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In January of 1968, Johnny Cash — who had one of his signature hits in the mid 1950s with "Folsom Prison Blues" — performed in concert at Folsom Prison, and Robert Hilburn was the only music journalist there. At the time, Hilburn was trying to get a gig at the Los Angeles Times, and this was one of his first freelance assignments. The event not only marked the start of Hilburn's reign as one of the world's premier music writers and critics — he was on staff at the Times from 1970 until 2005, and later penned the memoir Cornflakes with John Lennon — it also was the beginning of a long working relationship with Cash. Hilburn said he interviewed Cash 10 times over the years, and thought he knew the man. But eventually he realized he was wrong. That prompted him to write his new book, Johnny Cash: The Life, a comprehensive bio of a complicated, brilliant, and popular artist. We talked to Hilburn recently to pick apart some of what he figured out in the process.
ESQUIRE.COM: Why did you write this book?
ROBERT HILBURN: I saw the movie Walk the Line. Later I talked to Johnny's manager Lou Robin and asked, "How much of the story is left to be told?" He said to me, "About 80 percent." I thought I pretty much knew Johnny Cash's life. But one of my personal discoveries was how little we know about any of these people. I interviewed [Bob] Dylan 10 times, [Bruce] Springsteen 10 times, Bono 10 times. Take any celebrity — all we really know is what they choose to tell us, or what they show us in public. I felt I was 50 miles away from knowing Johnny Cash's real life.
ESQ: What did you learn that surprised you?
RH: There was this vague report that Johnny Cash took the song "Folsom Prison Blues" from a song Gordon Jenkins had written called "Crescent City Blues." But no one knew quite how he heard it, quite how he got it, and so forth. So I went on the Internet and looked up Johnny Cash's old Air Force squadron. It had all the names and e-mail addresses of everyone who was in his squadron at the time. I e-mailed all those people — let's say 40 of them — and I got 20 e-mails back. I sent those 20 an e-mail with a questionnaire with 30 questions, one of which was "Have you ever heard the song 'Crescent City Blues'?" One of the guys, Chuck Riley, said he bought that record, the original version, at the PX one night along with his shaving cream and razor blades on a whim. He's playing the record in the barracks, "Crescent City Blues," and it goes, "There's a train a comin', it's comin' around the bend. I've been stuck in Crescent City." It's the exact same beginning. And Johnny Cash was walking through the barracks and he hears it and sits down and says, "Will you play that again?" The guy plays it again. Johnny said, "Can I borrow the record?" And I'm sure he either taped or wrote down the lyrics. Johnny Cash always said, "I wrote 'Folsom Prison Blues' after seeing a movie called Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison." That was the accepted story. But he was not a songwriter at that point. Later Gordon Jenkins heard it, sued him for copyright infringement, and collected $75,000.
ESQ: Johnny Cash has been depicted as a troubled soul. Is that all basically true?
RH: His personal life was darker, darker, darker than you ever imagined. We all knew John took drugs. Me growing up in the '60s and '70s, there was almost something romantic about drugs, Keith Richards taking drugs and stuff. But looking at Cash's life, all the people he hurt, how much he hurt himself, the guilt he had over that, it's just staggering how much guilt and suffering he went through in his life.
ESQ: One of the most dramatic events of his life you recount in your book is the affair he had with his wife's sister. How did that come about?
RH: When I heard that it really stunned me. I thought I knew Johnny Cash but didn't know things had gotten that dark. June was pregnant with John's son, John Carter. They had gotten married in '68, this was '69, the boy was born in '70. June learns while she's pregnant that John was or had been having an affair with Anita. Then you have to trace back what happened in the '60s and they were both married to other people and having fights — "Why don't you leave your husband?" "Why don't you leave your wife?" — and they would break up. During that time John would have affairs with other women, and one of them was Anita. So what happened in 1969 was more like a relapse rather than the starting of a new relationship. John wasn't going after groupies. He wasn't like Elvis Presley or Buck Owens or so many people. Country music was full of affairs and cheating; that's where all those Hank Williams songs come from. He was looking for a love and an affirmation that he didn't get from his wife. He also fell in love with a woman named Billie Jean Horton, Johnny Horton's wife. She was the ex-wife of Hank Williams. Johnny Horton gets killed in a car crash. Johnny Cash asks Billie Jean to marry him. This was 1961, before he met June Carter. She turns him down because of the drugs; they scared her. She doesn't want to go through the same thing she went through with Hank Williams. Two months later he met June Carter. So if Billie Jean had accepted his proposal there would never have been a June Carter in Johnny Cash's life.
ESQ: What was Johnny Cash like as an artist?
RH: It's important to realize that everybody who went into country music, and most everybody who went into rock and roll in the '50s, they had no more goal than a hit on the jukebox. Johnny Cash from the very beginning had a goal that he wanted to make music that lifted people's spirits. He had gotten that feeling from the small town he came from [in Arkansas], a cotton patch. His family all sang gospel songs in the heat of the day, when they were picking cotton. All the destitute farmers came and sang gospel songs in church. He saw how music lifted people's spirits. He felt he was an underdog in life, and he always wanted to use his music to lift other people up, to say no matter how much trouble, there's hope. That was always his message in his songs. That's why he and Dylan bonded so much, because they were both trying to do something meaningful. Also music was a shelter from the storm around him, his relationship with June Carter, with abandoning his children. He would go off to the desert for days and weeks to try and write songs. That was his only shelter. Also, he mostly concentrated on his lyrics. He wasn't very good at melodies. He would take old melodies and rework them, the same way Dylan did.
ESQ: His older brother died in a horrified accident in 1944 at the age of 15. How did that shape Cash's life?
RH: The whole family adored his brother. His name was Jack, named after Jack Dempsey the boxer. He was just the sweetest kid, had a great disposition, he helped everybody around the town. He was going to be a minister. The father said, "I'm proud of this boy. John, you should be more like your brother. You're lazy, no account, shiftless." And John never felt the love from his father. He started idolizing his brother — "I want to be more like him, to get my father to finally accept me." Then he gets killed in a terrible accident with a saw [in a sawmill]. Johnny always saw Jack as his North Star in a way. That was taken from his life. I talked to a psychiatrist who knew John and worked with him and he said that, of all the things in his life, the biggest sorrow was losing his brother. If you look at the cover of the book it's not a happy picture of an entertainer. It's a troubled man and his eyes are sad. Several people who knew Johnny Cash said even at the best of times there was that sadness in his eyes, partially because his father never gave him the love he wanted and partially his brother dying and partially that he abandoned his own children and he felt guilty over it and they resented him for it for years. There was a lot of sorrow in Cash's life. Even while he's trying to make music to inspire people he's fighting day after day with his own demons and sorrows.
ESQ: And what did you learn in general about being an artist from writing this book?
RH: I learned how difficult it is to be an artist. There are always compromises. The record company wants you to do this, your fans want you to do this, your family, you can't concentrate on your work. It's a hard thing to be an artist and not give up. That's why I have so much respect for people like Dylan and Neil Young and Tom Waits, because they keep at it. I have a new respect for a true artist.
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