Johnny Cash sold ninety million records across every roots genre
J. R. Cash (1932–2003), raised by poor Arkansas cotton farmers, became one of history’s best-selling artists with more than ninety million records sold. Gospel roots, Air Force years in West Germany, and a voice for sorrow and redemption let him cross country, rockabilly, blues, folk, and gospel audiences.
His parents, Carrie and Ray, could not agree on John or Ray, so they named him simply J. R.; the Air Force refused initials, making him John R. Cash, and Sun Records made him Johnny in 1955. In 1935 the family moved to Dyess, Arkansas, a New Deal colony where poor families could work land they might one day own. From five he picked cotton and sang with the family in the fields, and a flood on the farm later became Five Feet High and Rising.
In 1944 his beloved older brother Jack, fifteen, was nearly cut in half by an unguarded table saw and died a week later. Their mother had begged Jack to go fishing instead, and Cash carried guilt over that day for life. Taught guitar by his mother and a friend, he was writing songs by twelve, and his boyhood high tenor dropped into the famous bass-baritone.
After four years of Air Force service, much of it in West Germany, he broke through in the mid-1950s Memphis rockabilly scene. The Tennessee Three gave him a chugging, train-like rhythm, and shows opened with Hello, I'm Johnny Cash and then Folsom Prison Blues. I Walk the Line, Ring of Fire and Get Rhythm became signatures, alongside comic songs like A Boy Named Sue and duets with June, starting with Jackson before they married. He also played free concerts in prisons.
Always dressed in black, he became the Man in Black. Late in life he covered Nine Inch Nails' Hurt, Soundgarden's Rusty Cage and Depeche Mode's Personal Jesus. He is one of very few artists in the Country, Rock and Roll and Gospel halls of fame, and the 2005 film Walk the Line dramatized his life.
Source: Johnny Cash
