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How Dreams Saved Johnny Cash
By Kym Chaffin

I always thought there was something Lincoln-like about Johnny Cash.  I could almost imagine them standing side by side, heads bowed together in deep conversation, two melancholy men dressed in black.  Cash said he wore black as a sign of mourning for prisoners, the poor and the downtrodden.  Both men were totally committed to solidarity with the underclass and both were strong dreamers, visionary guys who took their dreams seriously and spoke openly about them. 

Tragedy came early into the lives of both men, too.  Lincoln lost his mother and his sweetheart both to the diseases that periodically swept the frontier.  Johnny Cash lost his beloved older brother, Jack, to a horrible accident in a saw mill when they were both only teenagers.

These tragedies gave both men an aura of melancholy that stayed with them for life and while it may sound strange to the ears of mainstream American, I believe it also may have given both men an intense contact with the spirit world that led them to their interest in dreams.

Johnny Cash’s brother Jack was a devout youngster who was determined to be a preacher, a person Cash described as a “wise old soul.”

Decades later Cash wrote in his autobiography Cash about how his dead brother continued to visit him in dreams for decades:

“Jack comes to me in person, too.  He’s been showing up in my dreams every couple of months or so, sometimes more often, ever since he died, and he’s been keeping pace with me.  When June or John Carter [Johnny’s son] appear in my dreams, they’re usually younger than they are now, but Jack is always two years older than me.  When I was twenty, he was twenty-two; when I was forty eight, he was fifty already; and the last time I saw him, about three weeks ago, his hair was gray and his beard was snowy white.  He’s a preacher, just as he intended to be, a good man and a figure of high repute. 

“He’s still wise, too.  Usually in my “Jack dreams” I’m having some sort of problem or I’m doing something questionable, and I’ll notice him looking at me, smiling, as if to say “I know you J.R. [Johnny’s family name].  I know what you’ve really got in your mind—“There’s no fooling Jack.” 

Johnny Cash was supremely talented.  One of his very first song-writing attempts was “Folsom Prison Blues” arguably the best country song ever written.  But his life was also dark and hard, like the Arkansas dirt from which his family scratched a living. 

While his rise in music was meteoric he remained deeply unhappy, trapped in an incompatible marriage made at twenty-two.  Like all country artists of that era he constantly toured where he discovered amphetamines.

Like Elvis Presley later, Cash literally thought amphetamines were a wonderful gift from above to make his life easier.  In a few years, of course, he found himself totally addicted. 

Two things saved his life and career—his meeting with June Carter and a dream.

His meeting with June Carter, a singer-songwriter from a musical family and a deeply religious woman, seemed navigated by Cash’s uncanny intuition.  He originally met her backstage at the Grand Ole Opry and presciently told her “I’m gonna’ marry you someday.”  It was the kind of intuitive leap that seemed to characterize Cash’s career.

A few years later they found themselves traveling in the same show together and the attraction between them quickly took on a life of its own.  The problem was Cash was still in the same bad marriage as the first time they’d met.

Both of them had arrived simultaneously at a point of crisis. 

Wrestling with what was unthinkable to her religious beliefs June Carter wrote a song about ambiguously burning alive in flames of either passion or hell (or both).  She worked it out with songwriter Merle Kilgore and called it “Ring of Fire” but was so conflicted about it she gave it to Johnny to record.

Both Cash and his career were in trouble.  Steve Turner, writing in The Man Called Cash, put it succinctly, “Cash desperately needed a hit.  Despite being a remarkably popular touring act and an instantly recognizable name in American pop music, he hadn’t had a single in the pop charts in nearly four years.”

People felt like Cash, in his recordings, had “lost his sound”.  Merle Kilgore was discussing the problem with record producer Jack Clement who said, “I can get his [Cash’s] sound back.”

When Kilgore mentioned this to Cash, Johnny again revealed his primarily intuitive way of  dealing with decisions by saying, “You know what, Merle?  I know Jack Clement really can get my sound back because when you said that, it put chills all over my body.” 

It was then that Johnny Cash—who regularly tracked his dreams—had a big dream, a dream that drastically altered the trajectory of his life and propelled him from being a well-known country singer to being a superstar.

First you have to understand how strait-jacketed country music was in that era in terms of what instruments could appear on a recording.  It’s hard to believe now but even drums were forbidden.  The first great genius of country music, Hank Williams Sr., had his guitar player thunk-thunk-thunk heavily on the muffled strings of his guitar to simulate the sound of a drum to get around the constriction.

Johnny had booked the studio time to record June’s song “Ring of Fire” using Jack Clement as a producer/arranger but he laid down the night before and dreamed that he could hear himself singing the song with an arrangement he’d never heard before.. 

No trumpet or horn had ever appeared on a country song but as Cash listened to the dream-song he outrageously heard a chorus of what he called “Mexican bullfighting trumpets” framing the song with an unforgettable, over-arching, brassy riff that added a whole new range of feeling to the plaintive tune.

He woke up and, though he knew to put Mariachi trumpets on a country song was wildly in violation of several country music taboos, he couldn’t get the sound of it out of his head.

By the time he’d arrived at the session he’d almost talked himself out of mentioning it but June wouldn’t let him back-peddle and said, “Did you tell Jack about your dream?” 

Shyly, Cash told him about the trumpets and Clement realized it was great and leapt on it.  It was an of out-of-the-box inspiration that proved to be a stroke of genius.

“Ring of Fire” became what was known as a “Monster hit” by definition a record so good people who didn’t ordinarily buy records went out and bought it.  It made him a superstar.

Decades later, as all artists do, Cash had faded from such mass popularity.  However, he managed to pull off what few have before and  made a major comeback in the last few years of his life.   Recording with producer Rick Rubin, who was previously known for recording rap artists and heavy metal bands, Cash won over whole new generations of admirers (and made what has been called the greatest video of all time, Hurt). 

He did this by following the same intuitive instincts he’d always followed and shunning the ordinary and the road well-trodden.  After cutting several Grammy-winning albums with Rubin, (doing things like using heavy metal backup bands to sing archaic songs about murder and death), Cash was still tracking his dreams. 

One night Johnny had a dream that he turned into the signature song on one of his most lauded later albums.  Later, he described it to talk-show host Larry King:

“I dreamed I saw Queen Elizabeth, that I went into Buckingham Palace and there she sat on the floor.  And she looked up at me and said, “Johnny Cash, you’re like a thorn tree in a whirlwind.” And I woke up, of course.  What could a dream like this mean—thorn tree in a whirlwind?  Well…for two or three years…it kept haunting me.  This dream, kept thinkin’ about it.  How vivid it was.  And then I thought that maybe it’s biblical, so I found it.  Somethin’ about whirlwinds and thorn trees in the Bible.  So, from that, my song started.” 

It became his song “And the man comes round.”

But dreams weren’t Cash’s only contact with the numinous.  After he and June were married they bought an ancient house in Jamaica called “Cinnamon Hill” which was built in 1747 and managed to take up residence in a place that was truly magical. 

 In his autobiography, Cash discussed the house matter-of-factly.

 “There are ghosts…Many of the mysteries…can be explained.  But there have been incidents that defy conventional wisdom.  Mysterious figures have been seen—a woman, a young boy—at various times by various people over the years.

“Once, a woman appeared in the dining room when six of us were present.  We all saw her.  She came through the door leading to the kitchen, a person in her early thirties, I’d say, wearing a full-length white dress, and proceeded across the room toward the double doors in the opposite wall, which were closed and locked.  She went through them without opening them, and then, from the other side, she knocked: rat-tat-tat, rat-tat.”  (Cash, 34)

 He continued,

 “We’ve never had any trouble with these souls, they mean us no harm, I believe, and we’re certainly not scared of them; they just don’t produce that kind of emotion.”

Johnny’s wife, June Carter Cash, died in 2003. 

I believe it was Kurt Vonnegut who observed that some married people choose to leave this earth together.  I knew the minute I heard that June Carter had passed that Johnny Cash wasn’t long for this earthly veil.  The term “soul mate” is overused but if there is such a thing, I believe they were it. 

His old friend Al Gore called him to ask how he was doing and Johnny said, “I’ve never felt pain like this before.” 

He died four months later. 

I told a friend of mine at the time “I literally can’t imagine a world without Johnny Cash in it.”  I always thought he seemed a little out of place in this era, more like one of those great old souls who founded the USA and sacrificed to settle its frontiers. 

Maybe that is, at least in part, what made him so special.  But when I think of Cash the gifted dreamer, I remember that dream he had about the Queen.  He said later he held that dream in his mind for four years before he decided to turn it into a song.

May we all learn to have such discipline and inspiration with our dreaming. And we can!