What Johnny Cash Only Admitted After His Father Died

January 10th, 1968. Johnny Cash is on his way to Folsom State Prison to record the concert that will save his career. Beside him is a seventy-year-old Arkansas farmer who has never once told his son he loved him. Johnny Cash wrote two autobiographies. In 1975, with his father still alive, he praised him. In 1997, after both his parents were gone, he wrote about the drinking and the cruelty, and some stories were too hard to publish. Both books describe the same man. This is Ray Cash as the record shows him. The preacher's son from a family ruined by the Civil War. The private sent to France in 1918. The husband who married sixteen-year-old Carrie Rivers. The father who rode freight trains looking for work and talked his way into the Dyess Colony in 1935. The letters in which his son wrote that his dad used to drink all the time, and had changed after Jack died. The man who, in his son's words, never hugged us and never came close to saying he loved us. Then the trailer park in California, the ride to Folsom, and sixteen years in Hendersonville with a famous son who came by every other day. By the end you will know why his grandson, an executive producer of Walk the Line, said the film needed an antagonist, and why Johnny Cash wrote the kind book first. If you want more real stories behind the legends you think you know, subscribe. If this one changed how you see him, leave a like. And tell me in the comments, where are you watching from? Sources include Johnny Cash, Man in Black (1975) and Cash: The Autobiography (1997, with Patrick Carr); Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life (2013); John Carter Cash in Rolling Stone (2015); and the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. No photograph of Ray Cash is shown; period images are for context. Grave photograph by Thomas R Machnitzki, CC BY 3.0. Film clips from America Goes Over (1918), The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and Our Prisons (1956), via the Prelinger Archives. #johnnycash #raycash #folsomprison #dyessarkansas #countrymusic #theprivaterecord