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During Johnny Cash's nearly
fifty years of music, he
sold over ninety million
albums. He learned to sing while picking cotton
as an impoverished sharecropper's son in
Kingsland, Arkansas. Cash recorded more than
1,500 songs including well-known hits like 'A
Boy Named Sue', 'Folsom Prison Blues' and 'Ring
of Fire.' Johnny Cash is the only musician who
has ever been threefold-inducted into the
Songwriter's, Country Music, and Rock and Roll
Halls of Fame."
More than 100 other recording artists and groups have recorded Cash's song "I Walk the Line." Cash commented: "I wrote 'I walk the Line' when I was on the road in Texas in 1956, having a hard time resisting the temptation to be unfaithful to my wife back in Memphis": 'I keep a close watch on this heart of mine. I keep my eyes wide open all the time. I keep the ends out for the tie that binds. Because you're mine, I walk the line.' |
Cash's life was often fraught with tragedy and heartbreak. "After my 14-year-old brother Jack's death, said Johnny, "I felt like I'd died, too. I just didn't feel alive. I was terribly lonely without him. I had no other friend." Like his father before him, Johnny struggled for many years with addiction issues. His father was never able to tell his children that he loved them. Johnny Cash's first marriage ran aground in the midst of workaholism and pill-popping. In Cash' autobiography, he comments: "Touring and drugs were what I did, with the effort involved in drugs mounting steadily as time went by." Amphetamines keep him going without sleep, and barbiturates and alcohol knocked him out. Cash comments: "I was in and out of jails, hospitals, and car wrecks. I was a walking vision of death, and that's exactly how I felt. I was scraping the filthy bottom of the barrel of life."
He knew that he had wasted his life and drifted far from God. In desperation, Cash decided to end his life in 1967 by crawling deep into the inner recesses of Nickajack Cave on the Tennessee River. There in pitch darkness he met God and then miraculously was able to crawl to the opening of the cave. There waiting for him was his future wife June Carter and his mother. That was Cash's turning point in getting serious about battling his addiction. Cash stayed free of drugs until attacked in 1981 by an ostrich that ripped his stomach open and broke several ribs. While in hospital, he became re-addicted to painkillers. In 1983, his family and friends did an intervention, which included Cash's going to the Betty Ford Clinic. Cash comments: "I'm still absolutely convinced that the intervention was the hand of God working in my life, telling me that I still had a long way to go, a lot left to do. But first I had to humble myself before God."
In the midst of great trauma, Cash found that spiritual music helped bring him back from the despair of his addictions. "Wherever I go, I can start singing one of them and immediately begin to feel peace settle over me as God's grace flows in. They're powerful, those songs. At times they've been my only way back, the only door out of the dark, bad places the black dog calls home." Cash began to find great strength in reading the bible and in prayer. He learned to stop hating himself, and to forgive himself and others.
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During this time, Billy
Graham became a personal
friend and mentor. Billy
Graham "was interested, but
never judgmental...I've
always been able to share my
secrets and problems with
Billy, and I've benefited
greatly from his support and
advice. He's never pressed
me when I've been in
trouble; he's waited for me
to reveal myself, and then
he's helped me as much as he
can." I thank God for the late Johnny Cash's recovery from serious addiction, and pray that all of us will have the courage to change the things that can be changed. The Reverend Ed Hird+ Rector, St. Simon's North
Vancouver An November 2008 article for the "Deep Cove Crier" North Vancouver, Canada |
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Murray Moerman (