Johnny Cash
#
21
Ranking
Hall of Famer
BIRTHDATE
BIRTHPLACE
Kingsland
,
AR
,
USA
71
6
'
2
"
DIED
Johnny Cash was a Kingsland, Arkansas-born country legend who rose from picking cotton during the Great Depression and buying his first guitar for five dollars in a German Air Force barracks to become the only artist in history inducted into all four of the Country Music, Rock and Roll, Songwriters, and Gospel Music Halls of Fame, leaving behind a catalog of songs about faith, heartbreak, addiction, and redemption that endures as one of the most honest and fully human bodies of work in American music.
Current Tour & Setlist
Johnny Cash performed until very close to the end of his life despite deteriorating health from diabetes and autonomic neuropathy, giving some of his final shows in 2002 and releasing a stunning cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" just months before his death, a video that introduced him to an entirely new generation of fans and is now considered one of the greatest music videos ever made. He passed away on September 12, 2003, in Nashville at age 71, and is buried alongside June Carter Cash at Hendersonville Memory Gardens in Tennessee. His son John Carter Cash continues to steward his father's estate and legacy, and in September 2024 a statue of Cash was installed in the National Statuary Hall Collection at the U.S. Capitol as one of Arkansas's two official representatives.
Early Life
Born J.R. Cash on February 26, 1932, in Kingsland, Arkansas, the fourth of seven children of sharecropper Ray Cash and his wife Carrie, he grew up picking cotton on a government farm colony in Dyess, Arkansas, where his mother sang gospel and folk songs in the fields to keep the children's spirits up, and where the family gathered around the radio every night to listen to country music, planting seeds that would grow into one of the most distinctive voices in American history. When Cash was twelve, his beloved older brother Jack was killed in a horrific table saw accident at school, a trauma that haunted him for the rest of his life and that cast a long shadow of grief and faith throughout nearly every album he ever made.
Career Highlights
After graduating high school Cash enlisted in the Air Force and was stationed in Landsberg, Germany, where he formed his first band the Landsberg Barbarians and bought his first guitar for five dollars, then returned to Memphis in 1954 and spent his days selling appliances door to door while rehearsing at night with guitarist Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant as the Tennessee Two. After famously auditioning gospel songs for Sun Records producer Sam Phillips and being told to go home and sin and come back with something he could sell, Cash returned with the rockabilly original "Cry Cry Cry," which charted in 1955, followed by "Folsom Prison Blues" and "I Walk the Line," which spent 43 weeks on the country chart and sold over two million copies. He signed with Columbia Records in 1958, recorded landmark live albums at Folsom Prison and San Quentin that revitalized his career in the late 1960s, hosted his own nationally televised variety show from 1969 to 1971, joined Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson as a founding Highwayman, and staged a stunning late-career renaissance with producer Rick Rubin's American Recordings series in the 1990s, ultimately becoming the only artist in history inducted into all four of the Country Music, Rock and Roll, Songwriters, and Gospel Music Halls of Fame.
Family & Personal Life
Cash met his first wife Vivian Liberto in 1951 at a roller skating rink in San Antonio while in Air Force training, exchanged hundreds of pages of love letters during his three-year deployment to Germany, married her in August 1954, and had four daughters with her: Rosanne (born 1955), Kathy (born 1956), Cindy (born 1959), and Tara (born 1961), before Liberto filed for divorce in 1966 citing his drug and alcohol abuse, constant touring, and his deepening relationship with June Carter. Cash married June Carter on March 1, 1968, one week after proposing onstage during a concert in Ontario, Canada, and she is widely credited with helping pull him back from the brink of drug addiction and spiritual collapse; their son John Carter Cash was born March 3, 1970, and Rosanne Cash has gone on to become a Grammy-winning artist in her own right. June Carter Cash died on May 15, 2003, and Cash followed her just four months later, passing away on September 12, 2003, in Nashville at age 71, with many who knew him saying he had simply lost the will to live without her.
