Remembering Johnny Cash

There have been few people in my lifetime that really lived up to the words legend and hero.

Like a lot of people my age, Johnny Cash was someone who was always there, and in some crazy sense I thought he would always be there. The first Cash song I truly remember was “Ring of Fire” which was a big hit when I was a kid, but there were others which I didn’t necessarily first hear by Cash: “I Still Miss Someone” and “Big River” were some of the others. I didn’t appreciate him at first. I bought my first Johnny Cash album “Live At Folsom Prison,” not long after it came out. At first I didn’t see what all the fuss was about, but a couple of days later one of the songs (I can’t remember which one) was stuck in my mind and I had to hear it again, and then again and again. I was hooked.

In 1969, PBS broadcast a documentary on Cash, “Johnny Cash: The Man and His Music.” I was living in New York city at the time, and I remember a bunch of us crowding into someone’s apartment to watch it mainly because word had gotten out that Bob Dylan was going to be on it.

None of us had seen Bob Dylan since his motorcycle crash and when he finally appeared about midway through dueting in the recording studio with Cash on “One Too Many Mornings,” it was something of a shock since Dylan was singing in a totally new voice, not to mention they were singing the song to the Johnny Cash beat and Dylan was chewing gum.

That documentary however was important for many other reasons. Living up to the title, it showed who Johnny Cash the man was. His Arkansas roots, singing in prison, his concern for American Indians, taking the time backstage to listen to some unknown songwriter. It showed that Cash was for more than some shallow country music hitmaker.