THE JUKEBOX: Write Is Wrong

By Hollywood standards, Johnny Cash's $50,000 ranch house, the single Cadillac and the li'l old Ford Thunderbird are unspectacular. But by anybody's standards, the Cash household is unhinged.

Around the swimming pool, by day, a trio of little girls (ages 3½, 2½, and ½ raise continual riot. A yellow parrot named Jethroe screeches, whistles and squawks "There's a girl" whenever Mamma glides past in skintight velvet pants. A hefty brother-in-law lounges around listening to a recording of rock 'n' roll music that he composes himself. Through it all, Johnny Cash, head of the household, relaxes in pointy Italian-leather loafers, and practices a fast draw with his Colt .45.

Even in Hollywood, though, somebody has to pay for the groceries, so last week Daddy Johnny Cash put away his .45, unlimbered his guitar, and hit the road to rustle up some cash. In Saskatoon, Duluth, Hawaii or Australia, wherever tall (6 ft. 1 in., 195 Ibs.) Johnny sounds off with his own "country" ballads in his deep, twanging baritone, the tour is sure to pay off. For these days the jukebox set is again on a crying jag: hangings, murders, deaths, burials and blighted loves are the subjects they want a man to sing about. And ever since Johnny Cash came out of the Arkansas delta, he has been singing about sorrow with spectacular success. In four years, half a hundred Cash-composed songs have sold more than 6,000,000 records. The biggest Cash hit, Walk the Line, passed the million mark with ease; the latest, Don't Take Your Guns to Town, is well on its way to repeating that performance.

Singing Salesman. As a youngster, Johnny had something to cry about. Born near Kingsland, Ark. ("just a wide place in the road"), he grew up on a hardscrabble farm. Johnny's Baptist family were mainly hymn singers, but his mother reckoned that it was all right to teach the boys how to strum her battered old guitar. At twelve, Johnny was writing poems, songs and gory stories. At 22, after a tour in the Air Force, he was married, making a poor living as an appliance salesman in the poorer sections of Memphis.

But he and two friends—billed as Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two—were also working at church socials. Four years ago they got a singing tryout with Sun Records (the outfit that discovered Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis), and their first song was Johnny's Cry, Cry, Cry. And Johnny had it made.

Cry sold 100,000 copies in the South alone. Folsom Prison Blues, Ballad of a Teen-Age Queen—everything he turned out became a hit. And everything he composed came easily. "I write songs in the back of the car," Johnny explains, "or in hotel rooms, in planes." But "write" is the wrong word. He cannot read a note. Johnny simply picks out the tunes that arrange themselves in his head, plays them over and over till the boys know them well and can record them on tape.