“One Piece At A Time” by Johnny Cash

"One Piece at a Time" is the Wayne Kemp song Johnny Cash cut with the Tennessee Three in 1976, a country novelty number with a heist at its heart. Its narrator leaves Kentucky in 1949 for a job at General Motors in Detroit, putting wheels on Cadillacs he knows he'll never be able to afford, so he and a buddy on the line decide to liberate one, a part at a time: the little pieces go home in his oversized lunch box, the big ones ride out in his pal's motorhome. The collecting takes a good 25 years, and then comes the fun part, trying to make it all fit together.

Columbia released it, and it gave Cash his last trip to the top of Billboard's Hot Country Singles chart and his last appearance on the Hot 100, where it got to number 29.

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