No one can tell a story quite like an elder who grew up south of the Mason-Dixon line, so it’s unsurprising that the genre we most closely associate with the South is also the most narrative. Johnny Cash was a student of this oral tradition as a young boy growing up in Dyess, Arkansas. And indeed, he allowed this Southern family practice to permeate practically all aspects of his professional life.
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“I can remember listening to my dad tell stories nightly until I was as old as twelve,” Cash told Guitar Player decades later in 1994. “When I was a little boy, there was no TV. Sometimes, in the middle of the winter, the radio’s battery would go dead. There would be no power. We didn’t have electricity. All we had were books and each other. That storytelling thing is a tradition of mine. I carried that on into my recordings, my writing, and into my TV show.”
Cash incorporated storytelling into his variety television show, The Johnny Cash Show, through a segment called “Ride This Train.” From the title itself to the harrowing stories included therein, Cash used “Ride This Train” to celebrate and remember the countless tales of hobo camps, hardship, and traveling that his father, Ray Cash, passed down to the future Man in Black.
Some of the Stories Johnny Cash Heard From His Father Were Painful
Johnny Cash was born smack dab in the middle of the Great Depression. Coming from the rural New Deal colony of Dyess, Arkansas, Cash spent much of his childhood working in cotton fields and witnessing economic and personal struggles within his family firsthand. He experienced tremendous loss, including the death of his older brother, Jack. Amidst all of the present-day strife he endured, Cash would also hear stories from his father that, somehow, seemed even harder and more harrowing.
“In the Great Depression of the early 30s, he was a hobo. There were two kinds of hobos: bums and hobos who went out looking for work,” Cash explained to Guitar Player. “He rode the rails and sent every penny back to my mother. Once he was riding the rods, underneath a boxcar—the most dangerous way you can travel. It was February, and when they got into Pine Bluff, he and his buddy were so cold they couldn’t move. The rail detective saw them, dragged them out, and beat them half to death.” The second half of Cash’s story shares a common feature with many tales from this time: no matter how bad things got, people kept pushing forward because, frankly, there were no other options.
“By the time the train was ready to pull out,” Cash continued, “they’d been beaten enough that their blood was circulating. As the train started moving, they jumped into the boxcar with the railroad detective standing there, waving his fists at them. They got away. He told stories like that—human-interest stories about hardship, danger, and the strange fun of life on the road.”
And indeed, Cash would become well-acquainted with all three during his tenure as the Man in Black.
Photo by Universal Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
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