Johnny Cash: The Life Read Online Free PDF

dishes in the kitchen when they heard a voice through the open window singing a new gospel song that had been sweeping the country, “Everybody’s Gonna Have a Wonderful Time Up There.”
    Carrie looked out the window and saw fifteen-year-old J.R. pumping water into a bucket.
    “Is that you singing, J.R.?”
    He spun around and smiled, “Yes, Mama. My voice has gotten a little lower.”
    Carrie called her son into the kitchen and she cried as she hugged him.
    “You’ve got a gift, J.R. You are going to sing,” she told him. “God’s got his hand on you. You’re going to carry the message of Jesus Christ.”
    Carrie was so caught up in J.R.’s “gift” that she vowed to do what she could to nurture him. She wanted J.R. to take singing lessons, but he resisted for almost two years. Finally, Carrie insisted. She was making $5 to $6 a week using the family’s new washing machine to launder the clothes of some of the schoolteachers. She set aside $3 for once-a-week lessons with a young teacher in Lepanto, a larger town eight miles away. J.R. went along grudgingly each week to see LaVanda Mae Fielder. It might have been okay if she had let him sing songs he knew, but he had to sing songs the teacher thought were good vocal exercises, such as the Irish ballad “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.”
    After just three lessons, Fielder was frustrated by the teenager’s lack of progress. To make him more comfortable, she changed her strategy. She asked him to pick a song. He thought immediately of Hank Williams, whose “Lovesick Blues” was all over the radio in the early months of 1949. The chance to sing one of his favorite new songs freed J.R., and his voice was so engaging, the teacher closed the lid on her piano and told him the lessons were over. He shouldn’t ever let anyone change his style, “ever,” she repeated forcefully.
    These words gave J.R. enough confidence finally to stand in front of the church congregation without quivering. He started becoming more active at school, too, widening his group of friends and even showing his poems and other writings to some of his classmates. He gained such a good reputation as a writer that several of his friends paid him—usually about fifty cents—to write their homework poems or essays. “He was good with words,” recalls J. E. Huff. “He was smarter than we were. That’s for sure.” Classmate A. J. Henson liked a poem that J.R. wrote for him so much that he could still recite it more than five decades later:
    The top hand mounted his trusty steed
    And rode across the plain.
    He said, “I’ll ride until setting sun
    Unless I lose my rein.”
    The top hand gave a jerk
    And Bob drew up the slack.
    He rode his trail until setting sun
    Then rode a freight train back.
    A.J. got an A on the assignment.
    Still, J.R. couldn’t shake the pressure of needing to find a job after high school. All the years his father told him he was foolish to waste his energy on music had left an impression.
VI
    As their senior year approached, J.R. and his friends spent many an evening trying to figure out how to escape the toilsome life their parents led. “The only thing we knew for sure was we weren’t going to be farmers,” Huff says. The government program in Dyess had given people like Ray Cash the chance to survive, but never to flourish. The land was worked so hard that it had already lost what richness it had had, making it almost impossible for families to break even. Many of the long-timers left the delta settlement for Memphis, just fifty miles away, or other parts of the country where they could find better pay and easier work. Ray Cash began taking odd jobs in nearby towns to supplement his income.
    With his pals, J.R. weighed the merits of the main career paths that young men from poor families in the South often chose in the 1940s: head north to the auto plants in Michigan or join the military. There was also a third option—head to California in hopes of