Johnny Cash's life was one of breathtaking highs and unfathomable lows. Despite his legendary talent and all the respect he commanded because of it, Cash was a man who frequently succumbed to his temptations — and tested the faith others had in him. This is the tragic, real-life story of Johnny Cash.
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00:00Johnny Cash's life was one of breathtaking highs and unfathomable lows. Despite his legendary
00:06talent and all the respect he commanded because of it, Cash was a man who frequently succumbed
00:10to his temptations and tested the faith others had in him. This is the tragic real-life story
00:15of Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash was the fourth of seven children, born February 26, 1932,
00:22in Kingsland, Arkansas, to Ray and Carrie Cash. In his memoir, Johnny Cash, The Autobiography,
00:27Cash recalled that the house in which he was born didn't have any windows, and in winter,
00:31his mother had to hang blankets to keep them warm. The Depression hit the Cash family hard,
00:36but when Johnny was three years old, they moved to the Dyess Colony in northeast Arkansas,
00:40taking part in a federal farming program in which the family farmed 20 acres of cotton
00:45and other crops. When he was five, Johnny started working the fields alongside his parents and
00:50siblings. He started first as a water boy, carrying drinking water out to his family.
00:54By the time he was eight, he was picking cotton with them, dragging a heavy canvas sack that
00:59started empty but by the end of the day held 200 or more pounds of cotton. Cash wrote in his memoir,
01:04"...it wasn't complicated. You just parked the wagon at one end of the rows and went to it."
01:09He said the work was exhausting and painful. He had back pain, even as a child, and the cotton
01:14bowls he picked were sharp, which cut his hands. Cash remembered,
01:18"...we just worked and worked and worked."
01:20One Saturday morning when Johnny Cash was 12, he asked his older brother Jack to go fishing. Jack
01:26declined, since he had a job cutting oak trees into posts and working at a table saw. In his
01:31autobiography, Cash remembers begging his brother to skip the work, but Jack said no. Cash went by
01:36himself, but the time he spent there felt listless, and eventually, he left and headed for home.
01:41On his way back, his father met him on the road, in a panic. There had been an accident,
01:46and Jack was badly hurt. He had been pulled into the saw and cut from his ribs through
01:51his stomach to his groin. Jack clung on to life for close to a week before finally succumbing.
01:56Cash later remembered,
01:58"...after Jack's death, I felt like I'd died too. I had no other friend."
02:02As he grew up, Cash felt his brother's influence on him. Cash wrote,
02:06"...the most important question in my life has been,
02:08which is Jack's way? Which direction would he have taken?"
02:12Jack even showed up in Cash's dreams from time to time,
02:14usually when Cash was either doing something he shouldn't have been doing or about to do
02:18something he shouldn't have been doing. In the dreams, Jack would know what Cash wanted to do,
02:23and would look at him with an admonishing smile. According to Cash, there's no fooling Jack.
02:29When Cash was in the Air Force, he incessantly wrote letters to a woman named Vivian Liberto,
02:34who he had met at a roller rink and would later marry after leaving the service.
02:38Their domestic situation was a relatively normal one, in the sense that he got a job
02:43and they started a family, but all that changed when Cash started playing and recording music.
02:47Cash had a hit record, Cry Cry Cry, that compelled him to go out on tour,
02:51and that spelled trouble for their marriage. Eventually, according to biographer Steve
02:55Turner, Cash was away from home up to 80 percent of the year, traveling some 300,000 miles in the
03:01process. Unfortunately, during his time he also began to succumb to his addiction to amphetamines
03:06and alcohol, and also developed an eye for the attractive, sassy women he'd often meet on the
03:11road. Around this time, he also met and began flirting with June Carter, who would go on to
03:16become his second wife. Cash's time on the road made his time at home difficult to bear. His
03:21eldest daughter Roseanne would later remember,
03:23"'It got to where it was like somebody else was coming home, not my daddy.
03:26The drugs were at work, he'd stay up all night, he and my mom would fight, it was so sad.'"
03:32According to another of his daughters, Cindy, Vivian would often put her children in the car
03:36and go looking for a drunken Cash around town. She finally filed for divorce in 1966,
03:41and it was granted the following year.
03:44In 1961, Cash and his wife Vivian moved with their four daughters to Casita Springs in Ventura County,
03:50California, where Vivian hoped he would be convinced to give up the pills and alcohol
03:55that had become an integral and dangerous part of his life. Instead, his problems got worse,
04:00particularly with amphetamines. His daughter Roseanne later said,
04:03"'In my pre-teen years, my father's drug addiction was really consuming him and my
04:08parents' marriage. There was just this background tension and anxiety to all of those years.'"
04:13The pills would leave his voice a mere croak, and it got to the point where he was having
04:17trouble performing. Often, he never showed up to his gigs at all. Eventually, Cash stopped
04:22taking amphetamines, but his vigilance would sometimes wane. After all, he was still an addict
04:26and an alcoholic. He couldn't just take one pill. He needed a handful. He couldn't just have one
04:31drink. He needed to empty out his hotel room's minibar. Cash's struggles continued in the 80s,
04:36when he was prescribed pain medication for various surgeries and illnesses and continued
04:41to take them after he no longer needed them. Luckily, Cash didn't face these demons alone.
04:45The singer's struggles required a steadying influence in his life,
04:49so when he couldn't manage himself, he leaned on his second wife, June.
04:53She's not only a lady who I share my life with, but she may have been
04:59the person responsible for me still being alive."
05:03Strangely enough, the man who sang so convincingly about shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die
05:08was never once in his life incarcerated in an actual prison. He was, however,
05:12arrested several times for a variety of offenses related to drugs,
05:17either for procuring them or for his many escapades under their influence.
05:20Steve Turner's Cash biography tells the story of October 1965, when Cash took flight to El Paso,
05:26Texas, then caught a cab to take him across the Mexican border to Juarez, where he bought 668
05:32Dexedrine and 475 Equinel tablets on the black market and hid them in his guitar.
05:38Unfortunately for him, the dealer was under surveillance for allegedly selling heroin.
05:42Cash was arrested at the airport and held overnight on drug smuggling charges.
05:46He also faced charges back in El Paso for possession of the pills.
05:50Earlier that year, in May, Cash was drunk and out well past curfew in Starkville,
05:55Mississippi, when police arrested him and put him in a holding cell overnight to sober up.
06:00According to Rolling Stone, Cash kicked his foot against the cell door so hard that he
06:04broke one of his toes, and in November 1967, while under the influence of pills,
06:09Cash went on a joyride through Georgia, before banging on the door of a rural home
06:14until the police were summoned. His arrest that time netted him a night in jail.
06:18Cash often told a story about a time in which he was so deep in the throes of
06:23drug-related despair that he found himself completely robbed of the will to live.
06:27According to Cash, he trekked up to the Nickajack Cave in Tennessee in the fall of 1967.
06:32In his autobiography, he wrote,
06:34"[Nickajack contained the remains of many cave explorers,
06:37amateur adventurers who'd lost their lives in the caves over the years,
06:41usually by losing their way, and it was my hope and intention to join their company."
06:45Cash said he crawled through the cave for several hours until his flashlight batteries gave out,
06:49at which point he laid down in the pitch dark, ready to die. He said he'd never felt so far from
06:54God, but as he laid there, an epiphany came over him, that perhaps it wasn't his time to die.
06:59He got up and found his way out of the cave in the dark, guided by a small draft of air,
07:04and subsequently promised to quit drugs that very day.
07:06Cash recounted this story many times. It's published in his memoir and in a number of
07:11magazines and books that cover his life, but the story has many detractors. For example,
07:16Marshall Grand, Cash's friend and former bass player, says it never happened. And Robert Hilburn,
07:21Cash's biographer, notes that the Nickajack Cave was underwater in the fall of 1967,
07:26since the Army Corps of Engineers had damned it up. He also wrote,
07:29"[Cash did not quit drugs that day.]
07:32In April 2003, June Carter Cash had been diagnosed with a leaky heart valve,
07:37and after a battery of tests, doctors determined that valve replacement surgery was the only
07:42option to fix her problem and prolong her life. According to Steve Turner's biography of her
07:46husband, she initially balked at the prospect of going under the knife, claiming that, at 73,
07:51she was too old for the operation. Johnny Cash begged her to have the surgery,
07:55claiming he wasn't ready for her to leave him. June finally relented and had the surgery on May
08:007th, but early the next morning she went into cardiac arrest. It took doctors 20 minutes to
08:05resuscitate her, after which they put her on life support. Three days later, doctors performed more
08:09tests to see if she responded to stimuli, an indicator of whether she had any brain function.
08:15No one was certain how long her brain had been deprived of oxygen during the cardiac episode
08:19and resuscitation efforts. Johnny Cash gave permission for life support to be switched off,
08:24and June's bodily functions were expected to shut down over the course of three or so hours.
08:28Instead, she lingered for three days. On May 15th, with her family standing vigil around her bed,
08:34June Carter Cash passed away.
08:35We're friends, and we're sweethearts and lovers, and we're married, and we're happy."
08:42Within four months of his wife June's death, Johnny Cash would also be gone,
08:46but not before doing one last bit of work. In the days immediately following June's funeral,
08:51Cash reflected on his wife's life and their time together, which added up to 35 years of marriage,
08:56with very little of that time spent apart. He tried to keep busy, too.
09:00Mere days after June's funeral, Cash was back in the recording studio with legendary producer Rick
09:05Rubin. Adding to the collection of songs the two had stockpiled for the American Recordings series,
09:10but his ill health continued. In his final weeks, he would be hospitalized with pancreatitis,
09:15and two weeks after leaving the hospital, Johnny Cash died of complications from diabetes.
09:20He was 71 years old.
09:22Cash's legacy as a singer, songwriter, song interpreter, and shaper and reshaper of country
09:27music is unquestioned. There are few figures in country whose shadow looms as large as Cash's.
09:32When he was alive, he was larger than life. But that status came at a cost. His problems loomed
09:37large, too, and as he suffered, so did those around him. Still, when Johnny Cash spoke,
09:42millions listened. When he sang, millions sang along. When he died, millions mourned him.
09:47My dad was full of laughter. He was full of joy and full of spirit,
09:52and he'd always rather laugh than cry.
09:54That kid who grew up poor on the cotton farm sure made a hell of an impact.