Johnny Cash

Before Sun Records, Cash spent his late teens and early twenties in the U.S. Air Force. He enlisted in 1950 and trained as a Morse code intercept operator, eventually transcribing Soviet transmissions at nearly forty words a minute^[5]. Stationed in Landsberg, West Germany, he filled his off hours playing guitar in a group of fellow servicemen called the Landsberg Barbarians and courting a Texas girl named Vivian Liberto through letters home^[6][7]. It was in Landsberg, after watching a film about California's Folsom State Prison at the base theater, that he first sketched out "Folsom Prison Blues," borrowing its melody from Gordon Jenkins's 1953 recording "Crescent City Blues" for a song about a prisoner tormented by the sound of a train he could never board^[5]. He married Liberto and was discharged as a staff sergeant in 1954.

Johnny Cash (1932-2003) built one of the most recognizable voices in American music, a baritone rumble that could sound equally at home singing gospel, railroad ballads, prison laments, and outlaw stories. Signed to Sun Records in Memphis in 1955 alongside Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis, Cash developed a stripped-down, train-rhythm guitar sound with his backing band the Tennessee Two, later the Tennessee Three, that became his sonic signature for decades.

By the early 1960s, after moving to Columbia Records, Cash was one of country music's biggest stars, but his personal life was unraveling. His marriage to Vivian Liberto, whom he had married in 1954, was strained by constant touring and a growing dependence on amphetamines, a habit that would define much of his decade^[3]. Around 1962, singer June Carter, of the pioneering Carter Family, joined Cash's touring show as a regular opening act, and the two developed a romantic connection that neither was initially prepared to act on, given that both were already married^[4].

That entanglement produced one of Cash's signature hits, "Ring of Fire," written by June Carter and Merle Kilgore and recorded by Cash in March 1963 with an unexpected mariachi horn arrangement that came to him in a dream^[1]. The song shot to number one on the country chart and crossed over into the pop Top 20, and it later entered the Grammy Hall of Fame^[2]. Cash's marriage to Vivian did not survive the years that followed; she filed for divorce in 1966, and Cash married June Carter in 1968, beginning a musical and personal partnership that lasted until both of their deaths in 2003.

Cash spent much of the 1960s cycling through addiction, arrests, and creative reinvention, culminating in his celebrated live prison albums recorded at Folsom State Prison (1968) and San Quentin (1969), which reintroduced him to a broader audience as a voice for the overlooked and incarcerated. He opened both Folsom sets, and nearly every concert for the rest of his career, with "Folsom Prison Blues," the song he had first imagined fifteen years earlier as a homesick airman in Germany^[8]. He remained a towering, restless presence in American music for the rest of his career, closing it out with the stark, stripped-back American Recordings series produced by Rick Rubin in the 1990s and early 2000s.