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he greatest cowboy of them all, was born on this day back in 1932. We’re celebrating the Man in Black’s would-be 78th birthday with an interesting fact for every year since then. Revel in the random Cash-related miscellany — from what he nicknamed his tour bus to which president was his all-time favorite — after the jump.
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– Johnny Cash started smoking when he was 12 years old.
– The Masons rejected Cash’s application for membership “on moral grounds.”
– Cash learned how to hypnotize himself from country singer Johnny Horton.
– To commemorate his birthday, Cash’s family wants you to wear black.
– Cash adopted his signature all-black suits as a good luck charm after he wore a black t-shirt and jeans to his first public performance.
– His first gig with the Tennessee Two was playing for a group of elderly ladies in a church basement.
– When he was a child working in the cotton fields, Cash used to eat young cotton buds, despite his mother’s warnings that they would give him bellyaches.
– He took only one voice lesson, after which the teacher advised him not to let anyone change the way he sang.
– His parents named him J.R. Cash as a compromise between the names “John” and “Ray.” When he enlisted in the Air Force, Cash gave his name as “John R. Cash.”
– The first song he remembers singing was the hymn “I Am Bound for the Promised Land.”
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– After being arrested for trespassing in Starkville, Mississippi, Cash broke his toe trying to kick out the bars of his jail cell.
– The title for “Walk the Line” was a suggestion from Carl Perkins.
– During his act in the 1950s, Cash flaunted a killer Elvis impersonation.
– During his stint in the Air Force, Cash learned to translate Russian Morse code.
– He bought his first guitar in Germany for 20 deutschemarks ($5 American).
– The first song he heard on a radio was “Hobo Bill’s Last Ride” by Jimmie Rodgers.
– While in the Air Force, Cash traveled to London for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation.
– When he first tried to record for Sun records, Cash pitched himself as a gospel singer. After that didn’t work, he just sat on the steps of the recording studio until he could convince Sam Phillips to listen to his songs.
– Roy Orbison was Cash’s next-door neighbor in Tennessee for over 20 years.
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– Cash advised Jerry Lee Lewis not to record “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Goin On,” preferring his rendition of Jack Clement’s “It’ll Be Me.”
– Cash used to exchange birthday greetings with Elizabeth Taylor, whose birthday is the day after his.
– “Blue Suede Shoes,” Cash claims, came from a story he told Carl Perkins about an airman who used to tell Cash not to step on his blue suede shoes.
– Cash’s advice on living life on the road: “Back in 1957, there was no Extra Crispy. Other than that, it’s the same.”
– When Cash first moved to Memphis, he enrolled in a radio class at Keegan’s School of Industry, hoping to become a DJ.
– The first time Cash met honky-tonk pioneer Ernest Tubb, Tubb advised Cash, “Just remember this, son. The higher up the ladder you get, the brighter your ass shines.”
– At the Carter Family Fold, a mountain music concert hall in Virginia, Cash was the only artist allowed to use an amplifier.
– He met his first wife, Vivian Liberto, at a skating rink in San Antonio.
– During his time in the Air Force, Cash wrote all his letters to Vivian in green ink.
– After Johnny Carson moved to New York to start The Tonight Show, Cash bought Carson’s house in Encino.
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– The camper Cash used for his amphetamine binges in the desert was named Jesse James. It had its windows spray-painted black so Cash could sleep during daylight hours, “but also because I just liked to spray-paint things black.”
– After an oil leak from Jesse James set the Los Padres National Wildlife Refuge on fire, Cash became the only person ever successfully sued by the U.S. for starting a forest fire.
– The blaze Cash’s camper started killed all but 9 of the endangered condors at the refuge. When questioned about the birds at the deposition, Cash replied: “I don’t give a damn about your yellow buzzards.”
– Country guitarist Merle Travis taught Cash how to sink a Bowie knife at twenty paces.
– The first time Cash met songwriter Peter Le Farge, Cash gave him enough Thorazine that Le Farge slept for “three or four days.”
– An ostrich attack left Cash with five broken ribs and internal bleeding.
– During a hospital visit for surgery, Cash smuggled in a card of Valium in the bandages over his suture. (Half of the pills dissolved into the wound.)
– At his house in Jamaica, Cash had a “Billy Graham room” with a guest bed specifically for Graham.
– President Jimmy Carter was June Carter’s cousin, related to Cash by marriage.
– Cash was also distantly related to King Duff, the first king of Scotland.
– Carrie Cash, Johnny’s mother, worked at the gift shop for the “House of Cash” museum until her death.
– Muhammad Ali wrote a poem for Cash called “Truth” which Cash kept locked in a vault.
– The motto on the Cash family coat of arms reads “Better Times Will Come.”
– In the 1985 miniseries North and South, Cash played the abolitionist John Brown.
– He wrote, produced, and narrated Gospel Road, a movie about Jesus’ life, which featured June Carter Cash as Mary Magdalene.
– The same night Cash got fired from the Grand Ole Opry, he crashed June Carter’s Cadillac into an electrical pole.
– Cash collected 19th century guns and antique books.
– At Dolly Parton’s first performance on the Grand Ole Opry stage, Cash coached her backstage.
– When Cash was 5 years old, his dad shot his dog for eating the table scraps meant for the hogs.
– When visiting the White House, Cash compared shoe sizes with President Clinton. Cash is a size 13, Clinton is a size 12.
– Cash’s signature introduction (“Hello, I’m Johnny Cash”) debuted at his concert at Folsom prison.
– According to his autobiography Cash, if he were stuck on a desert island, Cash would bring Bob Dylan’s The Freeweelin’ Bob Dylan, Merle Travis’ Down Home, Jimmie Davis’s Greatest Gospel Hits, Emmylou Harris’ Roses in the Snow, Rosanne Cash’s The Wheel, a gospel album by Rosetta Tharpe, “something by Beethoven,” and You Are There by Edward R. Murrow.
– The tune for “I Walk the Line” was inspired by a recording of Bavarian guitar music Cash had accidentally played backwards.
– Once, on tour in the late 1950s, Cash and his band members bought 500 baby chickens and a hundred of them loose on each floor of a hotel.
– At another hotel, they flushed cherry bombs down the toilet and blew the plumbing out.
– The 1962 crime drama Five Minutes to Live was Cash’s first role in a full-length feature film.
– On his tours in the early 1960s, Cash was billed as “America’s Foremost Singing Storyteller.”
– Cash spent a night in jail in El Paso for smuggling two socks full of amphetamines across the Mexico border.
– During Cash’s divorce, he shared an apartment in Nashville with Waylon Jennings.
– Before one meeting with his addiction counselor, Cash drove a tractor into the lake beside his house.
– The scar on the right side of Cash’s face was from a botched surgical procedure while he was in the Air Force.
– Cash guest-starred as Kid Cole on four episodes of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.
– June Carter finally accepted Cash’s proposal for marriage at a hockey arena in Ontario.
– In 1984, when Cash felt that his record label was ignoring him, he released an intentionally awful album called Chicken in Black, with a title song about Cash’s brain being transplanted into the body of a chicken.
– He used to carry around a jar of instant coffee and ladle spoonfuls of it into the coffee he ordered in restaurants.
– The first episode of The Johnny Cash Show featured Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan as guests.
– On Independence Day in 1976, Cash served as grand marshal for the federal government’s bicentennial parade.
– In 1986, Cash published the novel Man in White based on the life of the apostle Paul.
– Cash’s video for “Delia’s Gone” shows Cash tying up and burying Kate Moss.
– Richard Nixon was Cash’s favorite president.
– While checked into the Betty Ford Clinic in the 1980s, Cash met and befriended Ozzy Osbourne.
– After his wife June died, Cash had her Wildwood Flower album cover painted on the elevator in his house.
– Cash suffered from aviataphobia (fear of flying) and ophidophobia (fear of snakes).
– In the Air Force, Cash wrote short stories under the pen name Johnny Dollar.
– During his first two years touring, Cash clocked over 100,000 miles of road travel.
– Cash once stuck a bowie knife into a hotel room’s reproduction of the Mona Lisa that didn’t meet his standards.
– As a 22-year-old inmate, Merle Haggard saw three of Cash’s shows in San Quentin. He later credited Cash for inspiring him to work on his singing.
– “The Man Comes Around” came from a dream Cash had about the Queen of England.
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