Johnny Cash Won't Back Down

It's hardly surprising, under such circumstances, that Cash's mind would turn to an earlier physical struggle — his tormented battle with drug addiction, a battle that, despite some notable backsliding, he eventually won. He does not like discussing his sickness. "It's all right," he assured the Michigan crowd after revealing his illness. "I refuse to give it some ground in my life." In the spring of 1999 he told USA Today, "I've made it a point to forget the name of the disease and not to give it any space in my life, because I just can't do it. I can't think that negatively. I can't believe I'm going to be incapacitated. I won't believe that." After that article appeared, Cash was so upset about its detailed discussion of his illness that he canceled some upcoming interviews.

Back in Hendersonville, Cash eventually leaves the house and, dressed in black tails and a black shirt, greets the family members, friends and guests who, to a person, are thrilled to see him. He takes the stage set up in the yard and affectionately introduces June. He looks flushed, and he moves with great deliberateness, spending his store of energy carefully, anticipating the exhaustion to come. Johnny joins June and her band — which includes their son John Carter Cash on acoustic guitar — to duet with June on "The Far Side Banks of Jordan," a tune that Cash first played for his wife twenty-five years before, telling her, "This is going to be our song." It's the sort of folk spiritual he used to sing with his family on their front porch in Dyess, Arkansas, decades ago, the kind of song that first sparked his love for music. He begins the song, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar. "I believe my steps are growing wearier each day," he sings. "Got another journey on my mind/The lures of this old world/Have ceased to make me want to stay/And my one regret is leaving you behind."

Johnny and June harmonize on the chorus: "I'll be waiting on the far side banks of Jordan/I'll be sitting, drawing pictures in the sand/And when I see you coming/I will rise up with a shout/And come running through the shallow water/Reaching for your hand."

Despite, or perhaps because of his illness, interest in Johnny Cash's music has reached a fever pitch. In May, Columbia/American/Legacy released an extraordinary three-CD box set of his work. Titled Love God and Murder, it is a thematically organized collection that explores the three grand subjects of Cash's forty-six-year career. Cash has also just released a stunning new album, American III: Solitary Man, his third collaboration with producer Rick Rubin. It is a brave, unflinching confrontation with his own mortality, the nearly inconceivable notion of leaving behind all the joys and sorrows that constitute a life. It's hard to imagine anyone else making an album remotely like it.

Like so many of the titanic heroes of rock & roll, Johnny Cash is a glorious mess of contradictions. The wild drugs and debauchery of Saturday night — and in Cash's case, pretty much every other night, too — have fought vigorously for his soul against the powerful Christian conviction of Sunday morning. Cash is the Man in Black, the noble outlaw, a fearsome figure whose Mount Rushmore face, piercing dark eyes and uproarious excesses helped make him one of the more combustible ingredients in the critical mass that exploded in Memphis in the mid-Fifties. In early songs like "I Walk the Line" and "Big River," he articulated a fierce vision of what country music — and its bastard child, rock & roll — could be. He hammered out a sound that is bare to the bone, without a single wasted note.

"I was a Johnny Cash freak," says Keith Richards, who first heard Cash's music as a teenager in England. "Luther Perkins, his guitar player, was amazing. Johnny's singing was, too. They taught me about the importance of silence in music — that you don't have to play all over the song. You just play what's necessary. If it's done wrong, it can be painfully monotonous. But when it's done right, it has this incredibly powerful focus and intensity, and that's what those early Cash songs were like.

"As far as early rock & roll goes," Richards continues, "if someone came up to me and for some reason they could only get a collection of one person's music, I'd say, 'Chuck Berry is important, but, man, you've got to get the Cash!' "

While he was making that groundbreaking music, Cash was also inventing what would soon become the myth of Johnny Cash. It is a larger-than-life persona that has had at least as much impact and influence as the music itself. "I was backstage at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville when I met him in 1965," says Kris Kristofferson, whose career Cash helped to launch. "It was back in his dangerous days, and it was electric. He was skinny as a snake, and you just never knew what he was going to do. He looked like he might explode at any minute. He was a bad boy, he stood up for the underdog, he was exciting and unpredictable, and he had an energy onstage that was unlike anybody else.

"I shook hands with him," Kristofferson continues, "and that was probably what brought me back to Nashville to be a songwriter. He was everything I thought an artist ought to be."