Johnny Cash: The Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

especially aggressive, the pranks would take on a harder edge. He loved, for instance, to break bottles he’d find stacked up behind stores in town or sneak into a field at night and set fire to a farmer’s haystack. In the Dyess High School annual at the end of his junior year, Cash was called “historian” for his interest in the subject, while Clanton, who was known throughout the school as the mastermind behind all the pranks, was simply “The Schemer.”
    After his weekly trip to the movies, Cash never had enough money to play the jukebox, but he did a good job of talking others into pushing the button next to the name of Eddy Arnold, who had become a new favorite. Arnold was the hottest thing in country music in the mid-1940s, thanks to such records as “I’ll Hold You in My Heart (Till I Can Hold You in My Arms).” Unlike the rawer honky-tonk style that J.R. usually preferred, Arnold sang with a crooning, pop-flavored approach that made him sort of the Bing Crosby of country.
    One day in the summer of 1947, J.R. heard on the radio that the cast of one of his favorite radio shows, the High Noon Roundup, was coming to Dyess for a concert. The whole Cash family listened to the show, which was broadcast live over Memphis station WMPS, during their lunch breaks from the fields. J.R. arrived at the school for the concert two hours early with Jesse and Harry. He puffed anxiously on a cigarette, hoping to figure out a way to meet the Louvin Brothers, who were the stars of the weekday program.
    J.R. recognized Charlie Louvin when he got out of a black Cadillac, and the teenager’s knees shook as Louvin walked toward him. All Louvin wanted was directions to the restroom, but J.R. took advantage of the request to escort the radio star there. He wanted to ask Louvin how he could get into the music business, but he didn’t have the nerve. Just walking alongside Louvin, however, made the whole idea of being a professional singer seem more possible.
    After the show, J.R. and his friends watched as the musicians put their equipment into their car and headed back to Memphis. J.R. would have given anything to be in the car with them. When Louvin waved at him as they pulled away, it was his biggest thrill since Eleanor Roosevelt shook his hand. In the weeks after the concert, J.R. started thinking of country singers and the Roosevelts in the same light. They both brought people together and made them feel good, and people cheered them. He assumed, of course, they must all be Baptists.
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    As J.R. moved through high school, he began to feel increasingly anxious about his future. For all the time he had spent thinking about being on the radio, he realized he didn’t have any idea how to make that happen. There was no station in Dyess where he might try to persuade someone to give a local boy the chance to show what he could do. J.R. still talked to his family and a few friends about being on the radio someday, but privately he was starting to worry.
    Truth be known, Ray wasn’t the only one in the Cash family who had doubts about J.R.’s musical dreams. Carrie wanted to support her son, but his voice was high-pitched, not at all husky and deep-rooted like the singers on the radio. Besides, he was shy. How could he be a singer if he couldn’t stand before an audience? Carrie had tried to help J.R. with his insecurity by arranging for him to sing in front of the church congregation. Cash later called it the “most horrible experience of my life.” It might have been all right in church if his mother had been onstage with him, but he found himself standing next to the preacher and a stranger on piano. He felt as if he “totally bombed,” but his mother didn’t give up; she kept pushing him to sing before the congregation, and every time J.R. felt embarrassed. It wasn’t the singing—it was the people watching him.
    That wall of shyness began to crack one afternoon in the summer of 1947. Carrie and Joanne were doing the