Born on This Day in 1928, the Bassist Who Shaped Johnny Cash’s Sound and Stuck with Him Through Thick and Thin

On this day (May 5) in 1928, Marshall Grant was born in Bryson City, North Carolina. He was a mechanic by trade who played guitar when he had the time. Then, one afternoon, he met Johnny Cash. Before long, Grant and his friend and co-worker, Luther Perkins, were making music with the young man who had just returned from an Air Force base in Germany. Together, they developed a unique style. Soon, that sound helped them dominate the country charts and airwaves.

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Grant married Etta May Dickerson in 1946. The next year, they moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where he worked as a mechanic for a few local shops. No one could guess how much his life would change when he took the job at Automobile Sales Company, though. There, he worked alongside Luther Perkins, Red Kernodle, and Roy Cash. After Roy’s younger brother, Johnny, returned to the United States after finishing a stint in the Air Force, he brought Johnny to meet his co-workers.

[RELATED: On This Day in 1956, Johnny Cash Released the Career-Defining Single That Spelled Out His Values]

“Marshall told me that when my dad walked into the mechanic’s bay, he looked up, saw a lanky, dark-haired young man standing in the doorway, and the hair on the back of his head stood up, and chills went down his back. He knew.” Rosanne Cash wrote in a 2013 piece for the Oxford American.

“Roy says you boys pick a little music,” Cash said. “Very little,” Grant replied. “Maybe I can pick with you sometime,” Cash suggested. That brief conversation was the beginning of something bigger than they could have imagined.

Marshall Grant Becomes a Bass Player

Initially, Marshall Grant, Johnny Cash, and Luther Perkins were all guitar players. They would get together at Grant’s house and play classic country and gospel tunes while their wives played cards in the other room. Eventually, they started to get more serious about their music. At that point, they decided that one of them should change instruments.

In the end, Grant was chosen to play bass. He taught himself how to play the boom-chicka-boom rhythm that became the heart of Cash’s sound on a stand-up bass.

Grant Did More Than Lay Down the Low End

Marshall Grant played bass behind Johnny Cash from the beginning of his musical career until 1980. However, he did more than handle the low end of the arrangements. He was a rock for Cash.

Rosanne Cash recalled the relationship between her father and Grant. They were “closer than brothers, from the first rudimentary attempts at music, through the Sun Records years, through staggering success and inconceivable fame, my dad’s drug addiction, my parents’ divorce, Dad’s recovery from addiction and chronic relapses, a devastating lawsuit between them, and eventually, sweet reconciliation between them in their later years,” she wrote. “He never got over my dad’s death, not for a second.”

Grant died in Jonesboro, Arkansas, where he was slated to perform at the Johnny Cash Festival, which raised funds to restore and preserve Cash’s childhood home.

Roseanne Cash summed up Marshall Grant’s importance to American music in a statement after his passing. “[Johnny Cash] wouldn’t have gone where he did without Marshall, and therefore, this lineage not only of my but the next generations of roots and rockabilly and country musicians would’ve disappeared. An entire generation of those musicians owes something to Marshall,” she explained.

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