Rise to Fame
He showed up at Sun Records in Memphis in 1955 wanting to be a gospel singer. Sam Phillips pointed him toward secular music instead, and the result was Folsom Prison Blues, a song Cash wrote after watching a prison film at his air base in Germany. I Walk the Line followed in 1956 and crossed to pop. By 1957, he was the top artist in country. The real pivot came in 1968, when he recorded live inside Folsom Prison. The label thought it was career suicide. The inmates got a show. Everyone else got one of the best live albums in American music.
In the Spotlight
Columbia had dropped him back in 1986. Rick Rubin, a producer better known for Beastie Boys and Slayer, saw Cash perform at Bob Dylan's 30th anniversary concert and decided he was being wasted. The American Recordings series stripped everything back to voice and guitar and had him covering Soundgarden and Nine Inch Nails. The Hurt video, shot at his Hendersonville estate while he was visibly failing, got nominated for six VMAs at the 2003 ceremony. Justin Timberlake won and said Cash deserved it more than anyone in the room. American IV was his first album to go gold in thirty years.
Side Notes
He got arrested seven times and never spent more than one night in jail. The outlaw image was a costume. The 1965 El Paso arrest tells the real story: cops found 688 amphetamine capsules and 475 sedatives stashed in his guitar case. He got a suspended sentence because the pills were technically prescriptions. At the White House, he refused to play the songs Nixon requested. Years earlier, while intercepting Soviet radio transmissions for the Air Force in Germany, he became the first American to learn of Stalin's death.
Final Chapter
June Carter Cash died on May 15, 2003. Cash kept recording anyway, completing 60 songs in his final four months. His last public performance was July 5 at the Carter Family Fold in Virginia, helped from a wheelchair to reach the microphone. He died September 12. A memorial concert at the Ryman Auditorium drew Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, and Sheryl Crow, broadcast on CMT in November. American V: A Hundred Highways came out posthumously in July 2006.