No matter how famous and successful a father might become, at the end of the day, he’s still someone’s dad—an important, albeit intimidating, lesson Rodney Crowell had to learn when meeting his musical hero, Johnny Cash. The experience would have been life-changing anyway, considering that Cash was the man who inspired Crowell to become a musician.
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But given the circumstances around their first few meetings, Crowell was even more terrified coming face to face with the Man in Black.
Why Rodney Crowell Started on the Wrong Foot With Johnny Cash
Most people who break the “never meet your heroes” rule have, at the very least, the benefit of relative obscurity. The average person meeting their favorite celebrity for the first time likely won’t be recognized by that celebrity, which makes meeting them marginally less nerve-wracking. Rodney Crowell was not afforded that luxury when he was meeting Johnny Cash for the first time. As a country artist, the meeting would have been a big deal no matter what. But Cash held a special place in Crowell’s mind as the musician who first inspired Crowell to start singing and playing the guitar.
As he recalled in an interview with Clint Black for Circle Country, Crowell said he “got off on the wrong foot with him ‘cause I was living out of wedlock with his daughter in Hollywood. That didn’t go over so well for a while.” Black, the father of a daughter himself, replied, “That’ll do it.”
Crowell married Johnny Cash’s daughter, Rosanne Cash, in 1979. The couple had three children together—Caitlin Rivers, Chelsea Jane, and Carrie Kathleen—before divorcing in 1992.
During his marriage to Rosanne Cash, Crowell collaborated with his father-in-law multiple times. Johnny Cash recorded several of Crowell’s songs, including “I’m Never Gonna Roam Again”, “Bull Rider”, and “One Way Rider”. Years after he and Rosanne Cash divorced, Crowell took his collaborative relationship with his ex-father-in-law one step further by revisiting one of the songs that made his ex-wife’s father famous.
The Pair Lightheartedly Butted Heads Over This Distinct Melody
In 1998, Rodney Crowell released a song about the first time he ever heard Johnny Cash’s iconic single, “I Walk the Line”. Appropriately titled “I Walk the Line (Revisited)”, Crowell’s track incorporated the lyrics of the original song’s chorus but with a different melody. The verses recount Crowell’s childhood memory of hearing the song on the radio in his father’s pickup truck. Crowell reached out to see if Cash would be willing to sing on the chorus, and he obliged, but not without a bit of good-natured razzing.
“I use his lyric as the chorus of the song, but I wrote the melody he was going to be singing,” Crowell told Wide Open Country in 2021. “So, I’m teaching him, and he looks at me. He’s kinda squinting. He says, ‘You got a lot of damn nerve changing my melody, son.’ Then, I got intimidated, [thinking], ‘I’m painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa. Who do I think I am?’ But then I recovered, you know, with this flippant, ‘Yeah, and you’re just the guy to go out there and do it.’ He goes up there, and he nails it in two takes.”
“On the mic, he says, ‘Will that do?’” Crowell continued. “I said, ‘Beautifully.’ It was a good moment.” As for his decision to revamp one of country music’s most iconic melodies of all time, Crowell said, “I was so far up into the process…I didn’t even stop to think that this master artist, I was asking him to re-paint his Mona Lisa. I would say it was more innocence than arrogance on my part. I was just chasing the piece of art.”
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