"Musicians scoffed, but Cash and the Tennessee Two possessed the quality that had been lacking in country music since Hank Williams died: originality," wrote Colin Escott and Martin Hawkins in Good Rockin' Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock 'n' Roll. Released in 1955, Cry! Cry! Cry! was a pop and country hit that ultimately peaked at No. ![]() Cash to write "an uptempo weeper love song," and he filled the order with Cry! Cry! Cry!, which would be paired with Hey Porter! as Mr. Not yet convinced that the man he called Johnny Cash had composed a hit, Phillips charged Mr. The hopeful artist went back to the studio with his Tennessee Two (guitarist Luther Perkins and bass man Marshall Grant) with homesick train song Hey Porter! and Folsom Prison Blues, a song that borrowed liberally from Gordon Jenkins' Crescent City Blues recording. Cash to write or find some secular material. Cash told Guralnick.Ī rock 'n' roll pioneer whose records with Elvis Presley were making pop inroads, Phillips had no use for a gospel artist. "I don't feel like anyone discovered me because I had to fight so hard to get heard," Mr. He forced his way into an audition, and Phillips was duly impressed. Cash happened once to be sitting outside Sun as Phillips came to work. Cash visited the studio often, hoping for an audition with Sun owner/producer Sam Phillips.Īfter being repeatedly told that Phillips was unavailable, Mr. "Sun Records was between my house and the broadcasting school," Mr. He set his sights on Sun Records, a Memphis operation that was seeing success with a new artist named Elvis Presley. Cash moved to Memphis, married Liberto, worked as a door-to-door appliance salesman, enrolled at the Keegan School of Broadcasting and put together an upstart country group to help him become a gospel singer. An attempt to replicate that sound, coupled with his feelings of fidelity toward Vivian Liberto, was the genesis of another classic song, I Walk The Line. In the service, he also was struck by an intriguing drawling sound that occurred when his reel-to-reel tape machine was improperly loaded. His time in the Air Force was of great musical significance, as it was there that he learned some guitar chords and saw a film called Inside Folsom Prison that spurred his now-famous song, Folsom Prison Blues. ![]() While in the service, he began strumming a guitar, composing music and verse and playing in a country band. His assignment to a base in Landsberg, Germany (he was a radio intercept operator charged with cracking Russian code transmissions) did not deter their burgeoning romance. Cash."ĭuring basic training in Texas, he met a high school senior named Vivian Liberto. The military refused to accept "J.R." as a first name, and he became "John R. Making car hoods on an assembly line didn't suit him much better than cotton farming, so he joined the Air Force. ![]() Upon graduation from Dyess High School in 1950, he moved to Michigan, intending to work in an automobile plant. Cash, it seemed incapable of removing him from Arkansas.
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