Before He Was the Man in Black, Johnny Cash Was in This Rowdy German Bar Band

Before he was the Man in Black, Johnny Cash was one of several military men who made up a rowdy German bar band called the Landsberg Barbarians. The band name directly referenced the southern Bavarian Air Force base in Landsberg am Lech, where Cash worked as a Morse code interceptor. (Fascinatingly, the future country icon was the first to intercept the news that Joseph Stalin died.)

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Cash, along with the rest of the Landsberg Barbarians, performed at shows that got so raucous, the Man in Black’s future engagements at various high-security prisons seemed tame by comparison. At the very least, the inmates in San Quentin didn’t have countless steins of beer goading them into their disorderly behavior.

Johnny Cash Was Once in a Rowdy German Bar Band

Johnny Cash volunteered to fight in the Korean War as a member of the U.S. Air Force when he was just 19 years old, which meant he was years away from becoming the country music icon we know him as today. Still, Cash had a keen interest in music, having picked up a little bit of guitar from a childhood friend before his enlistment. To pass the time during his off days, Cash joined forces with a small group of fellow soldiers-slash-amateur musicians. Orville Rigdon played lead guitar. Reed Cummins played a flat-top Gibson. A man with the last name of Freeman played mandolin, and Cash covered rhythm guitar.

Cash had two guitar teachers in his early years. One was a friend named Jessie Barnhill, who taught Cash rudimentary guitar chords and rhythms, despite having infantile paralysis-polio that withered his right hand. The second teacher was Rigdon. “He taught me some of my first chords on the guitar,” Cash recalled to Guitar Player. “I knew two that my friend, Jessie, taught me when I was 12. I don’t think I knew four chords when I started recording. All the songs I liked, you could play with two or three chords.”

Fortunately, the Landsberg Barbarians specialized in Appalachian and old country music that had simple, easy-to-follow chord progressions. They played “whatever country songs were popular,” Cash said. “A lot of Appalachian because Freeman was from West Virginia and knew all those songs. So did I. I listened to them all my life, sang a lot of Bill Monroe. My voice was a lot higher then. Hank Snow was one of my great inspirations.”

Landsberg Barbarians Gigs Made San Quentin Look Tame

Johnny Cash was 27 when he performed his first of many prison concerts. Songs like “Folsom Prison Blues” and “Green, Green Grass of Home” helped associate the Man in Black with incarceration, despite Cash never serving a prison sentence. (He did, however, have many overnight stays in a jail cell.) Despite the reputation most prisoners carry due to their unruly past, Cash’s prison gigs probably seemed surprisingly calm compared to his nights with the Landsberg Barbarians in a random German dive bar.

“We played these honky tonks and gasthauses at night in little towns around the base,” Cash said. “There was always a big fight. A lot of broken glass and broken bones, broken noses, and so forth. It was an acoustic band. There were no electric instruments. I think it was three guitars and a mandolin. We made a lot of noise at those gasthauses. Got into a lot of fights. The police came a few times.”

At least in San Quentin, Cash knew that the law was right there, ready to quell any disruptive inmate.

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