St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 35

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2003 ST. LOUTS POST-QSRWIH 35, JOHNNY CASH: 1932 2003 The "Man in Black" was country music's bare-bones realist nffiii Tiiti-iMiWiinffrMrtirrlMl atWMUl TIT nun ttMnn ii twrmm Johnny Cash and his wife, June Carter Cash, perform at the Americana Awards in 'Nashville, in September 2002. June Carter Cash died May 15. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 1 Wi fr I ill 1 By Stephen Holden The New York Times Johnny Cash, the legendary "Man in Black" whose gravelly bass-baritone was the vocal bedrock of American country music for more than four decades, died Friday morning at a hospital in Nashville, Term. He was 71.

He died of complications from diabetes, his manager, Lou Robin, said in a statement. Four months ago his wife, country singer and songwriter June Carter Cash, died of complications from heart surgery at age 73. Beginning in the mid-1950s, when he made his first records On Monday Columnist Jeff Daniel remembers Johnny Cash, in Everyday. for the Sun label, Mr. Cash forged a lean, hard-bitten country-folk sound that, at its most powerful, seemed to erase the lines between singing, storytelling and grueling life experience.

Born in poverty in Arkansas at the height of the Depression, he was country music's foremost poet of the working poor. His stripped-down songs described the lives of miners and sharecroppers, convicts and cowboys, railroad workers and laborers. His influence extended far beyond the sphere of country music. Along with Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins, his peers on Sun Records in the mid-1950s, he was considered a pioneer of rock 'n' roll. Indeed, in 1992, 12 years after his election to the Country Music Hall of Fame, he was elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and he remains the only performer besides Presley to have been inducted into both.

Mr. Cash won 10 Grammys, including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999. His most recent Grammy, in 2000, was for best country male vocal performance. The sound of the slapped bass on his first major hit, "I Walk the Line," and the hard-edged boom- His next successful disc was "Folsom Prison Blues." In May 1956, Sun released Mr. Cash's biggest hit and signature song, "I Walk the Line," a stern avowal of sexual fidelity that eventually sold more than 2 million copies.

His next single, "There You Go," also reached No. 1 on the country charts, and in July he was invited to join the Grand Ole Opry. By the summer of 1958 he had written more than 50 songs, many of them recorded by other artists, and he had sold more than 6 million records for Sun. But when the label balked at letting Mr. Cash record gospel music, he moved on to Columbia Records, where he would remain for the next 28 years.

Columbia in short order released several successful albums and a single, "Don't Take Your Guns to Town," that sold half a million copies. Mr. Cash began appearing on leading television programs such as "The Ed Sullivan Show" and acting in film and television Westerns. The rigors of touring and Mr. Cash's own bouts of depression contributed to a dependency on both amphetamines and barbiturates, which began in the early 1960s and have been legal with a prescription.

"There is that beast there in me. And I got to keep him caged or he'll eat me alive," he said in an interview with Neil Strauss in The New York Times in 1994. Johnny Cash's appeal transcended boundaries of class, generation and geography. In a career during which he recorded more than 1,500 songs, Mr. Cash applied his gritty voice to almost every kind of material, all delivered in a near-monotone that was the vocal equivalent of a monument hammered out of stone.

Mr. Cash's stoical singing about loneliness and death, love and humble Christian faith, reflected the barren terrain of his upbringing. He was born Feb. 26, 1932, in a shack in Kingsland, to Ray Cash and Carrie Rivers Cash, cotton farmers who were wiped out in the Depression. They named him it is not clear how the name John evolved, and the remains a mystery.

But it was the legendary record producer Sam Phillips of Sun Records who later gave him the name Johnny. When young J.R. was 3, the family moved to 20 acres of fertile land and a five-room house in Dyess Colony, in northeastern Arkansas, near the Mississippi River. There he spent the next 15 years, working in the fields and learning the plain-spoken stories of the sharecroppers in the area. Drawn to country music on the radio, he listened to the Grand Ole Opry from Nashville, Tenn.

He began writing songs, poems and stories and sang on local radio in Arkansas. After his high school graduation, he headed north to Michigan and took a job at an auto body plant in Pontiac. The job lasted less than a month, and he enlisted in the Air Force in 1950 and was sent to Landsberg, Germany. While overseas, Mr. Cash picked up the guitar and began writing songs, including "Hey Porter," which would later be one side of his first single.

Returning to the United States in 1954, he married Vivian Liberto, whom he had met while doing his basic training in Texas, and they moved to Memphis. There he met a pair of guitar-playing auto mechanics, Monroe Perkins and Marshall Grant, who with the steel guitarist A.W. Ker-nodle became the members of his first band, the Tennessee Three. In late 1954, the band minus Kernodle, who had left, auditioned for Sam Phillips, and the following spring the group recorded five songs for Sun Records. One of the songs, written by Mr.

Cash, was a sentimental ballad called "Cry, Cry, Cry," which became the first country hit for the fledgling label. Mr. Cash was signed to a contract by Sun and began to tour the United States and Canada and appear on radio and television. bums, "At Folsom Prison" and "At San Quentin," and teamed with Bob Dylan for a memorable "Girl From the North Country" on Dylan's "Nashville Skyline" album. By 1969, Mr.

Cash was the host of his own network television show, appearing over the next two years with such stars as Dylan, Glen Campbell, Ray Charles and the Carter Family. Also in 1969, his novelty song "A Boy Named Sue," written by Shel Sil-verstein, became the biggest pop hit of his career. By the 1980s, Mr. Cash and his family constituted one of the nation's most respected musical dynasties. Rosanne Cash, a daughter by his first marriage, and her husband at the time, singer and songwriter Rodney Crowell, were leading lights among the younger generation of country musicians.

Mr. Cash, like many other older stars who had achieved an almost statesmanlike status in country music, experienced some decline in record sales in the 1980s and '90s. But if his record-J ing career flagged, his legend flourished. He and his fellow country music performers Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson toured and recorded as the Highwaymen. He received a Grammy Legend Award in 1990 and two years later was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Four years after that, he was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors. His musical career took an unusual turn in 1994 when he was signed by Rick Rubin, a producer of heavy metal and rap acts, in--eluding the Beastie Boys, to Rubin's label, American Records. "American Recordings," his first album for the label, was a bare-bones country-folk album that sold only a little more than 100,000 copies but won him his sixth Grammy Award. Mr. Cash is survived by bis four daughters, Rosanne, Tara, Cinda and Kathy; and a son, John Carter, all of whom performed with him at one time or another.

Johnny Cash peforms at the Hollywood Bowl, about 1962. chicka-boom beat of the early hits he recorded with his trio, the Tennessee Three, were primal rock 'n' roll sounds. And his deep groaning voice, with its crags and quavers, demonstrated that a voice need not be pretty in order to be eloquent Mr. Cash's 1954 song about violent outcasts, "Folsom Prison Blues," has even been described as a forerunner of gangsta rap. The song, which he wrote shortly after he left the Air Force, captured an essential ingredient of his mystique: the image of the reformed outlaw.

With its bare-bones realism, the song distilled the aura of sepulchral grimness that often seemed to engulf Mr. Cash, who fought a long up-and-down battle against substance abuse, particularly amphetamine addiction. But in fact he spent only one day of his life in jail, in El Paso, Texas, for possession of pills that would steadily worsened. He began missing engagements and went on wild binges. His wife, Vivian, sued for divorce.

After one particularly se-rious drug Cash Circa 1970 SELECTED RECORDS BY JOHNNY CASH binge in 1967, he was found by a policeman in a tiny Georgia town, close to death. June Carter, the daughter of Mother Maybelle Carter of the Carter Family, was instrumental in altering the course of his life. She persuaded him to undergo treatment for his drug dependency and helped him to rediscover the Christian faith of his childhood. After marrying in 1968, they toured together in a family show. Mr.

Cash's career took a sharp upswing in the late 1960s. He released two hugely successful al- A Boy Named Sue, 1969 Sunday Morning Coming Down, 1970 Man in Black, 1971 A Thing Called Love, 1972 Ragged Old Rag, 1974 One Piece at a Time, 1976 (Ghost) Riders in the Sky, 1979 Desperados Waiting for a Train, 1985 Highwayman, with Willie Nelson, Wayton Jennings and Kris Kristofferson, 1985 Unchained, 1997 Solitary Man, 2000 American IV: The Man Comes Around, 2002 The Asssociated Press Cry, Cry, Cry, 1955 Folsom Prison Blues, 1956 I Walk the Line, 1956 Get Rhythm. 1956 Home of the Blues, 1957 Ballad of a Teenage Queen, 1958 Big River, 1958 Guess Things Happen That Way, 1958 Dont Take Your Guns to Town, 1959 Tennessee Flat-Top Box, 1961 Ring of Fire, 1963 The Ballad of Ira Hayes, 1964 It Ain't Me, Babe, with June Carter, 1964 Orange Blossom Special, 1965 Jackson, with June Carter, 1967 Daddy Sang Bass, 1968 STLtoday.com Hear audio clips from some of John ny Cash's best-known songs online at STLtoday.commusic..