Johnny Cash Stories

(written by Kris Kristofferson)

Ray Stevens (#55 country, #81 pop, 1969)

Johnny Cash (#1 country, #46 pop, 1970)

Johnny Cash literally owned the 1969 Country Music Association awards telecast. He was named “Entertainer of the Year,” “Male Vocalist of the Year” and, (with his wife June Carter Cash), won the CMA “Vocal Group of the Year” award. “Johnny Cash at San Quentin” brought him his second straight “Album of the Year” trophy and “A Boy Named Sue” earned “Single of the Year” honors.

Additionally, television made Cash the most recognizable performer of the era. On June 7, 1969 (four months before the CMA awards), “The Johnny Cash Show” premiered on ABC-TV as a summer replacement series, but it was so popular that the network renewed the program for the fall. The show reached an average of 23 million viewers each week, landing it solidly in the Top 20 in the Nielsen ratings. After a nearly two-year run, “The Johnny Cash Show” made its final broadcast in May of 1971.

ABC attempted at first to exude control over the program, but Cash would have none of it. When the network would try to dictate how it wanted the show presented, Johnny simply would inform them that he was going to do it his way or not at all. It made no difference to him. So in the end, ABC would always concede, but the network brass wasn’t always comfortable with the guests Cash wanted on his show, musicians such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and Joni Mitchell, non-country artists with decidedly left-wing political views. Of course, to keep viewership up, Johnny featured country music’s top stars as well.

At the height of his popularity, Cash received a call from White House aide H. R. (Bob) Haldeman (you might remember his name from the Watergate scandal), who asked Johnny to perform at a special White House ceremony at the request of President Richard Nixon. Cash accepted the invitation for the event, held on April 17, 1970.

The president had a “wish list” of three songs that he specifically wanted Cash to perform, but Johnny declined two of them: a version of Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee,” (Nixon wasn’t astute on country music and might have thought it was Cash’s hit, not Haggard’s) and the extremely controversial number “Welfare Cadillac,” which had recently climbed into Billboard’s Top Ten for an obscure performer by the name of Guy Drake.

Johnny did play the president’s third request “A Boy Named Sue,” plus his new release “What is Truth.” This was Cash’s “protest song” criticizing the Vietnam War, which made it a successful “crossover” record. It landed at #19 on Billboard’s Hot 100 pop chart, marking the 6th and final time a Johnny Cash single appeared in the top 20 of that chart.

In the meantime, while all this was going on with Johnny Cash, songwriter Kris Kristofferson was living in a dilapidated tenement in Nashville (alone following a divorce), trying to get some of his tunes recorded. He had been only mildly successful thus far. His situation was a long way down from the potential he had shown during the early years of his life. Kris’s father, Lars, was a U. S. Air Corps officer (later rising to the rank of U. S. Air Force Major General). He attempted to push his son toward a military career, but young Kris wasn’t really interested in that. He aspired to be a writer and enrolled in California’s Pamona College in 1954, becoming a member of the Kappa Delta Fraternity at Pamona, graduating in 1958 with a BA in literature. Kris earned a Rhodes scholarship to England’s Oxford University, achieving a degree in English literature by the time he returned to the United States in 1960, hoping to reach his goal as a novelist.