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. Johnny Cash was the fourth of seven children,
born February 26th, 1932, in Kingsland, Arkansas, to Ray and Carrie Cash. In his memoir, Johnny Cash: The Autobiography,
Cash recalled that the house in which he was born didn't have any windows, and in winter,
his mother had to hang blankets to keep them warm. The Depression hit the Cash family hard, but
when Johnny was three years old, they moved to the Dyess Colony in northeast Arkansas,
taking part in a federal farming program in which the family farmed 20 acres of cotton
and other crops. When he was five, Johnny started working in
the fields alongside his parents and siblings. He started at first as a water boy, carrying
drinking water out to his family. By the time he was eight, he was picking cotton
with them, dragging a heavy canvas sack that started empty, but by the end of the day held
200 or more pounds of cotton. Cash wrote in his memoir: "It wasn't complicated. You just parked the wagon at one end of the
rows and went to it." He said the work was exhausting and painful;
he had back pain, even as a child, and the cotton bolls he picked were sharp, which cut
his hands. Cash remembered: "[W]e just worked and worked and worked." One Saturday morning when Johnny Cash was
12, he asked his older brother Jack to go fishing. Jack declined, since he had a job cutting
oak trees into posts and working at a table saw. In his autobiography, Cash remembers begging
his brother to skip the work, but Jack said no. Cash went by himself, but the time he spent
there felt listless, and he eventually left and headed for home. On his way back, his father met him on the
road, in a panic - there had been an accident, and Jack was badly hurt. He had been pulled into the saw and cut from
his ribs through his stomach to his groin. Jack clung on to life for close to a week
before finally succumbing. Cash later remembered: "After Jack's death, I felt like I'd died,
too. I had no other friend." As he grew up, Cash felt his brother's influence
on him. Cash wrote: "The most important question in […] my life
has been 'Which is Jack's way? Which direction would he have taken?'" Jack even showed up in Cash's dreams from
time to time - usually when Cash was either doing something he shouldn't have been doing,
or about to do something he shouldn't have been doing. In the dreams, Jack would know what Cash wanted
to do, and would look at him with an admonishing smile. According to Cash: "There's no fooling Jack." When Cash was in the Air Force, he incessantly
wrote letters to a woman named Vivian Liberto, whom he had met at a roller rink, and would
later marry after leaving the service. Their domestic situation was a relatively
normal one, in the sense that he got a job and they started a family, but that all changed
when Cash started playing and recording music. Cash had a hit record, "Cry, Cry, Cry," that
compelled him to go out on tour, and that spelled trouble for their marriage. Eventually, according to biographer Steve
Turner, Cash was away from home up to 80 percent of the year, travelling some 300,000 miles
in the process. Unfortunately, during this time he also began
to succumb to his addiction to amphetamines and alcohol, and also developed an eye for
the attractive, "sassy" women he'd often meet on the road. Around this time, he also met and began flirting
with June Carter, who would go on to become his second wife. Cash's time on the road made his time at home
difficult to bear. His eldest daughter Rosanne would later remember: "It got to where it was like somebody else
was coming home, not my daddy. The drugs were at work. He'd stay up all night. He and my mom would fight. It was so sad." According to another of his daughters, Cindy,
Vivian would often put her children in the car and go looking for a drunken Cash around
town. She finally filed for divorce in 1966, and
it was granted the following year. In 1961, Cash and his wife Vivian moved with
their four daughters to Casitas Springs, in Ventura County, California - where Vivian
hoped he could be convinced to give up the pills and alcohol that had become an integral
and dangerous part of his life. Instead, his problems got worse, particularly
with amphetamines. His daughter Rosanne later said: "In my pre-teen years. my father's drug addiction was really consuming
him and my parents' marriage. […] There was just this background tension
and anxiety to all of those years." The pills would leave his voice a mere croak,
and it got to the point where he was having trouble performing. Often, he never showed up to his gigs at all. Eventually, Cash stopped taking amphetamines,
but his vigilance would sometimes wane. After all, he was still an addict and an alcoholic. He couldn't take just one pill; he needed
a handful. He couldn't have just one drink; he needed
to empty out his hotel room's mini-bar. Cash's struggles continued in the '80s, when
he was prescribed pain medication for various surgeries and illnesses and continued to take
them after he no longer needed them. Luckily, Cash didn't face these demons alone. The singer's struggles required a steadying
influence in his life; so when he couldn't manage himself, he leaned on his second wife,
June. "She's not only a lady who I shared a life
with, but she may have been, uh, the person responsible for me still being alive." Strangely enough, the man who sang so convincingly
about shooting a man in Reno "just to watch him die" was never once in his life incarcerated
in an actual prison. He was, however, arrested several times, for
a variety of offenses usually related to drugs — either for procuring them or for his many
escapades under their influence. Steve Turner's Cash biography tells the story
of October 1965, when Cash took a flight to El Paso, Texas, then caught a cab to take
him across the Mexican border to Juarez, where he bought 668 Dexadrine and 475 Equanil tablets
on the black market and hid them in his guitar. Unfortunately for him, the dealer was under
surveillance for allegedly selling heroin; Cash was arrested at the airport, and held
overnight on drug smuggling charges. He also faced charges back in El Paso for
possession of the pills. Earlier that year, in May, Cash was drunk
and out well past curfew in Starkville, Mississippi when police arrested him and put him in a
holding cell overnight to sober up. According to Rolling Stone, Cash kicked his
foot against his cell door so hard that he broke one of his toes. And in November 1967, while under the influence
of pills, Cashwent on a joyride through Georgia - before banging on the door of a rural home
until the police were summoned. His arrest that time netted him a night in
jail. Cash often told a story about a time in which
he was so deep in the throes of drug-related despair that he found himself completely robbed
of the will to live. According to Cash, he trekked up to Nickajack
Cave, in Tennessee, in the fall of 1967. In his autobiography, he wrote: "Nickajack contained the remains of many cave
explorers, amateur adventurers who'd lost their lives in the caves over the years, usually
by losing their way, and it was my hope and intention to join their company." Cash said he crawled through the cave for
several hours until his flashlight batteries gave out, at which point, he laid down in
the pitch dark, ready to die. He said he'd never felt so far from God - but
as he lay there, an epiphany came over him that perhaps it wasn't his time to die. He got up and found his way out of the cave
in the dark, guided by a small draft of air, and subsequently promised to quit drugs that
very day. Cash recounted this story many times - it's
published in his memoir and in a number of magazines and books that cover his life. But the story has many detractors. For example, Marshall Grant, Cash's friend
and former bass player, says it never happened. And Robert Hilburn, Cash's biographer, notes
that the Nickajack Cave was underwater in the fall of 1967; since the Army Corps of
Engineers had dammed it up. He also wrote: "Cash did not quit drugs that day." In April 2003, June Carter Cash had been diagnosed
with a leaky heart valve and, after a battery of tests, doctors determined that valve replacement
surgery was the only option to fix her problem and prolong her life. According to Steve Turner's biography of her
husband, she initially balked at the prospect of going under the knife, claiming that, at
73, she was too old for the operation. Johnny Cash begged her to have the surgery;
claiming he wasn't ready for her to leave him. June finally relented and had the surgery
on May 7th, but early the next morning she went into cardiac arrest. It took doctors 20 minutes to resuscitate
her, after which they put her on life support. Three days later, doctors performed more tests
to see if she responded to stimuli - an indicator of whether she had any brain function. No one was certain how long her brain had
been deprived of oxygen during the cardiac episode and resuscitation efforts. Johnny Cash gave permission for life support
to be switched off; and June's bodily functions were expected to shut down over the course
of three or so hours. Instead, she lingered for three days. On May 15th, with her family standing vigil
around her bed, June Carter Cash passed away. "We're friends, and we’re sweethearts and
lovers, and we’re married, and we're happy." Within four months of his wife June's death,
Johnny Cash would also be gone - but not before doing one last bit of work. In the days immediately following June's funeral,
Cash reflected on his wife's life and their time together - which added up to 35 years
of marriage, with very little of that time spent apart. He tried to keep busy, too; mere days after
June's funeral, Cash was back in the recording studio with legendary producer Rick Rubin,
adding to the collection of songs the two had stockpiled for the American Recordings
series. But his ill health continued. In his final weeks, he would be hospitalized
with pancreatitis and, two weeks after leaving the hospital, Johnny Cash died of complications
from diabetes. He was 71 years old. Cash's legacy as a singer, songwriter, song
interpreter, and shaper and re-shaper of country music is unquestioned. There are few figures in country whose shadow
looms as long as Cash's; when he was alive, he was larger than life. But that status came at a cost - his problems
loomed large too, and as he suffered, so did those around him. Still, when Johnny Cash spoke, millions listened;
when he sang, millions sang along; and when he died, millions mourned him. "My dad was full of laughter, he was full
of joy, full of spirit, and he would always rather laugh than cry." That kid who grew up poor on the cotton farm
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