Photo courtesy of the Sam Phillips Family
A tall, lanky boy named J. R. Cash (that was his given name, and the name by which he had always gone until he joined the service) was one of those poor country boys with a different mind-set. He had first started coming around the studio in February or March, some eight months after getting out of the Air Force. Twenty-two years old, from a little town in Arkansas called Dyess, he had headed straight for Memphis with the idea of somehow getting involved in the music business, arriving on virtually the same day that Elvis cut his first record, at the beginning of July. After a brief side trip to Texas to marry the girl he had met just before being posted to Germany three years earlier, he returned to Memphis, where he secured both a new car and a job as a door-to-door salesman for the Home Equipment Company through his older brother, Roy, an automobile mechanic. He also enrolled at Keegan’s School of Broadcasting on the GI Bill, because he knew by the example of all the country stars who had pursued that path that radio was as good an avenue as any to a musical career. Through Roy, too, a sometime musician himself and proud of his brother’s musical inclination, he met three other mechanics at the big Chrysler dealership on Union, where Roy worked, who had formed a little "practice" band of their own. Soon the four of them were playing late into the night, fooling around with Hank Williams tunes and popular numbers by Ernest Tubb and Hank Snow, with J.R. doing most of the singing and occasionally contributing a gospel original he had written. One of the men, Red Kernodle, played steel guitar, though with a good deal of tentativeness, as he had only recently acquired an instrument of his own. The other two strummed rhythm, much like J.R. — but they decided they were hardly going to be able to present themselves to the public with three acoustic guitars playing virtually the same part, so Marshall Grant bought a bass and Luther Perkins bought an electric guitar, and they all learned to play together.
John Cash (he was at this point alternately John and J.R.) was by his own account the worst salesman in the world, the kind of salesman who would follow up his initial pitch to a customer, as often as not poor and black, with the advice that they really didn’t need to buy this washing machine from him on the installment plan. One day he saw an old black man sitting on his porch in Orange Mound playing the banjo. Cash, whose passion for music ran the gamut from Roy Acuff singing "The Great Speckled Bird" to black gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s inspirited version of "Strange Things Happening", started talking to the man, who turned out to be a Memphis blues legend, Gus Cannon, founder of Cannon’s Jug Stompers, a popular recording group in the late '20s and early '30s, whose signature tune was the jaunty, vaudeville- flavored "Walk Right In". From then on Gus Cannon’s porch became a regular stop on his rounds; no matter what else might be pressing on his mind, including how he was going to be able to support his family on a meager salesman’s salary, with a baby now on the way, he would always swing by—to talk, once in a while to play or mix in his own distinctive bass voice, but most of all to listen not just to the music but to the unique perspective and experience of the man.
Cash started going by the Memphis Recording Service, he often said, because it was on his way to Keegan’s School of Broadcasting—but it was also just down the street from the Chrysler dealership where his brother and three fellow band members all worked. Elvis Presley’s success certainly impressed him, too. He had seen Elvis perform on a flatbed truck in front of Katz Drugstore at the opening of the brand-new Lamar-Airways Shopping Center, and he was knocked out not just by the music but by the galvanizing force that could come from a simple trio format—he even got to meet Elvis afterward and was impressed by his enthusiasm, conviction, and polite demeanor. But what motivated him most of all, as it happened, was rejection, as he stopped by again and again and was rebuffed each time without getting so much as a perfunctory audition.
He introduced himself to Mr. Phillips initially as a gospel singer, and Sam said he loved gospel music himself but he didn’t have any way to sell it. He told Marion all he wanted was a chance, and Marion said Sam didn’t have the time for him. Finally he just sat down on the curb one day and waited until Sam showed up "and I stood up and I said, ‘I’m John Cash, and I’ve got my guitar and I want you to hear me play,’ and [this time] he said, ‘Well, come on in.’ I sang for two or three hours, everything I knew. Hank Snow, Ernest Tubb, Bill Monroe, I remember singing ‘I’m Going to Sleep With One Eye Open (From Now On)’ by Flatt and Scruggs—I even sang an [old] Irish song I’d been singing all my life, ‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,’ just to give him an idea of what I liked. He said, ‘You’ve really got a range of material you understand and have a feel for.’ He said, ‘You say you got a group? Come back and bring those guys and let’s put something down.’"
When they came back, they were all nervous, Red Kernodle most of all. "He was so nervous he couldn’t play," Cash recalled. "We did about three [numbers] with the steel guitar, and he [just] packed up and left. He said, ‘This music business is not for me.’ And I thought the songs sounded terrible, so I didn’t argue." Sam didn’t really want steel guitar anyway—that, plus the fiddles and the choruses, was just the kind of thing that made every record coming out of Nashville sound exactly the same. But there was something absolutely intriguing about this little group. Just the difficulty they had putting something together, the very tentativeness that they exhibited in attempting to master their instruments—it was the damnedest thing, it was an original sound. Luther painstakingly picking one note at a time, Marshall slapping away at his recently acquired bass ("Marshall, when you play," was Sam’s only piece of advice, "slap the hell out of it") and doing his best to stay in tune. It was nothing but rhythm, a funny, awkward kind of rhythm—boom-chick-a-boom, boom-chick-a-boom—it was, Sam was quick to realize, the only way they could play. But at the heart of it was this Cash boy’s voice, its sincerity, its conviction, its very believability. Sam wasn’t sure just how to characterize it—it reminded him a little of Southern gospel progenitor V. O. Stamps in its depth and certitude, you could hear the influence of Ernest Tubb, or even Bill Monroe—but at the same time it didn’t sound like anything else he had ever heard. For all of the boy’s evident sincerity, there was an exploratory quality to the music—maybe it was the slight quaver in his voice, maybe it was the uncertainty of his pitch, maybe it was the band’s struggle just to get through a single song that made it so compelling in all its painful honesty.
There was one song in particular that Sam liked. "Hey Porter" had started out as a poem that John wrote on the eve of his return from Germany and now offered as both a warmly nostalgic salute to his Southern heritage and a sharply tuned interchange of humor, wordplay, and observation. It was almost, Sam thought, like a traditional folk song as sung by Burl Ives, but with more bite to it and a hard-won musical arrangement that had been agonizingly put together note by note. There was something reassuringly familiar about it—it was a train song ("Hey, porter"), a homecoming song ("How much longer till we cross that Mason-Dixon line?"), and yet it was at the same time charmingly original, too. But he didn’t hear anything else that he could release.
John did have a prison song he had written—it seemed a little morbid, though, and he sang it in a high, strangely affected, almost plummy voice, as if he were imitating Marty Robbins. It started out "I hear that train a-comin’/ A-comin’ round the bend"—but Sam didn’t think they needed any more train imagery either. So he told him to go home and see what else he could come up with. "Go home and write me an up-tempo weeper love song," Sam said—and then he would put out a record.
That was exactly what J. R. Cash did. It took all of two weeks for him to come up with a fully formed song—it came to him from listening to Smilin’ Eddie Hill on WSM, the Opry flagship station. Every night he would announce, "Stay tuned, we’re gonna bawl, squall, and climb the wall." The idea first struck him as the basis for a novelty song, and he wrote it originally as "You’re Gonna Bawl, Bawl, Bawl". But then he reconfigured it as a real country weeper, a brashly up-tempo weeper with an almost cocky tone that he called "Cry! Cry! Cry!" and when he brought it in to Sam after working out an arrangement with Luther and Marshall, Sam heard it right away. He recorded it with the same raw panache that Cash imparted to his delivery—the slapback only served to add to the overwhelming sense of presence that three faltering instruments and one booming voice, served up unadorned, could create.
To Sam these two songs only began to suggest what this surprisingly self-possessed young man might be capable of. For all of his polite, self-effacing manner, J. R. Cash seemed to maintain an unshakable center, with a deep faith, a sly, tongue-in-cheek sense of humor, and a broader experience of the world than Sam had seen in most of his artists. He was a voracious reader whose songwriting stemmed as much from imagination as experience, and his upbringing in the "cooperative community" of Dyess, a socialist settlement, really, created by the Roosevelt administration as an experiment in rural reclamation, could only add to his breadth of perspective.
There was some talk initially of crediting the record to "The Tennessee Three," the group’s loose title before Roy Cash’s brother had joined—but Sam said, No, John was front and center on the record, and, furthermore, he thought "Johnny" Cash sounded better than "John," if you were looking to appeal to young people. John objected at first—he had never been a "Johnny," he remonstrated, it seemed too insubstantial somehow, it seemed almost too juvenile (the only time he had ever called himself "Johnny" was in the love letters he sent home from Germany to his teenage fiancée)—but he wasn’t going to argue the point too strenuously with Mr. Phillips. He knew this was his big break, and besides, it seemed like Mr. Phillips had been right about nearly everything else up till now. He was beginning to feel like Mr. Phillips could "see something happening that nobody else could," could see something not just in him but in Elvis, too, and all the others, that they could not necessarily see in themselves. So he agreed to the name change. When the record came out, it would be by Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two, but with artist royalties split 40-30-30.
He went to his boss at the Home Equipment Company, George Bates, to see if he would sponsor a 15-minute show on KWEM to help promote his new career. Mr. Bates had been very good to him in the eight or nine months he had worked for the company; he had advanced John money nearly every payday, and he had told him frankly that he didn’t think he’d ever make much of a salesman, but he allowed him to keep trying. Whatever his opinion of John’s musical talent—if he had one at all—he never hesitated about sponsoring the show. The only question he had was whether John thought he would ever be able to pay back the money that he owed—over $1,000 at this point—"and I said, ‘One of these days I’m going to walk in here and give you a check for that full amount,’ and he said, ‘Well, I hope you’ll be able to, but I’ve taken care of you because I believed in you, and I believe you will do something.’"
Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two debuted on the air on May 21, just a few days after the "Cry! Cry! Cry!" session, and three days before his little girl, Rosanne, was born. Surprisingly, he didn’t play either of the songs on his scheduled Sun release, and even more surprisingly, for all of his self-disparagement and Mr. Bates’ assessment of his selling capabilities, he was a very convincing salesman, cool and confident and focusing on Cool-Glo Awnings as a plausible alternative to the more expensive option of air-conditioning. He sang "Wide Open Road", an original number that he had written in Germany, and a jaunty version of the Sons of the Pioneers’ "One More Ride", both of which he had already auditioned for Mr. Phillips, and solicited listener requests for future broadcasts—if he didn’t know the song already, he and Luther and Marshall would endeavor to learn it. Then, after highlighting Luther’s guitar playing ("Luther, step up and show all the little children how to play a big boogie"), he concluded with "a good sacred song, one of my own, I wrote it a while back," and sang the song he had first tried to interest Sam Phillips in, the one he considered his best composition, "Belshazzar".
The record came out a month later. It was one of the biggest thrills of his life, Cash often said, to hear his record played on the radio for the first time. For the first time, too, he was beginning to think, "I might can make a living at it, and I won’t have to do all those other things I don’t want to do, like be a policeman or work as a disc jockey or a [salesman]—maybe, you know, by the end of the year I might make enough to pay the rent." But when he took a promotional copy to Elvis’ manager, WMPS DJ Bob Neal, and Neal dropped it and broke it,"“I thought my world had ended. I didn’t think they’d make another one!"
This is an excerpt from Peter Guralnick's new book, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll, which is available November 10th. Reprint courtesy of Little, Brown, and Company.