Johnny Cash, the Man in Black, is best known for his hit music, his anti-authoritarian demeanor, and the fact that he’s the one country singer people like, even if they say they hate country. Cash was born in Kingsland, Arkansas, on February 26th, 1932. His parents, Ray and Carrie, owned a cotton farm, and young “J.R.” was soon working the fields along with his seven siblings. However, the simple life could not contain young Johnny, who joined the Air Force before embarking on a musical career that would see him and his baritone voice redefine an entire musical genre. Johnny Cash’s story became widely known with the 2005 biopic Walk the Line, which starred Joaquin Phoenix as Cash and garnered five Academy Award nominations. The film took its title from one of Cash’s most notable songs, but far from his only hit. “Ring of Fire,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” and “Boy Named Sue,” are among his many other highlights from a five decade career. Also, Walk the Line left out some pretty insane trivia about the life of Johnny Cash. For a more fascinating biography of the beloved and infamous country singer, read on.
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Johnny Cash’s life was one of extremes from the very beginning. He was incredibly close with his older brother, Jack, and when Cash was 12 years old, he watched Jack fall victim to a table saw. Johnny felt an enormous amount of guilt over the incident, and it probably had more than a little to do with his reckless adult behavior.
After nearly wiping out an entire species of bird (by himself), it was only natural that the birds look for their opportunity to strike back. They got it in 1981. Johnny Cash raised ostriches on his property, and he sometimes policed their behavior with the time-honored tradition of beating them with a stick. As many know, ostriches are basically modern-day velociraptors, and one of his ostriches responded to the stick-whacking by kicking Cash with its massive, clawed foot. This opened up Cash’s belly and nearly ended him, forcing him to hold his own insides in as he raced to the hospital.
Johnny Cash, in addition to his indelible contribution to music, also managed to play a role in an important moment of world history. During his time with the Air Force, Cash became a crack Morse code operator. This led to him intercepting and reporting on news from the Soviet Union that Joseph Stalin had died. Cash was actually the first American to hear that the seemingly indestructible dictator had finally expired.
When you live life at the speed that Johnny Cash did, you have to be pretty tough to survive. Although Cash lived to the ripe old age of 71, he almost didn’t make it there at all. In 1993, when he was 61, Cash was dreadfully ill. This was in part due to complications with his diabetes, and he went into a 12-day coma that doctors feared he would never wake up from. Of course, Johnny Cash wasn’t one to just lay around and wait to die, so he just sort of woke up and got back to recording music. He was ultimately diagnosed with autonomic neuropathy, something he would suffer through for the remaining ten years of his life.
Out of all the amazing songs in Johnny Cash’s discography, "Chicken In Black" is a bit of an outlier, though, there’s a good reason for it. Cash was annoyed with his record label, so he set out to make a song so terrible they would let him out of his contract. He even recorded a music video for it, which featured him in a powder-blue cape and yellow jumpsuit. The song was about a singer’s brain being put into a chicken, because why not? Cash’s plan worked, and he was let out of his contract.
After losing his older brother Jack at 12 years old, Cash was asked to help dig his brother’s grave and bury him. It's actually pretty astounding he didn't go on to invent death metal. This might have been viewed as a character-building activity for the young Cash, but it also undoubtedly left some serious emotional scars. Most 12-year-olds build tree forts.
Jimmy Carter, the 39th President, was a distant cousin of June Carter, and thus became related to Cash by marriage. Even though the relation was pretty distant, President Carter became close with Cash and June, and maintained a lifelong friendship. One can only imagine what they all talked about, but it was probably super interesting. Like, about peanuts and depression and stuff.
Johnny Cash is perhaps best known for his famous concert in Folsom Prison, which cemented him as a counterculture legend. He also spent plenty of time inside prisons behind bars, too. Cash was arrested seven times in his life, usually for charges related to drugs or alcohol. Several arrests for public drunkenness and reckless driving were inevitable, but the most memorable case has to be his arrest for drunkenly picking flowers from someone’s yard at 2 AM. He recalled the experience: You wouldn't believe it, one night I got in jail in Starkville Mississippi for picking flowers. I was walking down the street... and uh, you know, going to get me some cigarettes or something. 'Bout two in the morning, after a show. I think it was. Anyway, I reached down and picked a dandelion here and a daisy there as I went along, and this car pulls up. He said, 'Get it the hell in here boy, what are you doing?' I said, 'I'm just picking flowers.' Well, thirty six dollars for picking flowers and a night in jail. You can't hardly win can ya? No telling what they'd do if you pull an apple or something... I'd like to get back at the fella down in Starkville Mississippi... that still has my thirty six dollars.
Game recognizes game. A fantastic example of this is the interaction between Johnny Cash and the legendary boxer Muhammad Ali. Ali apparently wrote Cash a poem, which Cash treasured so much that he kept it locked in a fireproof safe thereafter. It eventually came to light that Ali hadn’t actually written the poem, but had lifted it from another author, which is actually more impressive if you think about it. Muhammad Ali, one of the most intimidating men to ever live, lied about writing a poem just to impress Johnny Cash.
Like many musical legends, Johnny Cash didn’t write all of his own songs. In fact, one of his biggest hits, "Ring of Fire," was written by June Carter, his future wife. Carter wrote the song about Johnny Cash, more specifically the guilt she felt over her feelings for him despite their marriages to other people. She obviously got over it later! But seriously, it was an intense and torrid quagmire of passion and morality.
Although his songs can bring out tears in even the manliest of men, Johnny Cash wasn’t exactly one for "emotions." Faron Young was a long-time friend of Cash’s, and a musical contemporary. When he died in 1996, his son asked if he could spread Young’s ashes in Johnny’s garden, which he had enjoyed visiting. Nature intervened, and the remains ended up all over Cash’s car windshield. When he returned home to find the mess, Cash unceremoniously windshield wiped his departed friend into oblivion, remarking that Young "went back and forth, back and forth, until he was all gone."
Was Johnny Cash cool enough to be part of a musical supergroup? Of course he was. Cash helped formed the Highwaymen in 1985 with three of country music’s other brightest stars; Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson. The group recorded together off and on for ten years, and even managed a number one single on their debut release. Even among these musical giants, Cash stood tall as the main star attraction, as well as the group’s undisputed loose cannon.
These days, it’s a lucky strike just to have a pleasant neighbor. The idea of two world-famous musicians happening to live next to each other is incredibly unlikely, but that was the case for Johnny Cash. He was neighbors with Roy Orbison, the singer of "Pretty Woman" and member of the Traveling Wilburys. Despite their two wildly different careers, Cash and Orbison got on famously, and eventually even worked together on several occasions. They even performed together for Johnny Carson.
Johnny Cash might have sang country music, but he lived a rock star lifestyle. Cash started smoking young, and picked up several addictions thereafter. Alcohol and amphetamines were his main vices, habits he started as a young musician, and he went to rehab several times attempting to get clean. Marshall Grant recalls the first time Cash used amphetamines: John said, ‘I’m so tired, I don’t know if I can do this or not.’ I said, ‘Well, God knows we’ve been tired before, we can do it.’ Gordon turned to John and said, ‘Wait a minute.’ He reached in his pocket and pulled out some innocent-looking pills... they looked like aspirin. And he handed John about six of them, or four, I didn’t count. And he said, ‘Here, take these, and you’ll make it through the night with no problems.’ Time and time again, Cash would return to his old ways and cause trouble for himself and others before finally cleaning his act up later in life. He died sober and still recording music.
For his most infamous prank, Johnny Cash released 500 baby chickens into the hotel where he was staying. Not content to just dump 500 live animals in the lobby, Cash instead diligently put 100 animals on each of the hotel’s five floors. Staff, predictably, were not amused. This was also in the early stages of his career, before he had the clout to really get away with such acts, no less.
Johnny Cash eventually settled down with the love of his life, June Carter Cash, but even that wasn’t an entirely happy story, as they broke up and reconciled several times. His first marriage to Vivian Liberto (who he met at 17) was incredibly rocky and ended in a bitter divorce that left both sides hurt. Between the two marriages, Cash had five children in total.
How many musical legends can say they nearly eradicated an entire species? Probably just Johnny Cash. Also, that's probably a good thing. In the 1960s, Cash parked his home-rigged “party truck” in a national forest in California, where it overheated and started a massive fire that scorched hundreds of acres. Tragically, the blaze took out 49 of the area's 53 endangered California condors. Cash responded that he didn’t "care about your damn yellow buzzards."
Cash began smoking at 12, and never looked back, picking up a lifelong nicotine habit. It’s a wonder that it didn’t ruin his amazing voice. LIFE unseen reports that smoking was one of many "bad" habits Cash found himself getting into at a young age. Another of these habits was apparently eating cotton bolls while working in the fields.
