Johnny Cash Quotes

“Cash said he was someone “made up of bad parts but was trying to do good.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“Cash said in return, “I’m a songwriter. I use my imagination. The important thing is the message of the song, not the imagery.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“But then you grow with it and you learn that it really doesn’t matter what other people think of you. You’re just one human being, and you’re doing the best you can.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“know everyone will say I’ve got to be out of my skull, but I feel like my recording career has just begun,” Cash told a reporter. “You know, my dreams and ambitions after all these years are pretty much the same as they were at the beginning. I still just want to make records and sing on the radio. After I finally got on the radio I just wanted to make better records and that’s still what I want to do.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“Even at the end of his life, Cash’s assets—aside from property and future royalties—were accounted in the low seven figures, far less than is generally assumed for a star of his stature. Unchained”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“That was an enormous leap—to go from the safety onstage or in the studio of singing with a band behind you to just facing an audience with your own guitar,” Rubin says. “Once we decided that we were going to make it a solo acoustic album, I noticed a change in him when he was just singing in my living room. Before, he had been relaxed and singing in a very personal, intimate way. But suddenly he changed. He began performing the songs, and it wasn’t the same.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“As Cash headed back on the road for most of August, Rubin brought in some musicians to explore dressing up some of the tracks—guitarist Mike Campbell from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and bassist Flea and drummer Chad Smith, both from the Chili Peppers. To”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“It was an especially difficult time for John. He still harbored resentment over the way his father had treated him when he was growing up in Dyess and how Ray had continued to withhold his approval.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“As he slowly began to recover, the family was told that he needed psychological help to survive. Through the hospital, the family contacted the Betty Ford Center, a heralded new alcohol and drug addiction treatment facility in the celebrity-rich Palm Springs area a couple of hours east of Los Angeles.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“Cash loved the Springsteen songs for much the same reason he so admired Dylan’s songs: their daring, compassion, and commentary.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“But none was as warmly embraced as John and June. To millions, their personal redemption was living affirmation of Cash’s music and themes.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“She and I looked across the set at each other, each of us silently asking the other, Are we going to go through this again? Is this what’s going to happen?”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“the freakish arrangement on another novelty, Chris Gantry’s “Allegheny,” that featured June squawking like an injured hawk. Grant thought it was downright embarrassing.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“He and June would eventually testify at nearly three dozen Crusades in front of nearly 2 million people.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“When Cash sat down for his annual New Year’s Eve reflections, he was too close to the situation to appreciate fully that he had just finished one of the most remarkable years in pop history. He’d not only made what is perhaps the greatest country album ever—a work so powerful and rich that Rolling Stone magazine would one day name it one of the hundred best albums regardless of genre—but also recorded a gospel album that was light-years away from the conventional collection of hymns.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“Cash’s reputation as a maverick who’d done jail time, and the El Paso drug bust, too, strengthened his link to rock ’n’ roll; it was his music as well as his image that paved the way for the country-rock coalition that Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings would tap into with their outlaw movement in the late 1970s.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“There in Nickajack Cave I became conscious of a very clear, simple idea: I was going to die at God’s time, not mine. I hadn’t prayed over my decision to seek death in the cave, but that hadn’t stopped God from intervening.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“With Vivian on the way out of his life, Cash reached out to other members of his family, most of whom sided with his wife.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“In her 2007 memoir Vivian wrote that the stress she felt at the time was “almost unbearable. I wanted to die.” She added that she tried to persuade Cash not to speak publicly about the Thunderbolt charges. “To this day,” she said, “I hate when accusations and threats from people like that are dignified with any response at all.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“In the publication, the States’ Rights Party alluded to the El Paso arrest and urged its readers to boycott Cash’s recordings, claiming, “Money from the sale of [Cash’s] records goes to scum like Johnny Cash to keep them supplied with drugs and negro women.” The article even referred to Cash’s “mongrelized” children. Reprints were widely circulated.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“More than anything else he had done, Ride This Train made Cash feel as if he had forged a connection with Jimmie Rodgers and the rest of his greatest musical heroes. He felt authentic. It was the most ambitious album country music had ever seen from a star of his stature.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“But Cash was not a man for moderation. He was soon craving more pills, and to his delight, he found them easy to get.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“They even started carrying shotguns so they could stop the car if they spotted a rabbit or some other potential meal on rural back roads.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“Despite the them-versus-us nature of the Nashville-Memphis relationship, the brain trust at the Opry couldn’t ignore the change going on with the arrival of rock ’n’ roll, and they felt they needed to embrace one of the young mavericks in the Sun stable. They had already lost out on Elvis, and they didn’t want to make the same mistake twice.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“Elvis was single and eager to take advantage of it. He pursued the young female fans with such abandon that Cash found it a bit distasteful.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“This early marketing of Cash to the rock market would prove to be of major significance in his career. Even if he had made the same records in Nashville, he might simply have been viewed as another hillbilly star—like Webb Pierce or Ray Price. But his ties to Elvis and Phillips and Sun Records would forever give Cash credibility in the wider, more culturally important rock ’n’ roll market.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“The importance of the Hayride wasn’t its pay scale. Most of the performers were paid union scale, $12 a night, which barely covered their gas and food. The value was the exposure. With its potent fifty-thousand-watt station, KWKH’s signal alone provided invaluable reach, but the Hayride show was also carried by some two hundred other stations, from as far west as El Paso, north to St. Louis, east to Jacksonville, and down the coast to Miami. That meant a lot of potential record buyers.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“I could see the momentum already there,” Marshall said. “John was becoming popular, with that little different sound we had. His big gigantic voice was cutting through something fierce. You could see it grow day by day.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“Marshall remembered Vivian’s being a bit overwhelmed by all the screaming young girls at the shows, even if they were mostly going crazy over Elvis. This wasn’t the fun-loving, relatively tame family crowd she had seen at country shows in San Antonio. This was something much more intense and sexual.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life

“All this further convinced Phillips that the country music old guard in Nashville was vulnerable. Pierce was only thirty-four, but the young artists from Sun had made him look fifty.”
― Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life