The Man in Black

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In any class portrait, one notices the similarities. But in this group, Cash stood out—not just with his grave voice and lifer's stare, but with the somber production of his songs. The lyrics Cash wrote for his signature hit I Walk the Line express an unexceptional sentiment: because I love you, I behave. But the thumping bass line and Cash's delivery ("I keep my eyes wide open all the time") make the mood part predatory, part paranoid. Even the upbeat love story Ballad of a Teenage Queen has a spooky side; it sounds as if it's beamed from the bottom of the well of loneliness. Phillips used acoustical reverbs on many Sun productions, but Cash hardly needed it. His voice was its own eerie echo chamber. "His voice was painful, it emoted so much ache and realness," says country star Tim McGraw, who, with his wife Faith Hill, forms a new-generation Cash-Carter duo. "There wasn't anything unreal when you heard Johnny Cash. Faith said today, 'He's the only man in black who can walk straight through the Pearly Gates.'"

Cash moved to Columbia records in 1958, where he had more menacing hits, including the admonitory Ring of Fire ("Love is a burning thing,/ And it makes a fiery ring / Bound by wild desire,/ I fell into a ring of fire"). Some think this was the time of prime Johnny Cash. "He was at his most powerful in the early '60s," says writer-publisher Jack Hurst, author of a book on the Grand Ole Opry. "Back then he was so deeply into the amphetamines that he had lost an awful lot of weight. He looked like a wraith, but a powerful wraith. He was like a prowling tiger onstage. You could see the man fighting demons. This was around the time he was recording Ballads of the True West, and I think he saw visions of himself as an outlaw, with a noose around his neck. He re-created this in his own persona. Against the other side of him it created this huge dramatic tension." Inside Cash, the churchman and the outlaw were having a brawl.

Being on the road for weeks, driving from one town to the next, was exhilarating and exhausting. Country star George Jones, 72, recalls the days when Cash hired him, the Statler Brothers, Stonewall Jackson and other scrounging singers to fill out his tour bill. "Lord, I don't know what we would have done without him," Jones says. "He was our meal ticket." The nonstop nights on the road led to drug and alcohol binges. "We went through those hard times together," Jones says. "We would try to help each other pull through. We'd get together in the dressing room after a show, talk about the mistakes we were making—the pills, the booze, what have you. His first wife Vivian was a wonderful lady. She went through a lot of hell with him. I know she couldn't stand it any more."

It takes a sinner to appreciate the blinding glare of grace. Cash saw the light in 1967, when he began spending quality time with June Carter, of the legendary country clan the Carter family. Carter urged Cash, who was trying to kick his addiction to prescription drugs, to attend services with her at the First Baptist Church of Hendersonville, Tenn. "He said he didn't think he was ready for that," recalls the church's minister Courtney Wilson. "But she told him they could go late and leave early. They came late and sat in the back." That day marked the revival of Cash's churchgoing and the beginning of his great love. He and Carter were married in 1968.

He was even closer to June than to Jesus, but his two loves were connected. "They had a deep, really mystical bond—their love for one another," says Hirshberg, who collaborated with author Mark Zwonitzer on Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music. "It was deeply undergirded with both religion and a total sense, a real deep-down-where-it-counts belief that God had brought them together. They considered their marriage—the fact that they had found each other—to be a miracle of their faith. Their marriage was an absolute religious experience for both of them."

A solid marriage doesn't guarantee career longevity, but Cash managed both. "We had more than one discussion about the ageism of country and rock," says rocker Tom Petty, who recorded and toured with Cash. "When something's gone past that demographic of appealing to people in their 20s, they don't think it's good anymore. Yet here was the perfect case of a guy who was growing older and his music was growing with him." It was Cash who took Bob Dylan to Music City to make the 1969 Nashville Skyline. Later, he guested on songs with Ray Charles, Emmylou Harris and U2. In the '80s, he teamed with Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kristofferson for a sometime supergroup called the Highwaymen.

Cash was also loyal to old friends down on their luck. "Johnny always carried people who needed help," says Knox Phillips, Sam's son. "He hired Carl Perkins as part of his band and put him on his TV show, out of love. He did the same for Jerry Lee. No matter how down someone might be or how negative his reputation had become, Johnny always had a come-on-in-and-help-yourself attitude for them." And in 1994 Cash found a sympathetic producer in Rick Rubin, co-founder of the rock-and-rap label Def Jam. It was Rubin's inspiration to return Cash to his roots: the voice, a guitar and the sparest backing. The result was the four American albums. These CDs didn't go platinum—they barely went rhinestone. But they validated Cash's status and towering stature. The latest one, The Man Comes Around, proves to be the perfect send-off for an artist who was failing in everything but artistry. It's Cash's own elegy, eulogy and last words.

The 15 songs include a mess of heartbreak and three wrongful deaths. Throughout, the gravity of Cash's voice lends something sepulchral to the fondest lyrics. When, in his version of Ewan MacColl's The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, he intones, "I know our joy would fill the earth," he could be singing from under it. And in Hurt (the song and the soul-whammingly evocative video) his performance synopsizes a lifetime of anguish. "I hurt myself today/ To see if I still feel," he drones. "I will let you down. I will make you hurt." It is the testimony of a man apologizing for living while preparing for death. On June's next-to-last album, Press On, she duetted with John on Terry Smith's Far Side Banks of Jordan—a song that Cash felt perfectly described their relationship. It's about two elderly people facing the end of their lives, and inevitable separation. June Carter Cash made that trip first, on May 15 of this year, after complications from heart surgery.

Cash was devastated. He knew that if he was to survive June's death, it would be through the thing he knew best: work. "About three days after June passed away," says country music star Marty Stuart, who toured with Cash for 24 years and was for a time married to Johnny's daughter Cindy, "John's son John Carter called me and said, 'Daddy wants to record.' It was the best news I heard in a long time. We all gathered around him and made close to 50 songs." The microphone seemed to be a source of healing and comfort.

Can a wound like the death of the love of one's life ever heal? Not easily; maybe not ever. "He tried to contain himself," Reverend Wilson says, "but her passing took his last spark, the last bit of his heart." Cash admitted as much. "I don't know hardly what to say tonight about being up here without her," he said at his first public appearance after her death, at the Carter Family Fold country music festival in Hiltons, Va. "The pain is so severe there is no way of describing it."

The pain could be described not in words but in sobs. "One day there was just the two of us sitting there," Stuart recalls, "and he broke down and started crying and said, 'Man, I miss her so bad.' I didn't know what to say, so I held his hand. He loved my wife Connie, who's been a friend to that family for a long time. He grabbed my hand and said, 'Son, cling to her; cling to her; cling to her.' What I saw at that moment is that he would have traded every bit of fame, fortune—everything that Johnny Cash meant to the world—for five minutes with June."

Two weeks before Cash's death, Jones and his wife Nancy paid a visit. "He had just gotten back from the dentist," Jones says. "He had numb lips and all. He stayed seated just about the whole time we were there. But he was in a good mood. He said he was fixing to get up and throw that wheelchair away, and he was going back to work." But to others Cash revealed his resignation. Wilson, who visited Cash at Nashville's Baptist Hospital, says, "He was aware things were closing down for him, and he was at peace. He was ready to go home to God."

So many Cash songs speak of the hereafter as if it were waiting, patiently, urgently, in the next room, as if it were comforting—especially for a man who had wrestled his demons to a draw and learned to walk the line—to think of death not as a psycho killer but as a kindly escort. In September When It Comes, a duet recorded this year with his daughter Rosanne, Cash speak-sings this poignant prophecy: "They will fly me, like an angel,/ To a place where I can rest/ When this begins, I'll let you know,/ September when it comes."

For Cash, September came last week, as Americans coped with a more general mourning. And if some felt shock at the news of Cash's passing, they could segue into celebration over a difficult life made exemplary, an outlaw redeemed by a woman's devotion. Besides, if you believe, the Man in Black is now garbed in white, and the doting husband has eternity to spend with his beloved. In a song she composed on the day of Cash's death, country singer Shelby Lynne imagines a sweet reconciliation—the next act of a beautiful duet on a new stage:

Hey, my darlin'
Hey, my sweet
I've waited on the day when I knew we would meet
Hey, my sun
Hey, my moon
Today's the day when Johnny met June

With reporting by Reported by Jackson Baker/Memphis; Steve Barnes/Dyess, Ark.; Sean Gregory and Jyoti Thottam/New York; Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles; and David E. Thigpen/Chicago

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