Stories and Lifestyle

Johnny Cash lived without making many compromises - and his fans loved him for it. Entire generations of music lovers and colleagues admired Johnny Cash for a long time - not always because but sometimes despite the fact that he was a country musician. Former US President Richard Nixon once called him "the voice of America, as rich and strong as our nation itself."

Of course, Cash also sang for the president - but he preferred to dedicate his music to the darker side of the American dream, the hardships of the poor, the workers, the criminals, the Natives. His prison concerts are legendary, he even got into trouble with the guards there. He sang there for free, his best-known concerts are those in the prisons of San Quentin and Folsom in California that have even been recorded for albums. To remind of the suffering of the underprivileged and the forgotten, he always wore black, as mentioned in his hit song "The Man in Black." In 1969, the sales figures for those two albums even overtook those of the Beatles. Cash's authenticity may also have been partially responsible for his not always straight-lined success.

Cash was born in 1932 in Kingsland in the southern US state of Arkansas. He grew up with six siblings in humble circumstances. As a child, he always had scratches on his hands and backaches from working on his parents cotton fields at the Mississippi. He made the first steps toward his music career in the 1950s as a US soldier in Germany, where he was stationed with an air force unit in the Bavarian Landsberg.

Cash liked to tell that he had bought his first guitar in Germany. He wrote two of his most popular songs in Germany, "Folsom Prison Blues" and "I Walk The Line." Furthermore, he founded a country band back then, the Landsberg Bavarians.

Together with Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins, he created the Rockabilly style in the 1950s, a synthesis of hard country music and rhythm & blues. With a record deal with Sam Phillips' legendary Sun Records, where Elvis Presley had his record deal as well, he started his steep career in 1955. Together with the group Tennessee Three his first single came out on June 21, 1955, with the songs "Hey Porter" and "Cry, Cry, Cry." The mix of Rock and Country was typical for Cash. In the 1960s he was the first political, angry-critical country singer. Furthermore, Cash had also become a successful actor and moderator. From 1969 until 1971 he even hosted his very own show, the "Johnny Cash Show."

Thus, Johnny Cash, together with Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings who died in 2002, was the pioneer of the alternative movement in the country scene. He received numerous awards - in 1980 he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame and in 1992 into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Until Elvis Presley was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1998, Cash had been the only one to receive both honors.

However, the recurring drug and alcohol excesses seemed to slow down Johnny Cash's creative energies in the 1970s. Cash, who had always been very religious, turned to God. In the 1990s Cash made a sensational comeback after he had been gone several years and won over a whole new group of fans. The four records he made in cooperation with producer and hip hop guru Rick Rubin from 1994 were the basis for Cash's later reputation as inspiration for a young country movement that learned to treat old American tradition with the necessary amount of respect. On these albums, Cash covered songs by bands such as Danzig, Nine Inch Nails, U2 and Soundgarden. The subject usually revolved around death, which critically ill Johnny Cash had felt approaching for a long time, but also always hope. A terrible blow was the death of his beloved wife June in May of 2003.

The singer's last years were marked by his disease. Apart from diabetes and several cases of severe bronchitis, he also frequently spent time in the hospital because of pancreas problems. At the end of the 90s it also came out that Cash suffered from autonomic neuropathy, a very rare disease. In 1999, however, he recovered enough to record the album "Solitary Man." One year later he announced that he was leaving the stage for good and only recording CDs in the future. In 2002 his last album came out, "The Man Comes Around."

In the February of 2003, Johnny Cash received his 11th Grammy for the song "Give My Love To Rose." At the MTV Video Awards, Cash had recently been honored for the video of his song "Hurt." One line of the song goes "I hurt myself today to see that I still live."

Johnny Cash died on September 12, 2003 at the age of 71 from the consequences of his severe diabetes in a hospital in Nashville.