Johnny Cash Wrote One of His Final Songs After a Dream About Queen Elizabeth II

Dreams always served Johnny Cash well. The melody for his 1956 classic “I Walk the Line” came to him in a dream-like state, while he was serving in the Air Force in 1955, with the lyrics written later. In 1959, Cash gathered words following a deep slumber for his single “You Dreamer You“ (also known as “Oh, What a Dream”). Years later, Cash also got the idea to add mariachi horns to his 1963 classic “Ring of Fire” from a dream.

In another dream, toward the end of his life, Cash found himself inside Buckingham Palace with Queen Elizabeth II, telling him he was like a “thorn bush caught in a whirlwind.”

“There she sat on the floor, and she looked up at me and said, ‘Johnny Cash, you’re like a thorn tree in a whirlwind,’” recalled Cash in an interview with Larry King in 2002. “I woke up and thought, ‘What could a dream like this mean?’ I forgot about it for two or three years, but it kept haunting me. I kept thinking about how vivid it was. I thought maybe it was biblical.”

At first, Cash didn’t understand what the words meant until he later found similar passages in the Book of Revelation in the bible. As he put the pieces of his dream back together, Cash started writing “The Man Comes Around.”

Pulled directly from his dream, the Queen’s words are also referenced in the chorus: 

And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree
The virgins are all trimming their wicks
The whirlwind is in the thorn tree
It’s hard for thee to kick against the pricks
In measured hundredweight and penny pound
When the man comes around

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[RELATED: Johnny Cash Called the Outlaw Hymn That Tom Waits Wrote for Him One of the “Greatest Spirituals” He Ever Heard]

Biblical Terms

Along with his interaction with the Queen, “This Man Comes Around” opens on a spoken word intro—And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder / One of the four beasts saying ‘Come and see’ / And I saw, and behold a white horse, pulled from Revelation 6:1-17—and covers the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

As the song starts, Cash refers to Jesus as “the man” who will come and pass judgment.

There’s a man goin’ ’round takin’ names
And he decides who to free and who to blame
Everybody won’t be treated all the same
There’ll be a golden ladder reachin’ down
When the man comes around

The hairs on your arm will stand up
At the terror in each sip and in each sup
Will you partake of that last offered cup
Or disappear into the potter’s ground?
When the man comes around

Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers
One hundred million angels singin’
Multitudes are marchin’ to the big kettledrum
Voices callin’, voices cryin’
Some are born, and some are dyin’
It’s alpha and omega’s kingdom come

Other references from the bible are peppered in, including The virgins are all trimming their wicks, which alludes to the Parable of the Ten Virgins from the Gospel of Matthew (25:1–13).

In 2002, the song was also featured in the film Dawn of the Dead. That year, Cash also released the song on American IV: The Man Comes Around, the final album of his lifetime. A year after the release of ‘The Man Comes Around,” Cash died at age 71.

Photo: Johnny Cash, Glastonbury Festival, June 26, 1994 (Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images)