September 13, 2024 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Johnny Cash is an American original, and this story is an insider’s look at the man whose music sprang from the way he lived. Pastor Greg Laurie is here to tell the story from his recent book/documentary, Johnny Cash: The Redemption of an American Icon. Cash died on September 12th, 2003.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Up next, a unique take on the life story of
Johnny Cash. This story is an insider's look at the
man whose music sprung from the way he lived. Our
(00:30):
storyteller is none other than greg Glory. Laurie is the
pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship in Orange County, California and Maui.
Gregor is here to tell the story from his recent book,
Johnny Cash, The Redemption of an American Icon. And we're
telling this story because on this day in two thousand
and three, Johnny Cash died. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Going back to the earliest days of my childhood, I
had an awareness of Johnny Cash. One of the reasons
for that is our family is from Arkansas, not far
from where Johnny's family was raised, and my grandparents, who
I lived with for a number of years because of
my mother's crazy lifestyle. She'd been married in divorced seven
(01:20):
times and was having a lot of boyfriends in between
and was running around, and so she left me with
my grandparents, Charles and Stella McDaniel, who we called Daddy
Charles and Mama Stella. So I remember as a little
boy watching Johnny Cash's television show, and I remember hearing
my grandfather say to my grandmother when he'd be reading
(01:41):
the paper, well, Stella, your cousin's in trouble again. Because
Johnny had a lot of problems early in his life
after he had his initial success, he was arrested numerous times.
He never served time in prison. He never murdered anybody.
Sometimes people think that because of lyrics from a song
such as I shot a man in Reno just to
(02:03):
watch him die. Johnny never shot anyone. But he had
a problem with amphetamines that he got addicted to when
he first started out his career on the road. But anyway,
I was always aware of Johnny Cash. So, as it
turns out, my grandmother's maiden name Estella Fowler Cash, and
so I'm distantly related to Johnny Cash. But there was
(02:24):
something always about Johnny that was different from any other musician.
His contemporaries would have been Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, many others,
but Johnny was Johnny. He was called the king of
country music, but in a way, he was more like
the king of his own music, because his music transcended
(02:45):
all forms of music, from country to rock and roll.
I mean, in some ways he was a pioneer of
what they called rockabilly. When he was in the studio,
there was Sam Phillips who also discovered Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis,
and car Perkins, and they developed this sound that evolved
into rock and roll. Elvis ran with it, but Johnny
(03:06):
could have continued with that boom chicken boom sound. He
would play his guitar, he'd put a card in the
frets of the guitar because at one point he didn't
have a drummer to provide percussion, so he would get
that sound that you hear on so many Johnny Cash records. Right,
So Johnny should have never become who he was. But
(03:29):
it was all a part of a plan, and in
my mind, it was a part of God's plan. He
was raised in abject poverty. His father, Ray was a cold,
distant man. He was a sharecropper, never really succeeded in life,
and he favored one son over the other. Johnny had
an older brother named Jack, and clearly Ray favored Jack
(03:52):
over Johnny. And I'm getting a little ahead of myself
in the story, but when Johnny's brother Jack was tragically
in an accident in the saw mill, Ray was quoted
to have said later, I think God took the wrong
son to Johnny. Really, all throughout his life, when Johnny
did find some success in music and then huge success,
(04:14):
even being invited to the White House, he would always
invite his father Ray. I think he was trying to
impress him well into his adult years. So that was
a very strange relationship between father and son. Well, Johnny's mother,
Carrie was a very nurturing, loving woman, and Johnny's father,
(04:36):
Ray was a very distant aloof uncommunicative father. So Johnny
and Jack were as thick as thieves, very very close brothers.
Johnny looked up to his brother, who, though still very young,
was almost like a proper father figure for him. He
(04:56):
gave Johnny guidance, encouragement, and Jack knew that he wanted
to be a preacher one day, and Johnny he wanted
to be a singer. They often went fishing together and
done one particular day, Johnny was gonna go fishing, he
invited Jack to come and join him, but Jack said,
I gotta go work down with the sawmill. To make
(05:17):
a few extra dollars for the family. That's because Jack
was such a responsible young man. And so Jack was
there working and tragically he was pulled into the saw. Somehow,
amazingly he survived it, but he stumbled out into the
field and he was literally holding his vital organs in.
(05:38):
So he was taken to the hospital. So meanwhile, Johnny's
out there fishing and his father shows up with a
minister and Jack's bloody shirt, and he says, get in
the truck, and he threw his fishing pole in the
back and they went down to the hospital and there
on that bed was Johnny's brother Jack, who was very
(06:00):
close to passing into eternity. So in my book Johnny Cash,
A Redemption of an American Icon, I described the scene
as follows, and I'm reading from my book Jr. That
would be Johnny took Jack's hand and brought his cheek
close to his brothers. Goodbye, Jack is all he could
(06:21):
get out. Jack looked at his father and asked, will
you meet me in heaven? Ray Cash did the most
unexpected thing. He fell on his knees and prayed, asking
Jesus Christ to be his Lord and savior. Then Jack
looked at Carrie, that would be Jack's mother. Why is
everybody crying over me? Mama, don't cry over me. Don't
(06:43):
you see the river? On one side of the river,
he said, was fire. On the other side was heaven.
I thought it was going toward the fire, but I'm
headed in the other direction now, Mama, can you hear
the angel singing? Jack squeezed her hand in tears of
happiness rule down his cheeks. Mama, he said, listen to
(07:03):
the angels. I'm going there, Mama. A moment later, Jack said,
what a beautiful city and the angels singing. Oh, Mama,
I wish you could hear the angels singing. Then he
was gone, And.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
You've been listening to Greglorie share the story of Johnny Cash.
The redemption of an American icon continues here on Our
American Stories. Lihabib here the host of all American Stories.
Every day on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from
(07:38):
across this great country, stories from our big cities and
small towns. But we truly can't do the show without you.
Our stories are free to listen to, but they're not
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a little, give a lot. Go to Alamerican Stories dot
com and give and we continue with our American Stories.
(08:12):
We last left off hearing how in nineteen forty four,
Johnny Cash's older brother, Jack, with whom he was very close,
died at twelve years of age in a tragic table
saw accident, with Johnny by his bedside. His final words were,
will you meet me in heaven. Let's return to Greg Glory.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
And those words are inscribed on Jack Cash's tombstone. Will
you meet me in Heaven, our preacher to the very end.
This made a powerful impression on Johnny, who missed his
brother so deeply, and on through his life he continued
to think about his brother, and in fact, his brother
(08:54):
would appear to him in dreams, he said, and what's
in Justine? As his brother appeared to him over the years,
he was an older version of what his brother might
have looked like, and actually Johnny used as sort of
a point of reference throughout his life what would Jack
have done? What would Jack have thought? About? This? So
(09:15):
the influence of his brother impacted Johnny Cash for the
rest of his life. Johnny grew up picking cotton out
in the fields. It sounds like a story from the
Old West, and in many ways it was because Johnny
was just like any other poor young boy working with
(09:37):
this family, no real sense of what his future would be.
But one thing that Carrie loved to do out on
the common fields was seeing old hymns that they would
hear at church.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
It's what it was raised. It was a thing that
inspired me as a child growing up on a cotton
farm where work was drudgery and it was so hard
that when I was in the field all the time,
and usually gospel songs because they lifted me up above
the black dirt.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
After supper, they loved to sit around the radio and
listen to the Grand Ole Opry and the songs. And
Johnny the young boy, began to dream that maybe one
day he could do that. And so they were out
in the fields one day and Johnny came in singing
a song and Carrie turned and said, who just sang that? Well,
it was Johnny, but his voice dropped and it was
(10:29):
that more familiar Johnny Cash Timber. And she said, God
has given to you a gift, my son. So I
think it was at that point that Johnny's dreams really
caught fire, where he thought that he could one day
maybe be on the Grand ol Opry, he could be
on the radio, he could have a hit song. But
before that would happen, he would serve a stint in
(10:51):
the Air Force. So during his stint in the Air Force,
Johnny found himself very adept at working as a Morse
Code operator, and I think Johnny was beginning to discover
his relationship with sound, with pitch, and later with music.
(11:14):
He was a Morse code operator and actually he was
the one who intercepted the news, a top secret message
from the Russians that Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin had died
from a stroke on March fifth, nineteen fifty three. And
this is an amazing thing because Johnny retained this skill
(11:34):
well into the later years of his life. Because his son,
John Carter Cash said, the old man still had it.
When he came to retaining his skills, he proved it
by writing out the twenty third Psalm on Morse code
on a piece of paper. So this sense of understanding
of sounds was something that would help Johnny when he
began to write songs, and he was writing a lot
(11:57):
of letters to the love of his life at that time, Vivian,
and he also began to compose songs about places he'd
never been to before. But his imagination was running wild,
and really that skill set that would later be fully
realized was being developed as he was stationed there over
(12:17):
in Germany. So after Johnny got back from Germany, he
took various odd jobs, from selling appliances to other things,
none of which really interested him. He wanted to be
a musician. He knew of this success of Elvis Presley,
so he started calling Sun's studios wanting to talk to Sam.
He could never really get hold of him, and one
day he did communicate with him, and so Sam invited
(12:41):
him down and Sam actually said to him, or you're
the one who keeps calling, so you know, there's something
to be said for persistence. And when Sam heard Johnny,
he didn't really know what to make of him because
a lot of people were trying to sound like Elvis,
but Johnny didn't sound anything like Elvis. Johnny he was
his own guy. And you know, you really have to
(13:02):
stop and be amazed by this collection of talent at
one moment in time and the ability of Sam Phillips
to pick that talent. I mean Jerry Lee Lewis also
known as the Killer Carl Perkins, who wrote Blue Suede Shoes,
and of course Elvis and Johnny. He saw something that
others did not see. And I think what he saw
(13:24):
was an authenticity And this, to me is the key
to really making your mark. I think it's really the
very definition of what cool is. What is cool. By
the way, Johnny was called the Godfather of cool. Why
is it then when his musical career was resurrected later
by producer Rick Rubin that a whole new generation Generation
(13:47):
X thought he was the coolest thing to ever come along. Answer,
Because Johnny was Johnny. Johnny was authentic. Johnny was an
American original. Being cool is not dressing in the latest
fads or the latest clothing, or using the latest phrases.
Being cool, of my definition, is being an authentic version
(14:09):
of yourself, being real. And I think people can see that,
and I think people could hear it in the songs
of Johnny. But it's not just the way he's singing,
it's the way he spoke, you know, the timbre of
his voice. He was described as the Voice of America.
I like Chris Christofferson's definition of Johnny Cash. He said
he was like Abraham Lincoln with a wild side, you know,
(14:32):
So that was Johnny. No one sounded like Johnny, No
one sang like Johnny. Of course, he had his own
dress code, which ultimately became black, and so he was
known as the man in Black. So how Johnny came
to write the song cry Crack Cry is pretty interesting.
So he was listening to the radio and he heard
dj Eddie Hill glibly in tone we've got good songs,
(14:56):
love songs, sweet songs, happy songs, and sad songs that'll
make you cry, Cry, Cry, And hearing those words caused
Johnny to pick up his pencil and start writing down
the lyrics to what would become a hit song, Cry
Cry Cry. The finished product clocked in at two minutes
in twenty nine seconds. So Johnny now he had a
(15:18):
hit on his hands, and he had radio airplane happening.
And now he's out on the road and he's touring.
So while Johnny was out on one of his first
tours that happened to be with Elvis Presley, he met
a man named Sonny James and Sonny was an outspoken Christian,
and Johnny, of course was a Christian as well. And
now he's having this first success and he's wondering, how
(15:40):
do you handle this? How do you live a Christian
life out here on the road. And I love the
advice that Sonny gave to Johnny. He said, Johnny, the
way I do this is by being the way that
I am. I'm not just an entertainer who has become
a Christian. I'm a Christian who chose to be an entertainer,
but I'm first a Christian. Who you are and what
(16:01):
you are in life sings louder than any song. And
then Sonny told Johnny, and don't forget to pray. And
you know, I think Johnny did follow that advice. He
did have lapsis, he did things he should have never done.
He trashed hotel rooms like a proper rock star, He
got drunk, he got banned from certain stages for his
crazy antics. But Johnny always turned to the Lord. And
(16:26):
later when he was really having his greatest success with
his television show, I think Johnny really lived out this
advice of Sonny James speaking openly about his faith without
embarrassment in fact that became a source of great tension
with him in the network, and some believe that's the
reason they ultimately canceled his television show that was very successful.
(16:48):
But Johnny was always wanting to express his faith openly
and publicly, and I think deep down in his heart
he still wanted to be a gospel singer, just like
he was when he originally went to see Sam Phillips
over at Sun Studios.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Gospel music is such so ingrained into my bones. You know,
I can't do a concert without singing the gospel song.
I have a calling. It's called to perform and sing
and gospel gospel song is a ministry in a way.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
And you've been listening to Greg Glory tell the story
of Johnny Cash's faith life. Johnny Cash, The Redemption of
an American Icon is the book, and by the way,
it's also a terrific documentary.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
I'm not an.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Entertainer who is a Christian. He was advised by someone
he look up to. I'm a Christian who is an entertainer.
And what a difference that will make in Cash's musical
life and his spiritual life as well. When we come
back more with Greg Glory and Johnny Cash, who died
on this day in history in two thousand and three,
(18:08):
and we returned to our American stories and to Greg
Glory telling the story of Johnny Cash and his faith journey.
And we're telling this story because on this day in
two thousand and three, Johnny Cash died. Let's pick up
where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
So now Johnny's out on the road. He's touring endlessly
and the road is wearing him down. He's exhausted. So
one night he shared a bill with a guy known
as the Hillbilly heartthrob Farren Young, who said, I've got
something that will fit you right up. From a pocket,
he pulled out a handful of cream colored pills and
(18:48):
all went out to Cash and he said, take this.
He won't be tired for long. You'll get to the
night with no problem whatsoever. Johnny grabbed the pill, he
swallowed it, and he gave quite a show. And that
was the beginning of Johnny's addiction to amphetamines. Now, in fairness,
a lot of people touring at this time, we're taking
(19:08):
these amphetamines. And there were commercials on television advocating how
these can help you give you more pep and I'm
not justifying the addiction that Johnny developed, but he was
not the only one, and they actually were quite mainstream.
But this became a problem that he struggled with on
through his life, and these amphetamines certainly took a toll
(19:32):
on him in many ways physically, and I would also
add spiritually.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
Well.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
Johnny loved Vivian. He wrote all these love letters, so
many to her over the years, and then finally they
were married and they had children together. But Johnny's career
was exploding, and Vivian would not see him for long
stretches of time. And then she went to one of
his shows and she saw the girls. She saw the
(20:00):
the girls and their interest in Elvis and in Johnny,
and it began to cause her to be very concerned.
But it all culminated when Johnny actually played at the
Hollywood Bowl and she was there with their children, their daughters,
and Johnny got into a car with June Carter Cash
excuse me, June Carter at that time, now Cash, and
(20:20):
he drove away instead of Johnny driving away with Vivian,
and she knew that trouble was afoot. And of course
Johnny had fallen in love with June Carter and decided
he wanted to marry her and announced it to her.
And so this ultimately resulted in the complete dissolution of
(20:42):
his first marriage to Vivian, something he deeply regretted. It
was wrong. Johnny was making wrong decisions. Johnny was doing
sinful things, and he knew it. But looking at a
bigger picture, one can look back on that and say,
though it is tragic that he was not the best
husband of Vivian and should have held that marriage together
(21:05):
because of his severe addiction to drugs, June Carter would
eventually save his very life because I think if it
wasn't for June who was out there with him, that
Johnny probably would have died of a drug overdose. He
could have followed in the footsteps of his friend Elvis Presley.
But June was someone that helped him through this very
(21:28):
hard time. Here's a quote from Johnny Cash. You know,
I used to sing with you there when they crucified
my Lord while I was stoned on amphetamines. I used
to sing all those gospel songs, but I never really
felt them, And maybe I was a little ashamed of
myself at the time because of the hypocrisy of it all.
(21:49):
There I was singing the praises of the Lord and
singing about the beauty and the peace you can find
in him, and I was stoned. So on one occasion,
Johnny borrowed June Carter's Cadillac and he wrecked it, breaking
his nose. He lost his front teeth as well as
he had head on collision with utility poll He claimed
(22:11):
a wet roadway was the cause of the accident, but
he was taken to Vanderbilt Hospital, where surprisingly he refused
to shot up morphine for the pain that had his
nose set And another surprise was that of the policeman
heading up the investigation of the crash was none other
than of Officer Rip Nicks, June Carter's husband. So no
(22:34):
charges were filed and the incident didn't make the paper.
But Officer Nix's wife undoubtedly got an earful at home.
So I would say, at this point in his life,
Johnny's trying to live in two worlds. You know. His
sister Joanne put it this way, Johnny was like two people.
She said, Johnny was one person and Cash was the other.
(22:56):
And she said cash cost all the trouble and he was.
He's always struggling with different things throughout his life and
reaping the consequences of it. And I think Johnny had
too much of the world to be happy in his
relationship with God, and too much of a relationship with
God to be happy in the world. He was in
(23:16):
sort of this no man's land, trying to live in
two places at the same time, and it was causing
a lot of internal and external conflict and problems in
his life.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
Well, I guess Christoberson pretty well summed it up. And
the song he wrote about me, He's a walking contradiction,
partly truth and partly fiction.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
So Johnny got to a point where, with the collapse
of his marriage to his first wife, Vivian, his addiction
to drugs, his life spiraling out of control, he effectively
decided to take his life. So he made his way
to a cave about thirty miles from Chattanooga called Nika Cave.
(24:01):
He had actually been there before as a young man
looking for arrowheads and other things, but now he just
thought he would keep walking as far in as he
possibly could walk and never return again. And that's exactly
what he did.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
I remember sitting in the mouth of that cave, crying,
and then taking a little two ceil flashlight and started
walking into that cave. And I decided I'd walk as
far as I could go and then lay down. And
I guess I probably wan a mile through one of
the caverns, and my flashlight completely burned out, and it
was black, black, dark, so dark. He could feel it
(24:38):
and said my goodbye prayers. I must have dozed off,
because I felt a presence within me come from outside
of me to make me sit up. This is awfully corny,
but the Nola Indian trick is to wed your fingers,
stick it up, see which way the wind blows. I
(24:58):
tried everything to see, and then I finally did that,
and I felt cool air on one side of my finger,
and I neither. I kept following it. It's long, you know, crawling.
Sometimes I'd follow twenty or thirty feet into a pit,
but claw my way back up, And just as I
was about to give up, I saw a little flick
of light way off in the distance, and I finally
(25:21):
made it there, and I collapsed in the mouth of
the cave. When I woke, June was there washing my face,
and she said, you're almost dead. Aren't you, And I said,
you have to know I want to live.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
So after this, another event happened in Lafayette, Georgia on
November two, nineteen sixty seven. He was visiting a friend
there and went up by himself at evening and got lost,
and in an effort he get directions back to his
friend's house, he knocked on the door of an elderly
woman who lived alone, and she called the police on him.
Deputy Bob jeff responded and Patty Cash down discovered prescription
(25:58):
drugs on him, which were and he took Cash to
jail and he spent the night in his cell. The
next morning, the sheriff woke up Johnny and brought him
into his office. So Johnny's sick, He's desponded. He's expecting
this lowman to come down on him hard, but instead
Jones opens up a George takes out the money and
the pills he had taken off Cash the night before,
(26:20):
held him out and said, I'm going to give you your
money and you're dope back because you know better than
most people that God gave you free will to do
whatever you want with your life. Cash could throw the
pills away or go ahead and take them and kill himself,
and Sheriff Jones added, whichever one you want to do,
mister Cash will be all right with me. Johnny's thinking
(26:40):
he was going on here, and as they were talking,
Johnny realized that this man really cared about him. In fact,
he told him they were huge Johnny Cash fans for
over a decade and at every record he had made.
The sheriff said, we love you. We've always loved you.
We've watched you on television, We've listened to you on
the radio. We've got your problem of hymns. You were
(27:03):
probably the biggest venue've ever had. This made a deep
impression on Johnny.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
And you're listening to Greg Glory tell the story of
Johnny Cash, who died on this day in history in
two thousand and three. We returned with more after these
messages here on our American Stories, and we continue with
(27:38):
our American stories and the story of Johnny Cash and
his faith life. Let's pick up where we last left
off with Greg Glory.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
So, Johnny Cash had this unique relationship with prisoners, and
when he wanted to make a record in a prison,
the record executives of his company thought that was the
worst idea imaginable, but it ended up being a brilliant
career choice, and Johnny debuted his song A Boy named
(28:09):
Sue that was recorded live. Johnny had a connection to prisoners.
Though he never spent time in prison, he did spend
time in jail. He knew what it was like to fail.
He knew what it was like to hit rock bottom.
And I think the prisoners could sense that about him.
And when he was asked why he did these shows
in prisons, he said, We're here because the inmate population
(28:33):
ask us to come. We're here because we love the applause,
you give us some prison talk about a captive audience.
And most importantly, he said, I'm here because I'm a Christian.
So after Johnny's television show was canceled, he decided to
take all of that fame and all of that influence
and do something he'd been wanting to do for a
(28:54):
long time. That is, make a film about Jesus Christ.
It was called The Gospel Row. Now, I would not
describe this as a cinematic masterpiece, but what I would
say is his heart was in the right place. He
wanted to do something that would move people toward a
relationship with God, so he took his family and his
(29:17):
entourage over to Israel, and the man that ended up
directing the film, who was not a believer at all,
in fact, was an atheist, ended up ironically playing the
role of Jesus. We might describe him as a very
Swedish Jesus because he was very blonde, a reddish hair,
and he literally Johnny was literally just hiring people that
(29:37):
he met to be extras in the film, and his
wife June, played the role of Mary Magdalene. And the film,
in my opinion, was not a great film, but Billy Graham,
who was a close friend of Johnny, took a great
interest in it and actually gave it a second life,
and it was seen by a lot of people, and
it even resulted in people coming to faith. So this
(30:00):
is not kind of the beginning of the musical decline
of Johnny Cash. He was eventually fired by his record
label Columbia, and actually he had made them a lot
of money and it was a really surprising turn of events.
But Johnny went on to pursue the things that mattered
to him. He continued to sing, but he also went
(30:22):
out and became an ordained minister. Very few people know
that about him, but he still had to make money.
He still had to make a living, so he ended
up having to audition to be in another record label.
Here he's sitting before a bunch of young record executives
or deciding if they want to record this musical legend,
(30:43):
and they told him basically, don't call us, we'll call you.
So Johnny's venues have become quite small at this point,
and one night he was playing at a dinner club
in Anaheim, California, and a thirty year old, long haired,
(31:06):
bearded man named Rick Rubin came to see him. Now,
Rick had been very successful with this def Jam record
label and had produced other rock acts and rap acts,
and he wanted to work with an older artist, and
so he came to hear Johnny. And after Johnny had performed,
someone came up to him and said, Hey, there's this
(31:28):
guy named Rick Rubin that wants to meet you. Well,
Johnny had never heard of Rick Rubin before, and in
walks rick and Rick introduces himself and says that he
wants to record Johnny, and Johnny asked, what are you
going to do for me that no one else has
been able to do for me before.
Speaker 3 (31:44):
I didn't believe it at first. I said, how, how
are you going to be in a different than everybody
else And he said, because we're going to get into
the music and find out what it's the best thing
Johnny Cash can do and the most natural thing, and
that's what we're going for.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
So now to get Johnny back to his roots again.
And unbeknownst to Johnny, as Rick was recording these songs,
he already was mapping out in his mind what would
become the first of many records that Johnny would do
toward the end of his career, called American Recordings, and
there is some production on them. It's sparse, but very effective,
(32:23):
and Rick reintroduced Johnny to a whole new audience of
people who had never heard of him before, specifically a
youth audience. Country music really didn't have a lot to
do with Johnny at this point, but Johnny was rediscovered
by Generation X and actually ended up winning an MTV
(32:43):
Award for his amazing video based on the Trent Reznor
song called Hurt and still to this day is something
that really moves you when you watch it. So Johnny
was having a big career comeback at this point.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
A lot of times, I feel like I got the
best of both worlds when I look out the nurse,
half of audience full of young people and half of
fans my age. You know, yeah, I feel like I
got to sec a third chance here to maybe do
it right.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
On the final album they did together, Johnny's health was failing.
His wife June had already died, and he was in
deep mourning, and he just felt the best thing he
could do was go back into the studio and express
his sorrow.
Speaker 3 (33:31):
If I quit, I would just live in front of
the television and get fat and die. And you know,
I just told him, pray I can die with my
boots on him.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
So Johnny and Rick Rubin became very good friends. And
Rick was not a believer in Jesus Christ. In fact,
I believe he was a Buddhist. But Rubin said Cash
was the most spiritually committed person he'd ever met.
Speaker 4 (33:54):
He's probably the most committed spiritual person I've ever met.
He really lived his life according to his connection with God, really,
and he had such an honest and pure way about
it that I remember we had a dinner party at
my house one night with Johnny and June and some
(34:17):
musicians and some film directors, and before dinner, Johnny had
everyone hold hands and he said a prayer and he
read from the Bible. And I know some of the
people at the table had never experienced that before, and
some of the people at the table were even atheists.
But his belief in what he believed was so strong
that what you believed didn't matter so much because you
(34:39):
were in the presence of someone who really believed, and
that felt good, and that made you believe really in
him more than anything else. It was really beautiful.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
So I wrote this book, Johnny Casher, Redemption of an
American Icon, and I was approached by the Kingdom Story
Company that wanted to do a documentary film on the
life Johnny Cash based on my book. So we agreed
to this, and now the film is going to be
seen in theaters around the country on December five, six,
(35:11):
and seven as a special Fathom event. It's a beautifully
done film, and we had full buy in in cooperation
from the Cash estate. But ultimately it shows that no
matter how badly you've messed up in life, that God
can make a message out of a mess. He can
bring good despite the bad, and the Bible says that
(35:34):
God can bring beauty out of ashes. He did an
interview towards the end of his life with MTV's Kurt Loader,
and he talked about his life, his career, his faith,
and his imminent death. And Johnny said to Kurt, I
expect my life to end pretty soon.
Speaker 5 (35:52):
Oh, I expect my life to him pretty soon. You know,
I'm seventy one years old, and I have great faith.
Though I have unshakable faith, I've never been angry with God.
I've never turned my back on God, so to speak.
I never thought that God wasn't there. See, he's my
counselor he's my wisdom. All the good things of my
(36:13):
life come from him.
Speaker 4 (36:16):
Where do you think we go afterwards?
Speaker 5 (36:18):
Where do we go?
Speaker 3 (36:20):
When do we die?
Speaker 5 (36:21):
You mean? Oh, well, we all hope to go to heaven.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
And a terrific job on the production and the storytelling
and editing by our own Greg Hangler, and a special
thanks to Greg Glory his book Johnny Cash The Redemption
of an American Icon and the film the documentary version,
and what a story we heard. And you know, he
did have a unique relationship with prisoners. As we learned
(36:50):
earlier in the storytelling, and I think Bono said it
best about Cash. He said, Johnny doesn't sing to the damned,
he sings with a damned. And Bono is himself a
committed Christian who writes a lot about the intersection of
faith and life and doubt and in the end, music
(37:12):
and fame. The story of Hash being fired from his
label is heartbreaking, having to audition in front of young
people who see no future or talent. And then in
comes Rick Rubin into a club in California, a small venue,
and he sees something in Cash, and sees something in
himself that he can bring to the table, and that
(37:35):
is getting rid of all that production, getting rid of
all the fancy boards, and having Cash connect to his
guitar and to the song and capture that authenticity as
no one can do like Rick Rubin, one of the
great producers who doesn't produce. In the end, though country
music wanted nothing to do with Cash at this stage
(37:56):
in his career, he rises again to fame with an
entire new generation of audience. The story of Johnny Cash,
who died on this day in history in two thousand
and three, as told by Greg Glory, here on our
American stories.
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Up next, a unique take on the life story of
Johnny Cash. This story is an insider's look at the
man whose music sprung from the way he lived. Our
(00:30):
storyteller is none other than greg Glory. Laurie is the
pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship in Orange County, California and Maui.
Gregor is here to tell the story from his recent book,
Johnny Cash, The Redemption of an American Icon. And we're
telling this story because on this day in two thousand
and three, Johnny Cash died. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Going back to the earliest days of my childhood, I
had an awareness of Johnny Cash. One of the reasons
for that is our family is from Arkansas, not far
from where Johnny's family was raised, and my grandparents, who
I lived with for a number of years because of
my mother's crazy lifestyle. She'd been married in divorced seven
(01:20):
times and was having a lot of boyfriends in between
and was running around, and so she left me with
my grandparents, Charles and Stella McDaniel, who we called Daddy
Charles and Mama Stella. So I remember as a little
boy watching Johnny Cash's television show, and I remember hearing
my grandfather say to my grandmother when he'd be reading
(01:41):
the paper, well, Stella, your cousin's in trouble again. Because
Johnny had a lot of problems early in his life
after he had his initial success, he was arrested numerous times.
He never served time in prison. He never murdered anybody.
Sometimes people think that because of lyrics from a song
such as I shot a man in Reno just to
(02:03):
watch him die. Johnny never shot anyone. But he had
a problem with amphetamines that he got addicted to when
he first started out his career on the road. But anyway,
I was always aware of Johnny Cash. So, as it
turns out, my grandmother's maiden name Estella Fowler Cash, and
so I'm distantly related to Johnny Cash. But there was
(02:24):
something always about Johnny that was different from any other musician.
His contemporaries would have been Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, many others,
but Johnny was Johnny. He was called the king of
country music, but in a way, he was more like
the king of his own music, because his music transcended
(02:45):
all forms of music, from country to rock and roll.
I mean, in some ways he was a pioneer of
what they called rockabilly. When he was in the studio,
there was Sam Phillips who also discovered Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis,
and car Perkins, and they developed this sound that evolved
into rock and roll. Elvis ran with it, but Johnny
(03:06):
could have continued with that boom chicken boom sound. He
would play his guitar, he'd put a card in the
frets of the guitar because at one point he didn't
have a drummer to provide percussion, so he would get
that sound that you hear on so many Johnny Cash records. Right,
So Johnny should have never become who he was. But
(03:29):
it was all a part of a plan, and in
my mind, it was a part of God's plan. He
was raised in abject poverty. His father, Ray was a cold,
distant man. He was a sharecropper, never really succeeded in life,
and he favored one son over the other. Johnny had
an older brother named Jack, and clearly Ray favored Jack
(03:52):
over Johnny. And I'm getting a little ahead of myself
in the story, but when Johnny's brother Jack was tragically
in an accident in the saw mill, Ray was quoted
to have said later, I think God took the wrong
son to Johnny. Really, all throughout his life, when Johnny
did find some success in music and then huge success,
(04:14):
even being invited to the White House, he would always
invite his father Ray. I think he was trying to
impress him well into his adult years. So that was
a very strange relationship between father and son. Well, Johnny's mother,
Carrie was a very nurturing, loving woman, and Johnny's father,
(04:36):
Ray was a very distant aloof uncommunicative father. So Johnny
and Jack were as thick as thieves, very very close brothers.
Johnny looked up to his brother, who, though still very young,
was almost like a proper father figure for him. He
(04:56):
gave Johnny guidance, encouragement, and Jack knew that he wanted
to be a preacher one day, and Johnny he wanted
to be a singer. They often went fishing together and
done one particular day, Johnny was gonna go fishing, he
invited Jack to come and join him, but Jack said,
I gotta go work down with the sawmill. To make
(05:17):
a few extra dollars for the family. That's because Jack
was such a responsible young man. And so Jack was
there working and tragically he was pulled into the saw. Somehow,
amazingly he survived it, but he stumbled out into the
field and he was literally holding his vital organs in.
(05:38):
So he was taken to the hospital. So meanwhile, Johnny's
out there fishing and his father shows up with a
minister and Jack's bloody shirt, and he says, get in
the truck, and he threw his fishing pole in the
back and they went down to the hospital and there
on that bed was Johnny's brother Jack, who was very
(06:00):
close to passing into eternity. So in my book Johnny Cash,
A Redemption of an American Icon, I described the scene
as follows, and I'm reading from my book Jr. That
would be Johnny took Jack's hand and brought his cheek
close to his brothers. Goodbye, Jack is all he could
(06:21):
get out. Jack looked at his father and asked, will
you meet me in heaven? Ray Cash did the most
unexpected thing. He fell on his knees and prayed, asking
Jesus Christ to be his Lord and savior. Then Jack
looked at Carrie, that would be Jack's mother. Why is
everybody crying over me? Mama, don't cry over me. Don't
(06:43):
you see the river? On one side of the river,
he said, was fire. On the other side was heaven.
I thought it was going toward the fire, but I'm
headed in the other direction now, Mama, can you hear
the angel singing? Jack squeezed her hand in tears of
happiness rule down his cheeks. Mama, he said, listen to
(07:03):
the angels. I'm going there, Mama. A moment later, Jack said,
what a beautiful city and the angels singing. Oh, Mama,
I wish you could hear the angels singing. Then he
was gone, And.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
You've been listening to Greglorie share the story of Johnny Cash.
The redemption of an American icon continues here on Our
American Stories. Lihabib here the host of all American Stories.
Every day on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from
(07:38):
across this great country, stories from our big cities and
small towns. But we truly can't do the show without you.
Our stories are free to listen to, but they're not
free to make. If you love what you hear, go
to Alamericanstories dot com and click the donate button. Give
a little, give a lot. Go to Alamerican Stories dot
com and give and we continue with our American Stories.
(08:12):
We last left off hearing how in nineteen forty four,
Johnny Cash's older brother, Jack, with whom he was very close,
died at twelve years of age in a tragic table
saw accident, with Johnny by his bedside. His final words were,
will you meet me in heaven. Let's return to Greg Glory.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
And those words are inscribed on Jack Cash's tombstone. Will
you meet me in Heaven, our preacher to the very end.
This made a powerful impression on Johnny, who missed his
brother so deeply, and on through his life he continued
to think about his brother, and in fact, his brother
(08:54):
would appear to him in dreams, he said, and what's
in Justine? As his brother appeared to him over the years,
he was an older version of what his brother might
have looked like, and actually Johnny used as sort of
a point of reference throughout his life what would Jack
have done? What would Jack have thought? About? This? So
(09:15):
the influence of his brother impacted Johnny Cash for the
rest of his life. Johnny grew up picking cotton out
in the fields. It sounds like a story from the
Old West, and in many ways it was because Johnny
was just like any other poor young boy working with
(09:37):
this family, no real sense of what his future would be.
But one thing that Carrie loved to do out on
the common fields was seeing old hymns that they would
hear at church.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
It's what it was raised. It was a thing that
inspired me as a child growing up on a cotton
farm where work was drudgery and it was so hard
that when I was in the field all the time,
and usually gospel songs because they lifted me up above
the black dirt.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
After supper, they loved to sit around the radio and
listen to the Grand Ole Opry and the songs. And
Johnny the young boy, began to dream that maybe one
day he could do that. And so they were out
in the fields one day and Johnny came in singing
a song and Carrie turned and said, who just sang that? Well,
it was Johnny, but his voice dropped and it was
(10:29):
that more familiar Johnny Cash Timber. And she said, God
has given to you a gift, my son. So I
think it was at that point that Johnny's dreams really
caught fire, where he thought that he could one day
maybe be on the Grand ol Opry, he could be
on the radio, he could have a hit song. But
before that would happen, he would serve a stint in
(10:51):
the Air Force. So during his stint in the Air Force,
Johnny found himself very adept at working as a Morse
Code operator, and I think Johnny was beginning to discover
his relationship with sound, with pitch, and later with music.
(11:14):
He was a Morse code operator and actually he was
the one who intercepted the news, a top secret message
from the Russians that Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin had died
from a stroke on March fifth, nineteen fifty three. And
this is an amazing thing because Johnny retained this skill
(11:34):
well into the later years of his life. Because his son,
John Carter Cash said, the old man still had it.
When he came to retaining his skills, he proved it
by writing out the twenty third Psalm on Morse code
on a piece of paper. So this sense of understanding
of sounds was something that would help Johnny when he
began to write songs, and he was writing a lot
(11:57):
of letters to the love of his life at that time, Vivian,
and he also began to compose songs about places he'd
never been to before. But his imagination was running wild,
and really that skill set that would later be fully
realized was being developed as he was stationed there over
(12:17):
in Germany. So after Johnny got back from Germany, he
took various odd jobs, from selling appliances to other things,
none of which really interested him. He wanted to be
a musician. He knew of this success of Elvis Presley,
so he started calling Sun's studios wanting to talk to Sam.
He could never really get hold of him, and one
day he did communicate with him, and so Sam invited
(12:41):
him down and Sam actually said to him, or you're
the one who keeps calling, so you know, there's something
to be said for persistence. And when Sam heard Johnny,
he didn't really know what to make of him because
a lot of people were trying to sound like Elvis,
but Johnny didn't sound anything like Elvis. Johnny he was
his own guy. And you know, you really have to
(13:02):
stop and be amazed by this collection of talent at
one moment in time and the ability of Sam Phillips
to pick that talent. I mean Jerry Lee Lewis also
known as the Killer Carl Perkins, who wrote Blue Suede Shoes,
and of course Elvis and Johnny. He saw something that
others did not see. And I think what he saw
(13:24):
was an authenticity And this, to me is the key
to really making your mark. I think it's really the
very definition of what cool is. What is cool. By
the way, Johnny was called the Godfather of cool. Why
is it then when his musical career was resurrected later
by producer Rick Rubin that a whole new generation Generation
(13:47):
X thought he was the coolest thing to ever come along. Answer,
Because Johnny was Johnny. Johnny was authentic. Johnny was an
American original. Being cool is not dressing in the latest
fads or the latest clothing, or using the latest phrases.
Being cool, of my definition, is being an authentic version
(14:09):
of yourself, being real. And I think people can see that,
and I think people could hear it in the songs
of Johnny. But it's not just the way he's singing,
it's the way he spoke, you know, the timbre of
his voice. He was described as the Voice of America.
I like Chris Christofferson's definition of Johnny Cash. He said
he was like Abraham Lincoln with a wild side, you know,
(14:32):
So that was Johnny. No one sounded like Johnny, No
one sang like Johnny. Of course, he had his own
dress code, which ultimately became black, and so he was
known as the man in Black. So how Johnny came
to write the song cry Crack Cry is pretty interesting.
So he was listening to the radio and he heard
dj Eddie Hill glibly in tone we've got good songs,
(14:56):
love songs, sweet songs, happy songs, and sad songs that'll
make you cry, Cry, Cry, And hearing those words caused
Johnny to pick up his pencil and start writing down
the lyrics to what would become a hit song, Cry
Cry Cry. The finished product clocked in at two minutes
in twenty nine seconds. So Johnny now he had a
(15:18):
hit on his hands, and he had radio airplane happening.
And now he's out on the road and he's touring.
So while Johnny was out on one of his first
tours that happened to be with Elvis Presley, he met
a man named Sonny James and Sonny was an outspoken Christian,
and Johnny, of course was a Christian as well. And
now he's having this first success and he's wondering, how
(15:40):
do you handle this? How do you live a Christian
life out here on the road. And I love the
advice that Sonny gave to Johnny. He said, Johnny, the
way I do this is by being the way that
I am. I'm not just an entertainer who has become
a Christian. I'm a Christian who chose to be an entertainer,
but I'm first a Christian. Who you are and what
(16:01):
you are in life sings louder than any song. And
then Sonny told Johnny, and don't forget to pray. And
you know, I think Johnny did follow that advice. He
did have lapsis, he did things he should have never done.
He trashed hotel rooms like a proper rock star, He
got drunk, he got banned from certain stages for his
crazy antics. But Johnny always turned to the Lord. And
(16:26):
later when he was really having his greatest success with
his television show, I think Johnny really lived out this
advice of Sonny James speaking openly about his faith without
embarrassment in fact that became a source of great tension
with him in the network, and some believe that's the
reason they ultimately canceled his television show that was very successful.
(16:48):
But Johnny was always wanting to express his faith openly
and publicly, and I think deep down in his heart
he still wanted to be a gospel singer, just like
he was when he originally went to see Sam Phillips
over at Sun Studios.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Gospel music is such so ingrained into my bones. You know,
I can't do a concert without singing the gospel song.
I have a calling. It's called to perform and sing
and gospel gospel song is a ministry in a way.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
And you've been listening to Greg Glory tell the story
of Johnny Cash's faith life. Johnny Cash, The Redemption of
an American Icon is the book, and by the way,
it's also a terrific documentary.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
I'm not an.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Entertainer who is a Christian. He was advised by someone
he look up to. I'm a Christian who is an entertainer.
And what a difference that will make in Cash's musical
life and his spiritual life as well. When we come
back more with Greg Glory and Johnny Cash, who died
on this day in history in two thousand and three,
(18:08):
and we returned to our American stories and to Greg
Glory telling the story of Johnny Cash and his faith journey.
And we're telling this story because on this day in
two thousand and three, Johnny Cash died. Let's pick up
where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
So now Johnny's out on the road. He's touring endlessly
and the road is wearing him down. He's exhausted. So
one night he shared a bill with a guy known
as the Hillbilly heartthrob Farren Young, who said, I've got
something that will fit you right up. From a pocket,
he pulled out a handful of cream colored pills and
(18:48):
all went out to Cash and he said, take this.
He won't be tired for long. You'll get to the
night with no problem whatsoever. Johnny grabbed the pill, he
swallowed it, and he gave quite a show. And that
was the beginning of Johnny's addiction to amphetamines. Now, in fairness,
a lot of people touring at this time, we're taking
(19:08):
these amphetamines. And there were commercials on television advocating how
these can help you give you more pep and I'm
not justifying the addiction that Johnny developed, but he was
not the only one, and they actually were quite mainstream.
But this became a problem that he struggled with on
through his life, and these amphetamines certainly took a toll
(19:32):
on him in many ways physically, and I would also
add spiritually.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
Well.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
Johnny loved Vivian. He wrote all these love letters, so
many to her over the years, and then finally they
were married and they had children together. But Johnny's career
was exploding, and Vivian would not see him for long
stretches of time. And then she went to one of
his shows and she saw the girls. She saw the
(20:00):
the girls and their interest in Elvis and in Johnny,
and it began to cause her to be very concerned.
But it all culminated when Johnny actually played at the
Hollywood Bowl and she was there with their children, their daughters,
and Johnny got into a car with June Carter Cash
excuse me, June Carter at that time, now Cash, and
(20:20):
he drove away instead of Johnny driving away with Vivian,
and she knew that trouble was afoot. And of course
Johnny had fallen in love with June Carter and decided
he wanted to marry her and announced it to her.
And so this ultimately resulted in the complete dissolution of
(20:42):
his first marriage to Vivian, something he deeply regretted. It
was wrong. Johnny was making wrong decisions. Johnny was doing
sinful things, and he knew it. But looking at a
bigger picture, one can look back on that and say,
though it is tragic that he was not the best
husband of Vivian and should have held that marriage together
(21:05):
because of his severe addiction to drugs, June Carter would
eventually save his very life because I think if it
wasn't for June who was out there with him, that
Johnny probably would have died of a drug overdose. He
could have followed in the footsteps of his friend Elvis Presley.
But June was someone that helped him through this very
(21:28):
hard time. Here's a quote from Johnny Cash. You know,
I used to sing with you there when they crucified
my Lord while I was stoned on amphetamines. I used
to sing all those gospel songs, but I never really
felt them, And maybe I was a little ashamed of
myself at the time because of the hypocrisy of it all.
(21:49):
There I was singing the praises of the Lord and
singing about the beauty and the peace you can find
in him, and I was stoned. So on one occasion,
Johnny borrowed June Carter's Cadillac and he wrecked it, breaking
his nose. He lost his front teeth as well as
he had head on collision with utility poll He claimed
(22:11):
a wet roadway was the cause of the accident, but
he was taken to Vanderbilt Hospital, where surprisingly he refused
to shot up morphine for the pain that had his
nose set And another surprise was that of the policeman
heading up the investigation of the crash was none other
than of Officer Rip Nicks, June Carter's husband. So no
(22:34):
charges were filed and the incident didn't make the paper.
But Officer Nix's wife undoubtedly got an earful at home.
So I would say, at this point in his life,
Johnny's trying to live in two worlds. You know. His
sister Joanne put it this way, Johnny was like two people.
She said, Johnny was one person and Cash was the other.
(22:56):
And she said cash cost all the trouble and he was.
He's always struggling with different things throughout his life and
reaping the consequences of it. And I think Johnny had
too much of the world to be happy in his
relationship with God, and too much of a relationship with
God to be happy in the world. He was in
(23:16):
sort of this no man's land, trying to live in
two places at the same time, and it was causing
a lot of internal and external conflict and problems in
his life.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
Well, I guess Christoberson pretty well summed it up. And
the song he wrote about me, He's a walking contradiction,
partly truth and partly fiction.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
So Johnny got to a point where, with the collapse
of his marriage to his first wife, Vivian, his addiction
to drugs, his life spiraling out of control, he effectively
decided to take his life. So he made his way
to a cave about thirty miles from Chattanooga called Nika Cave.
(24:01):
He had actually been there before as a young man
looking for arrowheads and other things, but now he just
thought he would keep walking as far in as he
possibly could walk and never return again. And that's exactly
what he did.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
I remember sitting in the mouth of that cave, crying,
and then taking a little two ceil flashlight and started
walking into that cave. And I decided I'd walk as
far as I could go and then lay down. And
I guess I probably wan a mile through one of
the caverns, and my flashlight completely burned out, and it
was black, black, dark, so dark. He could feel it
(24:38):
and said my goodbye prayers. I must have dozed off,
because I felt a presence within me come from outside
of me to make me sit up. This is awfully corny,
but the Nola Indian trick is to wed your fingers,
stick it up, see which way the wind blows. I
(24:58):
tried everything to see, and then I finally did that,
and I felt cool air on one side of my finger,
and I neither. I kept following it. It's long, you know, crawling.
Sometimes I'd follow twenty or thirty feet into a pit,
but claw my way back up, And just as I
was about to give up, I saw a little flick
of light way off in the distance, and I finally
(25:21):
made it there, and I collapsed in the mouth of
the cave. When I woke, June was there washing my face,
and she said, you're almost dead. Aren't you, And I said,
you have to know I want to live.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
So after this, another event happened in Lafayette, Georgia on
November two, nineteen sixty seven. He was visiting a friend
there and went up by himself at evening and got lost,
and in an effort he get directions back to his
friend's house, he knocked on the door of an elderly
woman who lived alone, and she called the police on him.
Deputy Bob jeff responded and Patty Cash down discovered prescription
(25:58):
drugs on him, which were and he took Cash to
jail and he spent the night in his cell. The
next morning, the sheriff woke up Johnny and brought him
into his office. So Johnny's sick, He's desponded. He's expecting
this lowman to come down on him hard, but instead
Jones opens up a George takes out the money and
the pills he had taken off Cash the night before,
(26:20):
held him out and said, I'm going to give you your
money and you're dope back because you know better than
most people that God gave you free will to do
whatever you want with your life. Cash could throw the
pills away or go ahead and take them and kill himself,
and Sheriff Jones added, whichever one you want to do,
mister Cash will be all right with me. Johnny's thinking
(26:40):
he was going on here, and as they were talking,
Johnny realized that this man really cared about him. In fact,
he told him they were huge Johnny Cash fans for
over a decade and at every record he had made.
The sheriff said, we love you. We've always loved you.
We've watched you on television, We've listened to you on
the radio. We've got your problem of hymns. You were
(27:03):
probably the biggest venue've ever had. This made a deep
impression on Johnny.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
And you're listening to Greg Glory tell the story of
Johnny Cash, who died on this day in history in
two thousand and three. We returned with more after these
messages here on our American Stories, and we continue with
(27:38):
our American stories and the story of Johnny Cash and
his faith life. Let's pick up where we last left
off with Greg Glory.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
So, Johnny Cash had this unique relationship with prisoners, and
when he wanted to make a record in a prison,
the record executives of his company thought that was the
worst idea imaginable, but it ended up being a brilliant
career choice, and Johnny debuted his song A Boy named
(28:09):
Sue that was recorded live. Johnny had a connection to prisoners.
Though he never spent time in prison, he did spend
time in jail. He knew what it was like to fail.
He knew what it was like to hit rock bottom.
And I think the prisoners could sense that about him.
And when he was asked why he did these shows
in prisons, he said, We're here because the inmate population
(28:33):
ask us to come. We're here because we love the applause,
you give us some prison talk about a captive audience.
And most importantly, he said, I'm here because I'm a Christian.
So after Johnny's television show was canceled, he decided to
take all of that fame and all of that influence
and do something he'd been wanting to do for a
(28:54):
long time. That is, make a film about Jesus Christ.
It was called The Gospel Row. Now, I would not
describe this as a cinematic masterpiece, but what I would
say is his heart was in the right place. He
wanted to do something that would move people toward a
relationship with God, so he took his family and his
(29:17):
entourage over to Israel, and the man that ended up
directing the film, who was not a believer at all,
in fact, was an atheist, ended up ironically playing the
role of Jesus. We might describe him as a very
Swedish Jesus because he was very blonde, a reddish hair,
and he literally Johnny was literally just hiring people that
(29:37):
he met to be extras in the film, and his
wife June, played the role of Mary Magdalene. And the film,
in my opinion, was not a great film, but Billy Graham,
who was a close friend of Johnny, took a great
interest in it and actually gave it a second life,
and it was seen by a lot of people, and
it even resulted in people coming to faith. So this
(30:00):
is not kind of the beginning of the musical decline
of Johnny Cash. He was eventually fired by his record
label Columbia, and actually he had made them a lot
of money and it was a really surprising turn of events.
But Johnny went on to pursue the things that mattered
to him. He continued to sing, but he also went
(30:22):
out and became an ordained minister. Very few people know
that about him, but he still had to make money.
He still had to make a living, so he ended
up having to audition to be in another record label.
Here he's sitting before a bunch of young record executives
or deciding if they want to record this musical legend,
(30:43):
and they told him basically, don't call us, we'll call you.
So Johnny's venues have become quite small at this point,
and one night he was playing at a dinner club
in Anaheim, California, and a thirty year old, long haired,
(31:06):
bearded man named Rick Rubin came to see him. Now,
Rick had been very successful with this def Jam record
label and had produced other rock acts and rap acts,
and he wanted to work with an older artist, and
so he came to hear Johnny. And after Johnny had performed,
someone came up to him and said, Hey, there's this
(31:28):
guy named Rick Rubin that wants to meet you. Well,
Johnny had never heard of Rick Rubin before, and in
walks rick and Rick introduces himself and says that he
wants to record Johnny, and Johnny asked, what are you
going to do for me that no one else has
been able to do for me before.
Speaker 3 (31:44):
I didn't believe it at first. I said, how, how
are you going to be in a different than everybody
else And he said, because we're going to get into
the music and find out what it's the best thing
Johnny Cash can do and the most natural thing, and
that's what we're going for.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
So now to get Johnny back to his roots again.
And unbeknownst to Johnny, as Rick was recording these songs,
he already was mapping out in his mind what would
become the first of many records that Johnny would do
toward the end of his career, called American Recordings, and
there is some production on them. It's sparse, but very effective,
(32:23):
and Rick reintroduced Johnny to a whole new audience of
people who had never heard of him before, specifically a
youth audience. Country music really didn't have a lot to
do with Johnny at this point, but Johnny was rediscovered
by Generation X and actually ended up winning an MTV
(32:43):
Award for his amazing video based on the Trent Reznor
song called Hurt and still to this day is something
that really moves you when you watch it. So Johnny
was having a big career comeback at this point.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
A lot of times, I feel like I got the
best of both worlds when I look out the nurse,
half of audience full of young people and half of
fans my age. You know, yeah, I feel like I
got to sec a third chance here to maybe do
it right.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
On the final album they did together, Johnny's health was failing.
His wife June had already died, and he was in
deep mourning, and he just felt the best thing he
could do was go back into the studio and express
his sorrow.
Speaker 3 (33:31):
If I quit, I would just live in front of
the television and get fat and die. And you know,
I just told him, pray I can die with my
boots on him.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
So Johnny and Rick Rubin became very good friends. And
Rick was not a believer in Jesus Christ. In fact,
I believe he was a Buddhist. But Rubin said Cash
was the most spiritually committed person he'd ever met.
Speaker 4 (33:54):
He's probably the most committed spiritual person I've ever met.
He really lived his life according to his connection with God, really,
and he had such an honest and pure way about
it that I remember we had a dinner party at
my house one night with Johnny and June and some
(34:17):
musicians and some film directors, and before dinner, Johnny had
everyone hold hands and he said a prayer and he
read from the Bible. And I know some of the
people at the table had never experienced that before, and
some of the people at the table were even atheists.
But his belief in what he believed was so strong
that what you believed didn't matter so much because you
(34:39):
were in the presence of someone who really believed, and
that felt good, and that made you believe really in
him more than anything else. It was really beautiful.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
So I wrote this book, Johnny Casher, Redemption of an
American Icon, and I was approached by the Kingdom Story
Company that wanted to do a documentary film on the
life Johnny Cash based on my book. So we agreed
to this, and now the film is going to be
seen in theaters around the country on December five, six,
(35:11):
and seven as a special Fathom event. It's a beautifully
done film, and we had full buy in in cooperation
from the Cash estate. But ultimately it shows that no
matter how badly you've messed up in life, that God
can make a message out of a mess. He can
bring good despite the bad, and the Bible says that
(35:34):
God can bring beauty out of ashes. He did an
interview towards the end of his life with MTV's Kurt Loader,
and he talked about his life, his career, his faith,
and his imminent death. And Johnny said to Kurt, I
expect my life to end pretty soon.
Speaker 5 (35:52):
Oh, I expect my life to him pretty soon. You know,
I'm seventy one years old, and I have great faith.
Though I have unshakable faith, I've never been angry with God.
I've never turned my back on God, so to speak.
I never thought that God wasn't there. See, he's my
counselor he's my wisdom. All the good things of my
(36:13):
life come from him.
Speaker 4 (36:16):
Where do you think we go afterwards?
Speaker 5 (36:18):
Where do we go?
Speaker 3 (36:20):
When do we die?
Speaker 5 (36:21):
You mean? Oh, well, we all hope to go to heaven.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
And a terrific job on the production and the storytelling
and editing by our own Greg Hangler, and a special
thanks to Greg Glory his book Johnny Cash The Redemption
of an American Icon and the film the documentary version,
and what a story we heard. And you know, he
did have a unique relationship with prisoners. As we learned
(36:50):
earlier in the storytelling, and I think Bono said it
best about Cash. He said, Johnny doesn't sing to the damned,
he sings with a damned. And Bono is himself a
committed Christian who writes a lot about the intersection of
faith and life and doubt and in the end, music
(37:12):
and fame. The story of Hash being fired from his
label is heartbreaking, having to audition in front of young
people who see no future or talent. And then in
comes Rick Rubin into a club in California, a small venue,
and he sees something in Cash, and sees something in
himself that he can bring to the table, and that
(37:35):
is getting rid of all that production, getting rid of
all the fancy boards, and having Cash connect to his
guitar and to the song and capture that authenticity as
no one can do like Rick Rubin, one of the
great producers who doesn't produce. In the end, though country
music wanted nothing to do with Cash at this stage
(37:56):
in his career, he rises again to fame with an
entire new generation of audience. The story of Johnny Cash,
who died on this day in history in two thousand
and three, as told by Greg Glory, here on our
American stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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