Johnny Cash Rejected This Tom Petty Song Over One Chord

As any musician knows, sometimes, the way a song sounds in your head doesn’t end up working out in real life, and such was the case for a standalone Tom Petty song that Johnny Cash rejected over its somewhat jazzy harmonic structure. (“Somewhat” being the operative word here.)

Petty once said he pictured the 1987 track as a B movie starring the Man in Black himself, so it only made sense that he reached out to Cash to cover the song. However, some of Petty’s chords rubbed Cash’s cowboy-chord sensibility the wrong way.

Johnny Cash Rejected This Tom Petty Song Over a Chord

Tom Petty’s seventh studio album, Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough), might not feature his most memorable hits, but it does include one track that has an interesting connection to country music legend Johnny Cash. The third track off the album’s B-side, “A Self-Made Man,” is a bouncy, bravado-filled rocker describing a self-made man who knows about pride and knows how to lose.

In Paul Zollo’s 2005 book Conversations with Tom Petty, the Heartbreakers frontman described trying to get Johnny Cash, whom Petty had very loosely based his song around, to cover the track in the studio. Laughing at the memory, Petty told Zollot that Cash “couldn’t deal with the major-seventh chord.”

“He just said, ‘I can’t sing over that. My voice doesn’t sound right with it. Can you find another chord?’ And I couldn’t come up with another chord that sounded right,” Petty said. “But I always wanted him to do it because he liked it. And he wanted to do it. He just couldn’t get over that major-seventh chord.”

Petty was no stranger to major-seventh chords, often incorporating these dreamy, jazz-adjacent harmonies to some of his greatest hits like “Into The Great Wide Open” and “Mary Jane’s Last Dance.” But for Cash, even a relatively small addition of a raised seventh chord was a bit too off-brand for someone who almost exclusively dealt with diatonic or the classic country leading tone (think “Folsom Prison Blues”).

The Heartbreakers Frontman Had Been in Cash’s Shoes Before

As disappointing as it must have been for Tom Petty to have his song rejected by Johnny Cash, he could certainly empathize with Cash’s point. Three years prior, Petty rejected his guitarist, Mike Campbell’s track, “Boys of Summer,” for a similar reason. The harmonies weren’t quite right. By the time the song wound up in the hands of Don Henley, of course, Campbell had worked the kinks out and transformed the song into a bona fide smash hit.

“In Tom’s defense, when I got to the chorus, I went to a different chord,” Campbell recalled on Brian Koppelman’s podcast The Moment. “It was kind of like a minor chord. As the song ended up, on the chorus it goes to that big major chord. You know, it lifts up. So, [Tom] heard a slightly inferior version. I remember when it went by, we were kind of grooving to it, and it got to that chord, and Jimmy Iovine goes, ‘Eh, it sounds like jazz.’”

While either scenario—Johnny Cash rejecting Tom Petty, Tom Petty rejecting Mike Campbell—could be seen as a missed opportunity to expand a singer’s musical stylings (and even Petty admitted to regretting his decision later on), we think it’s safe to say the artist’s decisions didn’t do much to disaffect the rest of their careers.

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