Johnny Cash – Alan E. Hunter

The Genesis of Bob Dylan, Part 1

March 3, 2025March 3, 2025 Alan E. Hunter- Irvington

Original Publish Date February 20, 2025.

https://weeklyview.net/2025/02/20/the-genesis-of-bob-dylan-part-1/

Another sad anniversary passed recently. On February 3, 1959, rock and roll pioneers Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and “The Big Bopper” J. P. Richardson were all killed (along with pilot Roger Peterson) in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa. The event became known as “The Day the Music Died” after Don McLean memorialized it in his 1971 song “American Pie.” While the anniversary passes every year, every so often they put us in a reflective mood. This year’s anniversary observance came on the heels of my 2-part article on the tragic death of Hattie Carroll, a subject that serrated Bob Dylan’s soul.

It turns out the Clear Lake plane crash had an equal impact on him, but for this one, Dylan had a front-row seat. On January 31, 1959, 18-year-old Robert Allen Zimmerman was in the crowd when Buddy Holly brought his ill-fated “Winter Dance Party” tour to Dylan’s Duluth Minnesota hometown. Holly, Valens, and the Big Bopper (along with Waylon Jennings and Dion and the Belmonts) came to the National Guard Armory in that city nine days into a grueling 24-date barnstorming tour of small ballrooms and theatres of the midwest in the dead of winter. While the tour was scheduled to go as far south as Chicago, Cincinnati, and Louisville, it did not include any Indiana stops.

In June 2017, after being honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature, the famously enigmatic Dylan reflected on his earliest influences. As you may imagine, Dylan singled out three books specifically: Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Odyssey before reflecting on Buddy Holly and how that night started him on his musical journey. “If I was to go back to the dawning of it all, I guess I’d have to start with Buddy Holly. Buddy died when I was about 18 and he was 22. From the moment I first heard him, I felt akin. I felt related like he was an older brother. I even thought I resembled him.” Dylan continued, “Buddy played the music that I loved, the music I grew up on country western, rock and roll, and rhythm and blues. Three separate strands of music that he intertwined and infused into one genre. One brand. And Buddy wrote songs, songs that had beautiful melodies and imaginative verses. And he sang great, sang in more than a few voices. He was the archetype, everything I wasn’t and wanted to be.”

**Buddy Holly’s Performing at his Final Concert**.

“I saw him only but once, and that was a few days before he was gone,” Dylan recalled. “I had to travel a hundred miles to get to see him play, and I wasn’t disappointed. He was powerful and electrifying and had a commanding presence. I was only six feet away. He was mesmerizing. I watched his face, his hands, the way he tapped his foot, his big black glasses, the eyes behind the glasses, the way he held his guitar, the way he stood, his neat suit. Everything about him. He looked older than 22. Something about him seemed permanent, and he filled me with conviction.”

**Buddy Holly Makes Eye Contact at the Duluth Armory**.

Even though it happened 57 years prior, Dylan remembered the experience of standing a few feet away and making eye contact with Holly like it was yesterday. And of course, he described it exactly as you would expect: Bob Dylan style: “Then, out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened,” said Dylan. “He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. Something I didn’t know what. And it gave me the chills.” Three days after locking eyes with his musical idol, Buddy Holly was dead. Holly’s death caused Dylan to reflect on his own mortality at such a young age, stripping away the confidence of youth and beginning the complicated relationship between Dylan and death that would resonate in his songwriting for the rest of his career. Throughout his career, Dylan covered many of Holly’s songs: “Gotta Travel On,” “Not Fade Away,” “Heartbeat,” and others.

On his 1997 triple Grammy-winning album Time Out of Mind Dylan sings “When the last rays of daylight go down / Buddy, you’re old no more” on “Standing in the Doorway.” Dylan said he could feel the late rocker’s presence while making the album. In a 1999 interview, Dylan said, “I don’t really recall exactly what I said about Buddy Holly, but while we were recording, every place I turned there was Buddy Holly. It was one of those things. Every place you turned. You walked down a hallway and you heard Buddy Holly records like ‘That’ll Be the Day.’ Then you’d get in the car to go over to the studio and ‘Rave On’ would be playing. Then you’d walk into this studio and someone’s playing a cassette of ‘It’s So Easy.’” Dylan continued, “And this would happen day after day after day. Phrases of Buddy Holly songs would just come out of nowhere. It was spooky, but after we recorded and left, it stayed in our minds. Well, Buddy Holly’s spirit must have been someplace, hastening this record.” When it won Album of the Year in 1998, Dylan said, “I just have some sort of feeling that he [Holly] was, I don’t know how or why, but I know he was with us all the time we were making this record in some kind of way.”

Dylan later described what happened a day or two after the plane crash when someone gave him a copy of an obscure 12-string guitarist from Louisiana named Huddy Lead Belly. It was of the 1940 song “Cotton Fields” (also known as “In Them Old Cotton Fields Back Home”). Dylan said, “I think it was a day or two after that that his plane went down. And somebody-somebody I’d never seen before-handed me a Leadbelly record with the song ‘Cotton Fields’ on it. And that record changed my life right then and there. Transported me into a world I’d never known. It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of a sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me. I must have played that record a hundred times.” Lead Belly led to more influential artists like Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker, and others in folk and blues, country, and jazz.

Songwriter Kris Kristofferson once described his friend Johnny Cash as being “a walking contradiction, partly fact, partly fiction” but that verse could easily be applied to Bob Dylan, especially when one considers that Cash was another of Dylan’s acknowledged influences. Over the years, Dylan has acknowledged other influences, and, like Cash, some are more obvious than others. Dylan’s Jewish Russian immigrant parents were fond of the Grand Ole Opry show on WSM radio. WSM broadcasts originated in Brentwood, Tennessee, and featured a unique 808-foot tall “Diamond” shaped tower that allowed the radio station to broadcast to forty states and hundreds of largely rural and small-town audiences. To this day, the WSM Tower is the oldest surviving intact example of this type of radio tower in the world.

In the early 1950s, Dylan listened to the Grand Ole Opry radio show and heard the songs of Hank Williams for the first time. In his 2004 book, Dylan wrote: “The first time I heard Hank [Williams] he was singing on the Grand Ole Opry…Roy Acuff, who MC’d the program was referred to by the announcer as ‘The King of Country Music.’ Someone would always be introduced as ‘the next governor of Tennessee’ and the show advertised dog food and sold plans for old-age pensions. Hank sang ‘Move It On Over,’ a song about living in the doghouse and it struck me really funny. He also sang spirituals like ‘When God Comes and Gathers His Jewels’ and ‘Are you Walking and a-Talking for the Lord.’ The sound of his voice went through me like an electric rod and I managed to get a hold of a few of his 78s-’Baby We’re Really In Love’ and ‘Honky Tonkin’’ and ‘Lost Highway ‘-and I played them endlessly.”

Dylan continued, “They called him a ‘hillbilly singer,’ but I didn’t know what that was. Homer and Jethro were more like what I thought a hillbilly was. Hank was no burr head. There was nothing clownish about him. Even at a young age, I identified fully with him. I didn’t have to experience anything that Hank did to know what he was singing about. I’d never seen a robin weep, but could imagine it and it made me sad. When he sang ‘the news is out all over town,’ I knew what news that was, even though I didn’t know. The first chance I got, I was going to go to the dance and wear out my shoes too. I’d learn later that Hank had died in the backseat of a car on New Year’s Day, kept my fingers crossed, hoped it wasn’t true. But it was true. It was like a great tree had fallen. Hearing about Hank’s death caught me squarely on the shoulder. The silence of outer space never seemed so loud. Intuitively I knew, though, that his voice would never drop out of sight or fade away-a voice like a beautiful horn.”

“Much later, I’d discover that Hank had been in tremendous pain all of his life, suffered from severe spinal problems-that the pain must have been torturous. In light of that, it’s all the more astonishing to hear his records. It’s almost like he defied the laws of gravity. The Luke the Drifter record, I just about wore out. That’s the one where he sings and recites parables, like the Beatitudes. I could listen to the Luke the Drifter record all day and drift away myself, become totally convinced in the goodness of man. When I hear Hank sing, all movement ceases. The slightest whisper seems sacrilege. In time, I became aware that in Hank’s recorded songs were the archetype rules of poetic songwriting. The architectural forms are like marble pillars and they had to be there. Even his words-all of his syllables are divided up so they make perfect mathematical sense. You can learn a lot about the structure of songwriting by listening to his records, and I listened to them a lot and had them internalized. In a few years’ time, Robert Shelton, the folk and jazz critic for the New York Times, would review one of my performances and would say something like ‘resembling a cross between a choirboy and a beatnik…he breaks all the rules in songwriting, except that of having something to say”. The rules, whether Shelton knew it or not, were Hank’s rules, but it wasn’t like I ever meant to break them. It’s just that what I was trying to express was beyond the circle.”

The Genesis of Bob Dylan, Part 2

Original Publish Date February 27, 2025.

https://weeklyview.net/2025/02/27/the-genesis-of-bob-dylan-part-2/

Bob Dylan’s next early musical influence came sandwiched between Hank and Buddy, and it is one you might not expect. Dylan discovered the plaintive delivery of Johnnie Ray (1927-1990) a singer/songwriter who played piano while delivering song lyrics tinged by a stream of tears. Although Ray is largely forgotten today, he was wildly popular for most of the 1950s and has been cited by many artists and critics as a major precursor to rock and roll. Tony Bennett called Ray the “father of rock and roll.” Dylan wrote of Johnnie Ray: “He was the first singer whose voice and style, I guess, I totally fell in love with… I loved his style, wanted to dress like him too.”

Johnnie Ray was a star in a pre-Elvis gyrating world of pop music, a genre of teenaged music that hadn’t existed before World War II. Ray was tall and lanky, partially deaf, and a little awkward on stage, a perceived fragility that caused his songs like “The Little White Cloud That Cried” and “Cry” to soar. Johnnie Ray didn’t just sing these songs-he became them. The press nicknamed him “The Prince of Wails,” “Mr. Emotion,” and “The Nabob of Sob.”

Ray was every bit of an enigma as Bob Dylan. He was an alcoholic who was loved and admired by the Black community (he began his career by performing in segregated Black nightclubs in the 1950s) and a man who never really divulged his sexuality. He was married to a woman in 1952/separated in 1953/divorced in 1954 and was allegedly the father of a child with journalist and What’s My Line TV show panelist Dorothy Kilgallen (1913-1965). In 1951, and again in 1956, Johnnie was arrested and briefly jailed for soliciting a plain-clothed police officer, both times in Detroit. Ray pled guilty to both charges, paid the fine, and was released. Ray was later arrested in a gay bar but the charges were kept quiet.

Sadly, Johnnie found no place in the folk music phenomenon, the rock ‘n’ roll revolution passed him by, and the British Invasion killed all the “white bread” acts, even though Ringo Starr admitted that, in the early days of The Beatles, they only loved “Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Johnnie Ray.” Oh, there were movie roles, starring alongside Marilyn Monroe in 1954’s There’s No Business Like Show Business, but only fans in the UK and Australia stood by him. During the ’60s and ’70s, Ray made occasional television appearances, but he was largely a forgotten man. Although today, it should be said that Johnnie is mentioned in a Billy Idol song, featured in the opening lines of “Come On Eileen” by Dexys Midnight Runners, and as a cultural touchstone in Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire.” Bob Dylan said this of Ray: “He was the first singer whose voice and style, I guess, I totally fell in love with. There was just something about the way he sang ‘When Your Sweetheart Sends A Letter’…that just knocked me out. I loved his style, wanted to dress like him too.”

During the fifties, Johnnie Ray went toe-to-toe on the charts with Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley. While the press tried to gin up an imagined feud between Elvis and Johnnie, the two had a mutual respect. After returning to the States from a European tour in 1956, Johnnie Ray was asked “What do you think of Elvis Presley?” He replied, “What’s an Elvis Presley?” People thought he was disrespecting Elvis, but at that point, he had been out of the country and never heard of him. However, Elvis would often sing Johnnie’s songs (like “Such a Night”) through the years. Johnnie Ray bridged the gap between swing and rock n roll and his influence is a huge one. But what about Elvis, was the king of rock n roll an influence on Bob Dylan?

**Dylan in Andy Warhol’s studio with Warhol’s Elvis.**

In a 2009 Rolling Stone interview, Dylan said, “I never met Elvis, because I didn’t want to meet Elvis. Elvis was in his Sixties movie period, and he was just crankin’ ’em out and knockin’ ’em off, one after another. And Elvis had kind of fallen out of favor in the Sixties. He didn’t really come back until, whatever was it, ’68? I know the Beatles went to see him, and he just played with their heads…Elvis was truly some sort of American king…And, well, like I said, I wouldn’t quite say he was ridiculed, but close. You see, the music scene had gone past him, and nobody bought his records. Nobody young wanted to listen to him or be like him. Nobody went to see his movies, as far as I know. He just wasn’t in anybody’s mind. Two or three times we were up in Hollywood, and he had sent some of the Memphis Mafia down to where we were to bring us up to see Elvis. But none of us went. Because it seemed like a sorry thing to do. I don’t know if I would have wanted to see Elvis like that. I wanted to see the powerful, mystical Elvis that had crash-landed from a burning star onto American soil. The Elvis that was bursting with life. That’s the Elvis that inspired us to all the possibilities of life. And that Elvis was gone, had left the building.“

But who was Bob Dylan’s main influence on his musical career? Other than Buddy Holly, it was the only artist that Dylan ever made an effort to find: Woody Guthrie. In May 1960, Dylan dropped out of college and by January 1961, he was performing in coffee houses around Greenwich Village in New York City. Five days after arriving in “The Village,” Dylan tracked Guthrie down at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Morris Plains, New Jersey. In September of 1954, unable to control his muscles, Guthrie checked himself into the facility. He wouldn’t leave for another two years, and when he did so in May 1956, he spent days wandering the streets of Morristown, New Jersey, in a state of homelessness. Guthrie was picked up by police and spent a night in Morris County Jail. It was believed that he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and Woody was transferred back to Greystone. It was a voluntary readmission and Greystone staffers could not believe that this drifter had published a book and countless songs. Later Guthrie was diagnosed with Huntington’s disease, a hereditary condition that cause loss of body control.

**Woody Guthrie and his famous guitar.**

By the time Bob Dylan met his hero in the winter of 1961, “The Village” was flooded with folk players, and the radio was populated with singers riffing on black artists (Pat Boone’s “Tutti-Fruiti” being the most egregious example) or catchy, but safe, songs from Tin Pan Alley songwriters. This prompted Dylan to comment, “I always kind of wrote my own songs but I never really would play them. Nobody played their own songs, the only person I knew who really did it was Woody Guthrie. Then one day,” he continued, “I just wrote a song, and it was the first song I ever wrote, and it was ‘A Song for Woody Guthrie.’ And I just felt like playing it one night and I played it. I just wanted a song to sing and there came a certain point where I couldn’t sing anything, I had to write what I wanted to sing because what I wanted to sing nobody else was writing, I couldn’t find that song someplace. If I could’ve I probably wouldn’t have ever started writing.” The song would be featured on Dylan’s self-titled debut album, released on March 19, 1962. The album sold 5,000 copies in its first year, just breaking even.

By then, Guthrie’s condition had declined to the point that he could barely move and depending on the day, barely speak. Performing was out of the question. So Dylan sang Woody’s songs back to him and the friendship blossomed. In the novel My Name is New York, Dylan said, “When I met him, he was not functioning with all of his facilities at 100 percent. I was there more as a servant. I knew all of his songs, and I went there to sing him his songs. He always liked the songs. He’d ask for certain ones and I knew them all!” Thereafter, the two shared a unique bond that would last the rest of Guthrie’s life. Dylan wrote of Guthrie’s impact: “The songs themselves had the infinite sweep of humanity in them… [He] was the true voice of the American spirit. I said to myself I was going to be Guthrie’s greatest disciple.” When Guthrie died at age 55 in 1967, Dylan emerged from a self-imposed exile after a motorcycle accident to perform a tribute concert to his hero at Carnegie Hall. According to one biographer, “This farewell to Dylan’s ‘last idol’ was the moment the legacy of American folk was crystalized.”

While any conversations shared between Dylan and Guthrie during those meetings will likely never be known, one Guthrie song is irresistible to not comment on…and speculate. In 1954, Guthrie wrote a song that describes what he felt were the racist housing practices and discriminatory rental policies of his landlord. In December 1950, Guthrie signed a lease at the Beach Haven apartment complex in Gravesend, Brooklyn. The song is called “Old Man Trump” and his landlord was none other than Fred Trump, father of U.S. President Donald Trump. In the song, Guthrie expresses his dissatisfaction with the “color line” Trump had drawn in his Brooklyn neighborhood. Oddly, there are no known Guthrie recordings of this song. However, the lyrics (written in Guthrie’s own hand) were discovered in 2016. “I suppose Old Man Trump knows, Just how much Racial Hate He stirred up In the bloodpot of human hearts When he drawed That color line Here at his Beach Haven family project…Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower, Where no Black folks come to roam. No, no, Old Man Trump! Old Beach Haven ain’t my home!”

Creepy history, Music

Johnny and June Carter Cash’s Home: Nashville’s Graceland, Part I

February 23, 2025 Alan E. Hunter- Irvington

Original Publish Date August 22, 2024.

https://weeklyview.net/2024/08/22/johnny-and-june-carter-cashs-home-nashvilles-graceland-part-1/

In July 2023, my wife and I made the 4 1/2 hour drive down to Nashville, Tennessee, for my birthday. After a few stops in Music City, we made an 18-mile side trip to the northeast suburb of Hendersonville and Old Hickory Lake. We traveled to Hendersonville to visit the site of Twitty City (the former home and amusement park complex owned and operated by Conway Twitty in the 1980s and 90s), Marty Robbins’ recording studio that he never used (he died in 1982, the same year it was set to open), Johnny and June Carter Cash’s gravesites, and the Cash family home at 200 Caudill Drive in Hendersonville. Well, what was left of it anyway. As you might imagine, the Cash Home, often described as country music’s Graceland, has an interesting history.

**Rhonda Hunter at Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash’s Graves.**

Johnny Cash fell in love with the house and the sprawling property the moment he saw it. Builder Braxton Dixon was building the home for his family, but Cash convinced him to sell it as a wedding present from Johnny to June. Dixon was no stranger to building celebrity homes, having built homes for Roy Orbison, Tammy Wynette, and Marty Stuart. Johnny bought the seven-bedroom/five full bathroom, 14,000 square foot mansion overlooking Old Hickory Lake in 1967 and lived there with June from 1968 to 2003. The four-lot lakefront property features five acres sitting right on the water, including 1,000 feet of lake frontage. The four large, 35-foot round front rooms featured stunning views of the property. Johnny and June lived there for 35 years and Cash wrote much of his famous music there. It was the only home the couple ever lived in together. Johnny Cash’s parents, Ray and Carrie, lived across the road from his mansion. Johnny’s brother Tommy described the house as “a very unusual contemporary structure. It was built on a solid rock foundation with native stone and wood and all kinds of unusual materials, from marble to old barn wood. I don’t think there was a major blueprint. I think the builder was building it the way he wanted it to look.”

It was the spiritual home of Cash and the musical universe he created. The home was visited by nearly every famous country star you can imagine: actors, rock stars, artists, politicians (Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Vice President Al Gore), and even Billy Graham. June cooked for them all in the home’s kitchen: eggs, pancakes, and ham in the morning, fried chicken, cornbread, and biscuits all day long. The home hosted Cash family Christmas celebrations, songwriting sessions, and informal jams (Johnny called them guitar pulls) featuring the likes of Bob Dylan, Brooks & Dunn, Joni Mitchell, Graham Nash, and a slew of others. In 1969, legend claims that an upstart songwriter named Kris Kristofferson landed a helicopter on the lawn, in hopes of getting the home’s famous owner to listen to some demos (from which Johnny picked “Sunday Morning Coming Down”). Cash’s late ’60s and early ’70s “guitar pulls” were held in a lakeside room accessed through a hallway and down some stairs from the home’s main family room. Although informal, these star-studded jams were profound, as Johnny writes in his 1997 autobiography, “Kris Kristofferson sang ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ for the first time … and Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now.’ Graham Nash sang ‘Marrakesh Express’, Shel Silverstein’s ‘A Boy Named Sue’ and Bob Dylan let us hear ‘Lay Lady Lay” during those sessions.”

**Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash Gravesite.**

The couple lived happily in their lakefront home until their deaths four months apart in 2003. With Johnny at her bedside, June died on May 15, 2003, at the age of 73, following heart valve replacement surgery. Johnny Cash died on September 12, 2003, at the age of 71, from what doctors said were complications from diabetes, but most believe he died of a broken heart. They are buried at the Hendersonville Memory Gardens near their home. A visit to the cemetery finds the manicured plot of the Cash family, the polished bronze grave ledger of John R. Cash at the left, and June Carter Cash to the right. The markers lay flat against the earth, completely covering the bodies that rest below. The markers usually found peppered with coins and guitar picks, feature facsimile signatures of both artists along with Old Testament Bible quotes from the book of Psalms. June’s mother Maybelle Carter and her sisters Helen and Anita are buried nearby. As are Luther Perkins, the original guitarist of Cash’s “Tennessee Three” band, and country stars Ferlin Husky and Sheb Wooley rest nearby.

**June & Johnny Cash inside their home.**

The Cash Mansion became an empty shrine to the duo for two years following their deaths. The couple’s furniture and many of their belongings, at least those that June didn’t give away to friends and family during the last years of her life, were still inside the house, but the couple was gone. It was always a tourist spot. Countless Greyhound buses, station wagons, vans, and carloads of people made the trek up that winding, narrow lane every day to lean on the stone and wood fence imagining Johnny and June as they were in life walking the property. To the surprise of many, in 2006, the Bee Gees’ Barry Gibb purchased the Cashes’ home for a mere $2.3 million. The Bee Gees frontman bought the property with plans of renovating, restoring, and making it an artist/writer’s retreat. Although he remodeled the interior, Gibb was determined to preserve the home to honor their memory and even pledged to keep intact whatever furnishings and decorator accents left behind. June was legendary for filling the house with ornate, tasteful objects that she had picked up and shipped home from performances all over the world. The renovations were at their final stage and Gibb was expected to move in that summer.

At 1:40 pm on April 10, 2007, a fire broke out outside the stone and wood building and while the fire department was on the scene within five minutes, the structure was already engulfed and the three-story contemporary structure burned to the ground. Only the chimney was still standing. But, a few original parts of the property survived the inferno, including the original garage, a covered boat dock, a bell garden, and a cute 1-bed, 1-bath detached apartment space where June stored her stage costumes. There’s also a tennis court, swimming pool, and a little guardhouse by the gate. The stone walls and steps that surrounded the home are still there as well as the stone/wood fences and gates that surround the property as they have done for half a century. The picturesque hardscaping still frames the trails that once hosted walks near the water from country royalty. The blaze spread quickly due to the flammable materials used in the construction work taking place in the mostly wooden interior. It was later revealed that the exterior structure itself was gutted when a flammable wood preserver that had been applied to the house caught on fire. Firefighters said the unusual multi-level structure of the house made the blaze even tougher to tackle. To his credit, Bee Gee Barry Gibb had removed most of that furniture, like Johnny and June’s bed, during renovation and it was safe and sound in storage.

While much music was written inside the mansion, not much music was made inside its walls. Photos of the Cash mansion can be found all over the internet and there are a couple of well-made videos you can check out too. The home was featured in the movie Walk the Line. In the film, the property is shown when Johnny and June’s families come together for Thanksgiving dinner. But the better view can be found in a 2002 music video filmed before Johnny died for the song “Hurt” which was filmed in the home. The video depicts a weakened, vulnerable Cash looking back at his life while surveying the home he and June shared. The video was largely filmed there, and it shows rare interiors of the home as well as views of the derelict House of Cash museum nearby. It is a must-see. Cash’s final recordings took place within the house as well, when he was too weak to make it to a studio.

If you visit the Cash property today, you can almost feel Johnny’s presence. After all, you can lean against Johnny’s stone & wood fence along Caudill Drive and gaze at the remaining buildings with ease. If you spend any time there, you’re likely to be joined by other pilgrims on the Cash trail. Not much in the way of conversation, just long moments of quiet reflection and an occasional nod of shared reverence. However, if you look over your left shoulder across the street, you can see the house where Johnny died. Johnny spent his final days living in the house at 185 Claudill Drive overlooking his old Lake House. The ranch house, which was built by the same architect, Braxton Dixon, was always referred to as “Mama Cash’s house” because it was where Cash’s parents lived before their passing. The ranch house is expansive, with 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, vaulted ceilings, stone fencing, and 200 feet of road frontage. Johnny spent his last days there when it became harder for him to get around in a wheelchair in the lake house. Both the lake house property and ranch house across the street have been sold (or have been offered for sale) in the years since Cash’s passing. The issue remains unclear and when I reached out to the registered owners for this story a few years back, my e-mails and phone calls were never responded to, so…

Better still, there is another lesser-known living connection to Johnny Cash on Caudill Drive. In 1978, Johnny began building a log cabin, finishing it in 1979. He intended to use it for rest, relaxation, songwriting, and recording. He named it Cash Cabin Studio but friends and family said the man in black called it the Sugarshack. The year the Cabin was built, Elvis Costello and Dave Edmunds along with members of the band Rockpile visited, being some of the first to write their names on the fireplace mantle piece. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers stopped by in the early 1980’s. In 1982 Johnny’s daughter Kathy and her husband Jimmy were wed there. Television star John Schneider of “The Dukes of Hazard” fame lived in the cabin for some time in the mid-1980s. Other early visitors included actor Robert Duvall, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, and Bono and Adam Clayton of U2.

**Cash Cabin Studio Interior With Mantel Above Fireplace.**

According to the website, “In 1991, June’s sister Anita Carter moved into the cabin and made it her home. It was Anita who first recorded in the cabin. Recording gear was brought in and set up and featured some wonderful musicians including Anita’s dear, old friend and master producer/guitarist Chet Atkins. In 1992, Johnny met producer Rick Rubin. Rick had a diverse creative palate, having made recordings for Run DMC, The Beastie Boys, and several other groundbreaking rap and heavy metal artists. Johnny signed up with Rick’s record company and went to California to work with Rick. Although most of Johnny’s first album in the Grammy Award-winning American Recordings series was recorded at Rick’s Los Angeles home, there were a couple of tracks recorded in the Cabin, with a simple tape machine and standard microphones. The magic of the Cabin’s music took off from there. Johnny went on to record almost half of the remainder of the American Recordings series at the Cabin. June Carter Cash also recorded both of her latter life Grammy Award-winning albums Press On and Wildwood Flower at the Cabin. Through this process, John Carter Cash worked intensely with his parents on their music. In the Summer of 2003, Johnny’s last recording, made mere days before his death, was in the Cabin. He recorded two songs in their entirety in those two sessions that day: “Like the 309” early in the day, for the album “American Recordings V, A Hundred Highways”, and “Engine 143” at the end of the day, for an album being produced by John Carter, “The Unbroken Circle, The Musical Heritage of the Carter Family”. But the story doesn’t end there.

Next Week: Part 2 of Johnny and June Carter Cash’s Home: Nashville’s Graceland.

Johnny and June Carter Cash’s Home: Nashville’s Graceland, Part II.

https://weeklyview.net/2024/08/29/johnny-and-june-carter-cashs-home-nashvilles-graceland-part-2/

After reading Part 1 of this article, it should come as no surprise that Johnny and June Carter Cash’s beloved Lake House has a mystique all its own. Johnny and June lived happily in the house for some 35 years. When they died (four months apart) in 2003, it sat empty for two years before it was sold by the Cash’s son, John Carter Cash, to Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees. As a bevy of contractors worked to meet the Gibbs’ July 4 deadline, the home caught fire and burned to the ground on April 10, 2007. Then Gibbs built a new house on higher ground, keeping the original Cash home foundations as a testament to the memory of Cash. The new house has been sold a few times but the Cash property remains pretty much the same as it was after the fire. Johnny and June had some famous neighbors too: Marty Stuart (Cash’s former son-in-law) and The Oak Ridge Boys’ Richard Sterban among them. After the fire, Sterban reportedly remarked that “perhaps, after all, no one except Johnny and June Carter Cash were meant to live at the lake house.”

So the Cash presence is strong here. While the Johnny Cash story is complicated, Kris Kristofferson wrote of his friend “John” that “He’s a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.” Cash struggled mightily with addictions and the only thing that saved him from himself was June Carter Cash. I can appreciate that. All questions of the Cash Lake House’s demise being tied to the passing of Johnny and June Carter Cash aside, Hickory Lake is no stranger to tragedy in its own right. There is an air of mystery that haunts Old Hickory Lake and extends beyond the charred ruins of the Cash mansion. Roy Orbison once owned a home right next to the Lake House. It burned down, killing two of his three sons. Orbison (1936-1988), was best known for his distinctive, natural lyric baritone voice featuring a range from A2 to G4: higher than the standard baritone range on the high end and not as low on the low end. Orbison’s (a.k.a. The Big O) lyric baritone voice was sweeter and lighter than the average baritone, and he could sing faster songs with more vocal agility than an average baritone. Orbison chose complex compositions and dark emotional ballads conveyed a quiet, desperate vulnerability, which led to his “Lonesome Roy” reputation. (Believe me, Roy Orbison was no boy scout. He was famous for his carousing and womanizing on the road and his conquest numbers could match anyone from Elvis to Wilt Chamberlain, but THAT is another story.) Between 1960 and 1964, 22 of his songs were placed on the Billboard Top Forty, including “Only the Lonely,” “Crying,” and “Oh, Pretty Woman.” Orbison’s trademark stage performance was standing still and solitary, lit by a single spotlight, dressed in black clothes and dark sunglasses which only added an air of mystery to his persona.

**Anthony King Orbison and Roy DeWayne Orbison with their mother Claudette holding baby Wesley.**

While playing a show in Birmingham England on Saturday, September 14, 1968, Orbison received the news that his home in Hendersonville had burned down. This occurred less than two years after the death of his wife Claudette Frady Orbison in a motorcycle accident on June 6, 1966, at the age of 24. It was a tragedy that plunged Orbison so deep into grief that he couldn’t write songs for a year and a half. To make matters worse, Roy received news that his sons Roy Dewayne Orbison, Jr. (age 10) and Anthony King Orbison (age 6) died in the fire. Their baby brother Wesley (age 3) survived. Fire officials stated that the cause of the fire may have been an aerosol can, which possibly contained some kind of lacquer. It was speculated that the boys were playing with a lighter or matches and using the spray can as a makeshift flame thrower when furniture or curtains ignited. The fire spread so quickly that when the boy’s grandparents, Orbie Lee Orbison and Nadine Shultz, opened the door to the room, the resulting blast knocked them to the other side of the house. Even though firefighters responded quickly, the flames were too intense to save the two young boys. By the time Roy made it home, all that was left of the home was the chimney.

Roy moved in with his parents and became a recluse, refusing to see or talk to anyone. When Johnny Cash visited, he found Roy sitting in his room staring at a television with the sound off. Cash told him that he loved him and was there for him. Orbison said he did not know how to cope with his grief. After the fire, Orbison had to start all over again and he could never bear the thought of rebuilding a home on the property. Roy’s parents helped to raise Wesley while his father was on the road and in the studio. In December 1988 just as his star was on the rise again, Orbison spent the night visiting with Wesley, from whom he had been estranged. The two stayed up all night singing together and writing songs. The following day, Roy died of a sudden heart attack at the age of 52.

**Orchard Signage On Hendersonville Site.**

Eventually, Johnny Cash bought the lot, promising Orbison that he would never build on the site again and insisting “Only good shall grow on this land.” The Cash family planted fruit trees and cultivated an orchard where the Orbison house once stood. It was not unusual to see Johnny Cash, watering can in hand, tending to the saplings during the early years of the orchard. As the fruit trees and grapevines flourished, they were maintained personally by the Cash family and the orchard came to fruition. Several years after Roy’s death, Johnny saw Wesley standing in the orchard on the lot where his brothers died. Cash asked Wesley why he was there. Wesley replied that it comforted him. Together, they gathered fruit from the orchard that Wesley took with him. Soon afterward, John and June gifted the lot to Wesley, who maintains the orchard to this day. It is ironic that years later, like Orbison’s, Cash’s house burnt, leaving only the chimney.

**Luther Perkins Grave Near Johnny & June’s Gravesite.**

Not only was Johnny’s 1963 song “Ring of Fire” a hit, staying at No. 1 on the country chart for seven weeks and declared the number one greatest country song of all time by Rolling Stone Magazine, it was written by his wife June Carter years before they were married. Tragically, fire remained an unfortunate theme in Cash’s circle. On Saturday, Aug. 3, 1968, his first “Tennessee Three” guitarist, Luther Perkins, fell asleep on the couch in his den with a lit cigarette in his hand. Luther’s home (at 94 Riverwood Drive) was just a little further down the road from Johnny’s. The accidental fire failed to burn the home but Luther suffered burns over half of his body and never regained consciousness. Two days later, he died at Vanderbilt Hospital of burns sustained in that fire. Perkins had bought the lakeside house just two months earlier and had spent the afternoon of the fire installing a television antenna on the roof. When his wife returned home from a poker party at a friend’s house that night, she found the house filled with smoke, and flames in the den and the kitchen, her husband unconscious on the floor. Perkins had called Cash the night of the fire and asked him to come over. Cash, thinking Perkins’ wife was there to take care of him, begged off. Later, Cash would rank Perkins’ death with that of his brother Jack in terms of the impact it made on his life. “Part of me died with Luther,” Johnny said.

Bandmate Marshall Grant, who along with Cash and Perkins, made up the original “Tennessee Three,” wrote in his autobiography I Was There When It Happened, said, “Luther apparently woke up, realized what was happening, and tried to escape, but he was overcome by dense smoke and couldn’t make it to a sliding glass door leading outside. The house itself never caught fire, but there was terrible smoke damage, the likes of which I’ve never seen. They told us at the hospital that if Luther had lived, the doctors probably would have had to amputate his hands, and I don’t think he could have lived with that.” Luther Perkins is buried only yards away from Johnny and June Carter Cash at the Hendersonville Memory Gardens. Bassist Marshall Grant died on August 7, 2011, at the age of 83, in Jonesboro, Arkansas while attending a festival to restore the childhood home of Johnny Cash.

But wait, there’s more. Cash’s longtime friend, Faron Young, known as the ” Hillbilly Heartthrob” for his chart-topping singles “Hello Walls” and “It’s Four in the Morning” has an eerie connection to the Cash property as well. In 1972, Young was famously arrested and charged with assault for spanking a girl in the audience at a concert in Clarksburg, West Virginia, after he claimed she spat on him. Young appeared before a justice of the peace and was fined $24, plus $11 in court costs. Afterward, Young’s life was plagued with bouts of depression and alcoholism. On the night of December 4, 1984, Young fired a pistol into the kitchen ceiling of his Harbor Island home. When he refused to seek help for his alcoholism, Young and his wife Hilda separated, sold their home, and bought individual houses. When asked at the divorce trial if he feared hurting someone by shooting holes into the ceiling, Young answered “Not whatsoever.” The couple divorced after 32 years of marriage in 1986.

Feeling abandoned by fans and the country music industry and in failing health (he was battling emphysema, and had undergone prostate surgery for cancer), Faron Young penned a suicide note specifically enumerating his health and the decline in his career, shot himself on December 9, 1996. Sadly, Faron didn’t die immediately. Hearing the shot, Young’s long time friend and bandmate, Ray Emmett, rushed into the room to find Faron lying in his bed, still alive. Young was rushed to Nashville’s Summit Medical Center where the next day, December 10, 1996, at 1:07 p.m., he died at the age of 64. Faron Young was cremated, and his ashes were spread by his family over Old Hickory Lake at the house of Johnny and June Cash. In a “Country Music Spotlight” interview with Willie Nelson (who wrote Young’s biggest hit “Hello Walls”), Cash said, “He (Faron) was one of my favorite people, he was one day older than me. He requested that his ashes be distributed on Old Hickory Lake and my property. So they came out there with his ashes…and the wind was blowing…So he’s everywhere, he’s all over my place, my yard, my house, my windows, in my sill, on my car, I turned on my windshield wipers the next day and there’s Faron. There he went, back and forth, back and forth, until he was all gone.” So, the next time you’re heading south, take a side trip to Hendersonville and venture over to 200 Caudill Drive, park your car on the side of the road, put your elbows on Johnny Cash’s fence, and dream.