system. But the experience taught Cash and the Tennessee Two how to reach out to an audience in all kinds of situations.

John’s family spread the word in Dyess, and John saw lots of familiar faces in the audiences; in fact, it wasn’t uncommon for John to know half the people in the room personally. If Cash didn’t have time to stop by his parents’ house on the way to the show, Carrie would often bring some food along to the venue. They would sit on the lawn outside the building and eat, adding an even more informal touch to the evening. This really was the bottom rung of the show business ladder. For all the energy that went into setting themselves up and then driving to the facility, the shows drew small audiences, between fifty and one hundred most nights, which meant John, Luther, and Marshall usually made between $12 and $25 collectively.

The first step toward the big time occurred a couple of weeks after the record came out. Sonny James, a self-effacing young singer who’d had a couple of hits on Capitol Records, heard “Cry, Cry, Cry” on the radio and called Phillips to see if he could get John to play a show that James’s manager had put together for that night in nearby Covington. Cash jumped at the chance, even though he hadn’t checked with Marshall and Luther to see if they were free. How could anything be more important than this? It was going to be a real show, not a “pretend” one like most of those in Arkansas. When Cash wasn’t able to reach Marshall, he and Luther headed to Covington, figuring they’d work out something. They were relieved when James’s bass player volunteered to take Grant’s part.