FEATURE:
The Lockdown Playlist
Johnny Cash's I Walk the Line at Sixty-Five
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RELEASED on 1st May, 1956…
I Walk the Line is among Johnny Cash’s most-famous songs. It is one of the classics from the late, much-missed Country star. Ahead of its sixty-fifth anniversary, I wanted to put together a Lockdown Playlist of other tracks that contain the words ‘line’ and ‘lines’. I was going to do a Johnny Cash-only playlist, but I thought it would be fun to compile some songs that share that word. Before getting to it, NPR ran a feature in 2000 regarding the story of I Walk the Line:
“If you read enough articles, interviews and liner notes, you can try to piece together the story of what inspired "I Walk the Line," but Johnny Cash is a masterful storyteller. And even his good friend Kris Kristofferson has said he's half-truth, half-fiction. The humming at the start of each verse? Cash said he picked that up from Dr. Hollingsworth, a physician in his hometown who was always humming. Then there's lyric, `I keep my eyes wide open all the time,' which Cash said was based on a piece of advice from a Dale Carnegie business course.
And the melody line? Well, in his autobiography, Cash explains how when he was in the Air Force in Germany, he put a tape up on his reel-to-reel recorder and heard a, quote, "haunting drone full of weird chord changes, something that sounded like spooky church music." It turned out the tape was a recording of his band, the Landsberg Barbarians, but it was being played backwards.
"I had a conversation with Johnny the other day," Rodney Crowell says. "And we were talking about when he was in the military--he was in the Air Force. And his job in the Air Force, he sat with headphones on trying to pick up, I think, German Morse code. And, you know, when Morse code's running through the headphones, and he's, you know, pulling his eight-hour shift. I said, `Man, that's sounds to me like--that's where your--(makes guitar noises)--sound came from.' And he said, `It absolutely is.' He said, `When I first started writing songs, I was kind of keeping a little notebook and scratching things around with Morse code running through my head.'"
When Johnny Cash came back from the Air Force, he moved to Memphis, where he worked as a door-to-door appliance salesman. He started a band with Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant, two guys from the local car dealership. They wanted to record a gospel record with Sam Phillips. He was the hottest producer in Memphis, the brains and ears of Sun Records. He helped create Elvis Presley's sound, Carl Perkins' sound, Jerry Lee Lewis' sound. `Sam Phillips was the man to see,' Johnny Cash told "Fresh Air's" Terry Gross in 1997.
"So I called him, and he turned me down flat. And then two weeks later, I called him, turned down, turned down again. He told me over the phone that he couldn't sell gospel music. So I went down with my guitar and sat on the front steps of his recording studio and met him when he came in. And I said, `I'm John Cash. I'm the one who's been calling. And if you listen to me, I believe you'll be glad you did.' And he said, `Come on in.'"
Cash recorded a few singles with Sam Phillips. And not long after, he went on the road opening for 20-year-old Elvis Presley, who was already on his way to becoming, well, Elvis. And wherever Elvis went, of course, adoring girls were sure to follow. Johnny Cash was 23 and married to his first wife, Vivian Liberto. On tour, Cash met temptation, and that is what led him to write "I Walk the Line." It is a proclamation of fidelity.
"It was kind of a prodding to myself to, `Play it straight, Johnny,'" Cash said of the song.
Cash originally played the song on the slow side.
"Well, Sam wanted it up--you know, up-tempo. And I put paper in the strings of my guitar to get that--(makes guitar noises)--sound. And with a bass and a lead guitar, there it was. Bare and stark that song was when it was released. And I heard it on the radio, and I really didn't like it. And I called Sam Phillips and I asked him please not to send out any more records of that song. But he said, `Let's give it a chance.' And it was just a few days until--that's all it took to take off."
The song became a huge hit across the country, and the line Johnny Cash tried to walk in his personal life got tougher”.
To mark sixty-five years of a truly terrific and fantastic song, this Lockdown Playlist is an assortment of songs that have the word ‘line’ and ‘lines’ in their titles. It is left for me to round things off by providing a nod and salute to…
A Johnny Cash classic.