The Man Called CASH Read online

  Larry Gatlin, who introduced each of the participants in the service, sang "Help Me" with his two brothers. Emmylou Harris and Sheryl Crow joined forces on "Angel Band" and "On the Sea of Galilee." Laura Cash, John Carter's wife, played "How Great Thou Art" on the fiddle. Members of the Carter Family—Janette Carter, Joe Carter, and Dale Jett—from southwestern Virginia sang "Anchored in Love." When the Oak Ridge Boys performed "Loving God, Loving Each Other," Cash took a tissue from his pocket and began wiping his eyes for the first time.

  Loving God, loving each other,

  Making music with my friends;

  Loving God, loving each other,

  And the music never ends.3.

  Spoken tributes were given by people who had known completely different aspects of June's life. A message from the prime minister of Jamaica praised her work with charities in Montego Bay. Film producer James Keach and his actress-wife, Jane Seymour, spoke of her television role on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. A Baptist minister came from California to speak of how he owed his salvation to her witness. Tearful fans merely wanted to express their gratitude for her life and music. The overwhelming impression given of June was someone who was utterly selfless, someone whose fulfillment came from serving God and serving others.

  The most eloquent and moving tribute came from Rosanne, the only family member to speak. She spoke glowingly of the way June gave to all who came into her life and how she banned the use of the word stepchildren in her family. "In her eyes there were two kinds of people in the world: those she knew and loved and those she didn't know and loved," Rosanne said.

  She looked for the best in everyone. It was a way of life for her. If you pointed out that a particular person was perhaps not totally deserving of her love and in fact might be somewhat of a loser she would say, "Well, honey, we just have to lift him up." She was forever lifting people up.

  It took a long time for me to understand that what she did when she lifted you up was to mirror the very best part of you back to yourself. She was like a spiritual detective: she saw into all your dark corners and deep recesses, saw your potential and your possible future and the gifts you didn't even know you possessed, and she "lifted them up" for you to see.

  She did it for all of us, daily, continuously. But her great mission and passion were lifting up my dad. If being a wife were a corporation, June would have been the CEO. It was her most treasured role. She began every day by saying, "What can I do for you, John?" Her love filled up every room he was in, lightened every path he walked, and her devotion created a sacred, exhilarating place for them to live out their married life. My daddy has lost his dearest companion, his musical counterpart, his soul-mate and best friend.

  Rosanne ended with a story of a family reunion Cash had organized that he called Grandchildren's Week. During it June was honored each day with special tributes and songs from the grandchildren, and on one of the days she sent everyone on a canoe trip down the Holston River. She continued,

  It was a gorgeous, magical day. Some of the more urban members of the family had never even been in a canoe. We drifted for a couple of hours and as we rounded the last bend in the river to the place where we would dock, there was June, standing on the shore in the little clearing between the trees. She had gone ahead in a car to surprise us and welcome us at the end of the journey. She was wearing one of her big flowerered hats and a long white skirt, and she was waving her scarf and calling, "Hellooo!" I have never seen her so happy.

  So, today, from a bereft husband, seven grieving children, sixteen grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, we wave to her from this shore as she drifts out of our lives. What a legacy she leaves! What a mother she was! I know she has gone ahead of us to the far-side bank. I have faith that when we all round the last bend in the river, she will be standing there on the shore in her big flowered hat and long white skirt, under a June-blue sky, waving her scarf to greet us.

  In the days immediately after the funeral, Cash stayed at home. What most struck those who visited him was his loneliness. Since marrying, he and June had spent hardly any time apart. It didn't seem possible to speak of Johnny Cash without adding "and June." Now it was as though part of his being had been amputated. When his children visited, he wanted them to tell him their favorite stories of June, and he'd frequently turn to a framed photograph of her that he kept beside him and start talking to it. "Oh, honey. You look so beautiful. I sure do miss you."

  Yet he knew that the only way to minimize the gnawing pain was to start playing music again. He not only needed the sounds to work their healing, he needed a project to give him a new reason for waking up each morning and the fellowship of musicians to distract his mind from the loss. June had told him that she had to go, but she had also said that he had to take care of himself. When he had called Rick Rubin from the hospital to tell him that June had died, he told Rubin that he wanted to record as soon as possible. "I want to work every day," he told him. "I need you to keep me busy." Three days after the funeral Cash called Kelly at the office. "Well, I've thought about it, and I've prayed about it, and June wants me to get to work," he said. "I have a lot I need to do, and so I'm going to work." The next day he was back in the studio recording.

  2

  The Promised Land

  ON THE THIRD FLOOR of the sprawling Hendersonville, Tennessee, home where Johnny Cash spent the second half of his life, a small study was lined with the most treasured of his thousands of books. Here he would closet himself away to read, write, listen to music, or just think. Immediately outside the room, in his dressing area, rested a large black safe in which he kept a cotton boll plucked from the fields of Dyess, Arkansas—the town of his childhood—as a reminder of where he had come from and of how much he had been blessed.

  Cash had seemingly always maintained an ambivalent attitude toward his roots—wavering between nostalgia and a desire to forget. Later in life, he became increasingly interested in family history, tracing the origins of his branch of the Cashes back to seventeenth-century Scotland. He held immense pride in the values he'd learned by being brought up the hard way. Yet he had little interest in reunions and rarely returned to Dyess, despite the fact it took less than five hours to drive there from Hendersonville.

  Documentary director Robert Elfstrom captured this ambivalence on film in 1968, when together they visited the white clapboard house of Cash's childhood in Arkansas. Cash walked around the deserted building with June and his sister Louise, but instead of recounting happy times he became unusually pensive. He only stayed a few minutes before wandering alone outside in the cotton field. The visit seemed to have awakened memories that he had long tried to bury. "He walked around and then I saw that it was obviously bringing up other thoughts," says Elfstrom. "I don't know what those thoughts were. Then he left rather abruptly." Asked about the trip in a 1970 interview, Cash mused, "Every room, every window, every wall had a memory. Some almost bring tears."

  Cash could never quite bring himself to tell the full story of his early life and the inner conflicts produced during those years. His anger, self-destructive tendencies, and insecurity quite possibly originated with his early relationship with his father, Ray Cash, though in his first autobiography he expressed nothing but admiration for the man. However, he tellingly dedicated that book to June's father, Ezra 'Eck' Carter, "who taught me to love the Word." In his second autobiography, published after his father's death, he questioned the authenticity of his father's Christian conversion and rather pointedly asserted that he didn't visit his father's grave any longer. Yet he stopped short of discussing the full extent of the effect his father's behavior had had on his life.

  Like many of his fellow country farmers, Ray Cash loved guns, but, unlike most of them, he seemed to gain an unhealthy pleasure from the process of destruction. He boasted of how he once killed fifty cows with a box of fifty bullets. Cash told his daughter Kathy a story from his teenage years, during which he had a pet dog that gave birth to a litter of puppies, whic
h his father didn't want. "Grandpa put all the puppies in a bag with a rock in it and threw it in the river, and he made Dad come and watch as they drowned. Then he shot the dog."

  But, oddly enough, even though such behavior wounded the sensitive Cash deeply as a child and stirred up inner turmoil, Cash almost always maintained that his father never inflicted physical or emotional pain on him. While creating a parent journal, his daughter Tara once asked him, "When you needed punishment as a child, which parent corrected you, and how?" His response: "My mother swatted me with a fly swatter once. I got smart with her. My dad never touched me in his life."

  Ray could also be extremely racist and remained that way throughout his life. Though he often talked of the lynchings he witnessed as a child, (there were eighty two lynchings in Arkansas from the year of his birth until the time he left to go overseas with the army), there was only one in his hometown and that when he was a baby. One of Ray's brothers, a sheriff during the 1920s and a judge during the 1930s, used to boast of his mistreatment of blacks.

  Even as an old man living in Hendersonville in the home purchased for him by his now-famous son, Ray held on to his racist views. One afternoon, Cash dropped by with his daughters and a young Jamaican boy named Anthony, who worked on his Caribbean property, Cinnamon Hill. When they stood up to leave, the children naturally called out, "Good-bye, Grandpa!" and Anthony, excited to be in America for the first time, also shouted out, "Goodbye, Grandpa." Ray whirled round and said "No n—'s ever gonna call me Grandpa. In fact, I don't even like having n—s in my house." Mortified, Cash never took Anthony back to his parents' home. "I should have realized that some things will never change about my dad," he said. "He grew up in Arkansas."

  AFTER THE FIRST WORLD WAR, Ray met Carrie Rivers in Kingsland, Arkansas. Born in nearby Rison on May 13, 1897, Ray could trace his family back to Strathmiglo, Scotland, where William Cash lived before he left Glasgow in 1677 aboard Good Intent to settle in Essex County, Massachusetts. Subsequent generations of Cashes moved south to Virginia, farther south to Georgia, and eventually inland to Arkansas. The first John Cash was born in 1757 and fought in the Revolutionary War. His grandson Reuben Moses Cash served in the Confederate army. Reuben's son William Henry Cash, a farmer and then a Baptist preacher, fathered Ray Cash.

  Ray had eleven brothers and sisters, although only seven of them reached adulthood. Raised on the farm, they left school at fourteen, after a rudimentary education, to pick cotton. By the time Ray joined the army, just shy of twenty, both of his parents had died. He went first to New Mexico with the Second Arkansas Infantry, where he helped protect border towns from Pancho Villa's bandits, and then, in August 1918, he received orders to report for duty in France. Fortunately by the time he was fully combat trained, the Armistice had been signed, and he found himself reassigned to low-key convoy duties.

  Carrie Rivers's ancestors likewise came from Britain. It was said that five Rivers brothers left Hampshire, England, in the eighteenth century, one settling in Virginia and four in South Carolina. Two of the South Carolina settlers established themselves in Chesterfield, close to the North Carolina border, where Carrie's father, John Lewis Rivers, was born in 1866. At twenty-six he left Chesterfield with two other families and took the train to Kingsland, Arkansas. Once settled, he married Rosanna Lee Hurst, the daughter of one of those families, and Carrie Rivers was born on March 13, 1904. Recognized as a "godly man," John Lewis Rivers also had an ear for music, leading the singing at Crossroads Methodist Church in Kingsland for forty years.

  When Ray Cash received his discharge from the army on July 1, 1919, he returned home to Rison. He soon found work with a brother felling oak and cypress trees near Kingsland to build a bridge over the Saline River. For a dollar a day they lodged and ate with John and Rosanna Rivers, who lived in the nearby Crossroads community. Ray struck up a relationship with their daughter Carrie. He was twenty-two and she was fifteen. A year later, on August 18,1920, they married, and in 1921 Carrie gave birth to their first child, Roy. Three years later came their first daughter, Margaret Louise (always known as Louise), followed by Jack in 1929.

  In almost every way, Ray and Carrie were opposites. She was cheerful and outgoing, self-controlled and consistent. He tended to be sullen and withdrawn, always harboring a wild streak of unpredictability. Carrie, a lifelong devoted Methodist, was a teetotaler. Ray, a backsliding Baptist, enjoyed his spirits—to excess. Even physically they clashed: she tall and slim, he short and broad.

  While winter snow still covered the ground, Carrie, with the help of a local midwife, gave birth to their third son, J. R. Cash, at home on February 26, 1932. Time would show that this boy would literally embody all of his parents' extremes. He was a man who had his mother's height and his father's breadth. One minute he could have her cheerful and friendly disposition, and then, suddenly, plunge into the harder, more rigid moods of his father. He could keep the faith like his mother but would just as easily backslide like his father. And while he could display Carrie's respect for discipline, he would often reproduce Ray's wild and uncontrollable behavior.

  Even choosing his name pulled his parents in different directions. His mother wanted to call him John after John Lewis Rivers, but his father wanted to call him Ray after himself. Ray John Cash didn't suit Carrie, and John Ray Cash didn't suit Ray, so they compromised by naming him J. R. Cash. "Did you ever have an imaginary friend?" Tara asked, in another question for her parent journal. "Yes," he told her. "Sometimes I am two people. Johnny is the nice one. Cash causes all the trouble. They fight."

  The 1930s were difficult days for Southern sharecroppers like Ray Cash. Bank foreclosures had brought mass unemployment and the price of cotton had dropped more than 80 percent. A five-hundred-pound bale that was worth $125 in 1928 would only raise twenty-five dollars in 1932. Ray took any work available to provide for his expanding family. He walked miles to cut wood in a sawmill, drove cattle, worked his brother's farm,and even hopped freight trains to Charleston, Mississippi, to dismantle a chemical plant.

  Because the railroad ran close to their home in Kingsland, one of Cash's earliest memories was the sound of the train whistle and the sight of migrant families huddled in boxcars. Sometimes his father would take the leftovers from their family meals and offer them to the hungry travelers. The mystery of the railroad and the symbol of hope it represented would remain with Cash throughout his life.

  In 1934 Ray heard about an experimental community being set up in northeast Arkansas. Part of Roosevelt's Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) provided resettlement for the families worst hit by the Depression. Sixteen thousand acres of reclaimed swampland in Mississippi County was bought in order to build a model farming community. Each family would receive a newly built house, twenty acres of land to clear and cultivate, a barn, a mule, a milk cow, and a hen coop. The town center would have a town hall, cinema, cotton mill, cannery, school, hospital, churches, cotton mill, and shops. To ensure the best market price, all the cotton picked would be collected by the colony and sold in bulk, with proceeds divided equally among the residents.

  Initially known as Colonization Project Number One, and later named Dyess after Arkansas's Emergency Relief Administrator W. R. Dyess, the colony offered Ray Cash the chance he needed. His family, now seven strong with the arrival of baby Reba in January 1934, would have a new start. The project also offered the added incentive of eventual property ownership. FERA maintained a strict selection criteria. Applicants, besides having to prove their genuine need, needed a strong work ethic, outstanding moral character, and the skills to clear and farm their own land.

  Ray was one of only five people chosen from Cleveland County. His experience in cotton picking and forest clearance stood him in good stead. On March 23, 1935, a pickup truck came to collect the family from Kingsland and drive them to their new home. Carrie, Louise, and baby Reba sat beside the driver. Ray and the three boys rode beneath the tarpaulin in the back, along with the few family possession
s. Though a mere 250 miles, the journey down narrow icy gravel tracks and dirt roads took a day and a half. Carrie lifted their spirits by singing hymns—the most memorable to Cash being "I Am Bound for the Promised Land," probably because the heavenly hope chimed so perfectly with their earthly aspirations.

  0 the transporting, rapturous scene,

  That rises to my sight!

  Sweet fields arrayed in living green,

  And rivers of delight!

  I am bound for the Promised Land,

  I am bound for the Promised Land;

  Oh, who will come and go with me?

  I am bound for the Promised Land.1

  The landscape was flat and uninteresting, the soil rich and dark, and freshly painted white clapboard houses with porches at the front dotted the roads that led out like spokes from the town center. Ninety miles of ditches drained away the rainwater to prevent the land from turning back to swamp.

  When the Cash family pulled up to House 266 on Road Three, the paint cans still littered the living room floor and the yard was waterlogged, but this two-bedroom home was the biggest and best they'd ever lived in. No matter that the road was little more than a dirt track, or that it was a two-mile walk into the town, or even that they had neither electricity nor running water. To Ray and Carrie it was paradise.

  In Dyess everyone was on equal footing. There was no division between rich and poor, native and newcomer, or manager and worker. All of the five hundred families arrived around the same time and in the same economic condition. Each family had the same style of house on the same amount of land and shared the same opportunity to improve their situation. Cash would later remark, "I grew up under socialism."

  Dyess families were expected to be essentially self-sufficient. Every household had a cow for milk, hens for eggs, a mule to pull the plough, and hogs to kill for ham and bacon. They grew corn for bread and biscuits, and alfalfa to feed the livestock. They collected rain in barrels and firewood from fallen trees. Government home economists showed the women how to can their fruit and vegetables for the winter months. Besides clothes, oil, matches, sugar, coffee, and flour, little else came from the store. "We had plenty to eat," says Joy Cox Gower, who grew up a near neighbor to the Cashes. "It might not have been what we wanted, but there was plenty of it. We didn't want for the necessities of life."