Johnny Cash--He Walked the Line by Wensley Clarkson

Author:Wensley Clarkson [Garth Campbell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784184872
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

For the young all over the free world to whom President John F Kennedy seemed like half-messiah and half-movie star, his death in November, 1963 ushered in a decade of violence, sociopolitical upheaval and cultural change. Vietnam, the antiwar movement, campus unrest, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, riots, the violence at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, the Black Panthers, LBJ and Richard Nixon, hippies, yippies, free sex, Woodstock, Altamont, acid heads and acid rock, the Manson Family – these are some of the features that defined the turbulent 1960s and early 1970s. Few people were to be less identified with this age of discontent and institution-smashing than Johnny Cash.

In the months following John Kennedy’s assassination, it became increasingly evident that America could not return to the relative tranquillity of the early postwar years. In 1964, the Warren Commission Report concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in killing the President, and a jury in turn convicted Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby of murdering Oswald. That was also the year three civil-rights workers – Goodman, Cheney and Schwerner – were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, to the outrage of a nation.

In August, 1964, North Vietnamese torpedo boats allegedly attacked the US destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy. President Lyndon Johnson, seizing the opportunity to escalate the war effort in South-East Asia, ordered retaliatory air strikes. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution, passed overwhelmingly by Congress five days later, gave the President authority to take any steps he deemed necessary to ‘maintain peace’.

So it was, amongst the peace worshippers and antiwar brigade, that the unlikely figure of Johnny Cash emerged a hero at the Newport Folk Festival, in 1964. He even gave his new friend Bob Dylan his Martin guitar as a gesture of respect and solidarity that must have confused all those who wondered what Johnny was doing with the long-haired weirdo – to say nothing of those who wondered what Dylan was doing hanging around with those Southern bigot shit-kickers down in Nashville.

Johnny Cash forged a surprisingly close relationship with Bob Dylan when they both appeared at Newport. Johnny even went to the trouble of writing to folk song magazine Broadside to defend Dylan’s decision to play an electric guitar at the festival the following year, which horrified so-called purists of the folk scene.

By 1965 Johnny Cash had all but hit rock bottom in personal terms. Professionally, he was setting all-time records for touring, having scored spectacular success with a number-one hit, ‘Ring of Fire’ in 1963. But, despite this success, Cash now had a reputation in the industry as ‘the worst no-show in the business’. Numerous venues across the country were filing law suits against him, many of which would take years to go through the court system.

That same year, Cash was arrested by narcotics agents in El Paso, Texas. It was the culmination of a specially supervised operation to trap the pill-popping singer who’d been down to Juarez, in Mexico, where a black market for such pills thrived.

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