Johnny Cash

Johnny Cash was born on February 26, 1932, to poor cotton farmers in Kingsland, Arkansas, and grew up on gospel music, playing on a local radio station while he was still in high school. He spent four years in the Air Force, largely stationed in West Germany, then came home and landed in the middle of the rockabilly boom in Memphis in the mid-'50s, recording for Sun Records with a sound as stark as a prairie road.

That sound came from his deep, calm bass-baritone and his backing band, the Tennessee Three, whose chugging guitars rolled along like a freight train. "Folsom Prison Blues" and "I Walk the Line", both on Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar, were the foundation, alongside signature songs like "Ring of Fire", "Get Rhythm" and "Man in Black". He opened his shows with a simple "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash" and followed it with "Folsom Prison Blues". He could be funny, too, on "One Piece at a Time" and "A Boy Named Sue", and he sang railroad songs like "Hey, Porter" and "Rock Island Line", plus "Jackson", a duet with June Carter, his future wife, with many more duets to come once they married. He dressed in black, earning the name "Man in Black", and he played free concerts in prisons.

Most of his songs deal in sorrow, moral struggle and redemption, and those themes deepened as he got older. In his final years he took on songs by contemporary rock acts and made them sound like hymns carved from granite: Soundgarden's "Rusty Cage", Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus" and, most devastatingly, Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt", a frail, trembling, unforgettable reading that sounds like a man settling his accounts. "I Won't Back Down", "Solitary Man", "I've Been Everywhere", "Rowboat" and "God's Gonna Cut You Down" came from the same late flowering.

He died on September 12, 2003, having sold more than 90 million records. He moved freely between gospel, folk, blues, rockabilly, rock and roll and country, and he was inducted into the Country Music, Rock and Roll and Gospel Music Halls of Fame. He was also a member of the Highwaymen and the Million Dollar Quartet, and his life story became the 2005 film Walk the Line. On rock radio's countdowns, "Hurt" is the song that stops listeners cold.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.