- His album, "The Man Comes Around", features his rendition of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt". NIN frontman Trent Reznor admitted that at first he was angry about the cover, as he wrote it from a deeply personal point of view. However, when he heard the song and saw the video for the first time, he was deeply moved and found Cash's cover beautiful and meaningful.
- One time his truck caught on fire and burned half of a national forest. He was taken to court, and when the judge asked him why he did it, he said, "I didn't do it, my truck did, and it's dead.".
- His older brother (the sibling Johnny was closest to as a child) died in a horrible accident involving a buzz saw when Johnny was young, and it was never clear whether it was accidental, suicide, or even murder. Wracked with guilt, Johnny, by most accounts, never got over the death (it was a little-known, personal obsession of his to investigate the incident) and it is widely thought that his dark world view was shaped by it.
- In the 1980s he found love letters to wife June Carter Cash from Elvis Presley in their attic. Upon finding these, he burned them.
- He had long since kicked his drug habit when, in a bizarre series of events in the early 1980s, he was attacked by a male ostrich he had been keeping on his farm after he had threatened the huge bird. He was put onto painkillers to survive the critical injuries and quickly became addicted. He checked himself into the Betty Ford Clinic, successfully quit them and made friends with Ozzy Osbourne during his stay.
- Proposed to wife June Carter Cash over 30 times before she finally said "Yes".
- He was friends with every U.S. President starting with Richard Nixon. He was least close with the last two, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, because of a personal distrust for both men and because of his declining health. He was probably closest with Jimmy Carter, who was actually a very close friend and distant relation of his wife, June Carter Cash. None of these friendships were about politics, as he never particularly supported any administration but was just friendly with the men.
- He was given the name "J.R." because his parents Ray Cash and Carrie Cash couldn't agree on a name, only on initials. He adopted "John R. Cash" when he joined the Air Force, which did not accept initials.
- Elvis Presley, Hank Williams and Johnny are the only three musicians to have been inducted both into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Country Music Hall of Fame.
- He suffered from a fear of flying and snakes.
- According to the biography "Johnny Cash: The Life of an American Icon" by Stephen Miller, while Cash was in the Air Force and serving as a code intercept operator at Landsberg AFB in Germany, he was the first American radio operator to receive the news of the death of Joseph Stalin.
- Apart from his performances at Folsom Prison and San Quentin, he also performed at Österåkeranstalten (The Österåker Prison) north of Stockholm, Sweden, in 1972. The recording was released in 1973. Between the songs Cash can be heard speaking Swedish, which was greatly appreciated by the inmates.
- Recorded over 1500 songs throughout his career.
- Member of The Highwaymen, with Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson. The foursome recorded several albums in the 1980s and 1990s.
- On 10/24/03 his stepdaughter Rosey Nix Adams, a country music singer, died. Cause of death was accidental carbon monoxide poisoning from six heaters on her bus. She was 45.
- Along with Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins, he was a member of the celebrated "The Million Dollar Quartet". They got that name because they were money-makers for Sam Phillips' Sun Records Label.
- According to the tell-all books "Anchored In Love" by Cash's son John Carter Cash, and "I Was There When It Happened", by longtime friend and band member Marshall Grant, Cash was addicted to drugs for most of his adult life. He confessed much of this in "Johnny Cash: The Autobiography", published in 1997 by Harper Collins. He did not completely stop using drugs after his well-documented withdrawal in 1967. He was drug-free from 1970-77, when he started taking amphetamines again. A 1983 attack by an ostrich (the animal was part of Cash's menagerie near Nashville) required hospitalization, where it was discovered that he was sneaking more painkillers than he'd been prescribed. He entered the Betty Ford Clinic in 1983 and stayed clean for a short time. His next relapse put him into Nashville's Cumberland Heights Alcohol and Drug Treatment Center in 1989. After another battle with drugs in the early 1990s, he discovered that his wife, June Carter Cash, and his son, John Carter Cash, were both addicted to narcotics. The younger Cash cleaned up shortly before the deaths of his parents in 2003. According to John Carter Cash, his mother never confronted her addiction. It is not known for certain whether or not Cash ever completely extricated himself from drug abuse.
- He was addicted to speed (usually with alcohol or morphine as a chaser) through much of his 20s until 1967, when June Carter Cash and numerous his friends and family members staged an arduous but successful intervention. It is thought that he had an addictive personality which he may have been genetic, as many members of his family were addicts to various substances and vices.
- The video for "Hurt", from the album "The Man Comes Around" was voted greatest music video ever made accoridng to a panel assembled by the UK newspaper "The Guardian".
- He went through much of the 1970s on a sanctimonious cloud, having associated himself with evangelists and turned his shows into gospel performances where he encouraged people to accept Jesus Christ and condemned blatant sexuality and violence in culture. He said in the 1990s that, although his faith remained as strong as ever and many of his songs expressed this, his attitudes had changed and he found his 1970s' overzealousness distasteful, having learned to respect that people should have their own beliefs.
- Has a species of tarantula named for him, "Aphonopelma johnnycashi". The tarantula in question is black, and can be found in the area around Folsom, CA.
- Was ranked #1 of the 40 greatest men in country music.
- His guitarist, Bob Wootton of The Tennessee Three, acted as Cash's stunt double anytime there was a scene that required him to ride a horse because he had a fear of horses.
- Contrary to popular belief, he never served more than one night in prison (he was held in jail overnight once after being caught smuggling 1,163 amphetamine tablets across from Mexico). He actually wrote "Folsom Prison Blues" after seeing the documentary Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison (1951).
- Recorded entire albums live in California's Folsom and San Quentin prisons, in front of highly receptive audiences of convicts.
- In his song "Man in Black" he explained that he wore predominately black clothing to honor and remind others of the suffering of the world's poor and oppressed.
- The US Air Force would not accept "J.R." as a given name when he enlisted, so he became John R. Cash. He signed for Sun Records in 1955 (a year after his discharge) and had his name changed again . . . to Johnny Cash.
- His career was at an all-time low in the 1980s and he realized his record label of nearly 30 years, Columbia, was growing indifferent to him and wasn't properly marketing him, so to kill the relationship with the label before they did, Cash recorded "Chicken in Black". An intentionally awful song about Johnny's brain being transplanted to a chicken, it ironically turned out to be a larger commercial success than any of his other recent material. However, it wasn't long after "Chicken in Black" that Columbia and Cash parted ways.
- One of his biggest fans is "Jackass" star Johnny Knoxville. The two became friends before Cash died.
- His album "Ring of Fire" (1964) was the first country album to ever reach the top of the US pop charts.
- Stated in an interview with Larry King that his favorite country singer is Dwight Yoakam.
- Among "The Highwaymen", Johnny was old friends (or "blood brothers" as he put it) with Waylon Jennings. Kris Kristofferson idolized Cash and the two become close friends while in "The Highwaymen". Cash was least close with Willie Nelson, but the two were always friendly, despite the competitive eye they kept on one another.
- His songwriting went from a brief process to a very long one as he aged and his health declined. He wrote the song "Big River" while on a short boat ride across New York City's Hudson River in the 1950s, while he spent weeks crafting "The Man Comes Around," one of the last songs he wrote.
- Awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Recording at 6320 Hollywood Blvd.
- In the years shortly before his death, he recorded songs by other contemporary artists, including cover versions of U2's "One", Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus", Richard Thompson's "Tear Stained Letter", Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water", Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down", Loudon Wainwright III's "The Man Who Couldn't Cry", Ewan MacColl's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" and the song "Thirteen" written especially for him by gothic rocker Glenn Danzig.
- The son of poor cotton farmers whose economic and personal struggles during the Depression (when Johnny was growing up) shaped him as a person and inspired many of his songs.
- The band Coldplay was supposed to record a song titled "Til Kingdom Comes" with him for their album "X&Y", but Cash died before that. They added the song as a hidden track and dedicated it to him. In their "Twisted Logic Tour", they played this song in all the venues in addition to playing a cover of his famous song "Ring of Fire". On the two nights (6 & 7 September 2005) at Madison Square Garden in New York they also dedicated the song "Til Kingdom Comes" to the victims of hurricane Katrina.
- After the 1950s, when he wrote almost all of the songs he performed, he performed many covers. On the average album, he was the writer of about a third of the songs.
- He was invited to perform at the White House for the first time in 1972. President Richard Nixon's office requested that he play "Okie from Muskogee" (a Merle Haggard song that scorned "hippies", youthful marijuana users and war protesters) and "Welfare Cadillac" (a Guy Drake song that derides the integrity of welfare recipients). Reportedly he refused to play either song because he found both songs morally reprehensible. However, it was also reported that he refused to play them because he did not have enough time to learn the songs with the band before the performance. He ended up playing a series of his own more left-leaning, politically-charged songs, including "The Ballad of Ira H. Hayes" (about a Native-American World War II Marine hero who helped raise the American flag on Iwo Jima but was subjected to ferocious racism upon his return to Arizona) and "Man in Black" (which contains angry, anti-war lyrics, which Cash almost certainly wrote about the Vietnam War).
- Although he could bear it, he disliked being defined as a "country" artist, feeling that his music wasn't really genre-defined and noting that he often stood well outside of the Nashville mainstream (particularly towards the end of his career). Technically, his music contains elements of rock 'n' roll, folk music, bluegrass, blues and gospel as well as country-style music.
- His album "Bitter Tears" contains original songs told from the viewpoint of Native Americans.
- Father, with June Carter Cash, of John Carter Cash.
- The scar to the right of his mouth was the result of a botched attempt to remove a cyst while he was serving in the Air Force in Germany.
- He had English, and smaller amounts of Scottish and Irish, ancestry. His surname, "Cash", traced back to Scotland.
- His father was a soldier in the US Army unit under Gen. John J. Pershing that hunted Mexican bandit Pancho Villa in Mexico in the early 1900s.
- Cash and "American Recordings" posted a "thank you" to the Nashville country music industry in Billboard Magazine after winning the Grammy for best country record for "Unchained" in the form of the infamous photo of Johnny angrily giving the middle finger to the camera taken back in 1969 during his San Quentin prison performance. Cash did this because he was enraged by Nashville having pretty much left behind him and other aging "country" artists who had defined the genre to make room for the more pop-oriented new country artists, like Garth Brooks.
- His good friend Kris Kristofferson admitted that he wrote his well-known and not-entirely-flattering "Pilgrim" about Cash.
- In January 2006 his long-time lakeside home in Hendersonville, TN, was bought by a corporation owned by The Bee Gees' Barry Gibb.
- His size varied considerably over time. Standing 6'2", he weighed about 200 pounds as a young man, but then his weight plummeted to an unhealthy 140 pounds when his drug addiction was at its peak in the mid-'60s. His weight increased when he kicked his habits, and he eventually became overweight, weighing about 250 pounds by his 50s.
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