Johnny Cash Looks Back With a Smile : After rock’s love fest, the country legend basks in his long-awaited glory and talks about the music

It’s been more than 12 hours since Johnny Cash was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but he’s still wearing a smile as he sits in his hotel suite the next afternoon with family and friends.

Bob Dylan, an old ally, called to offer congratulations. Now his daughter, Rosanne Cash, is rushing into the room with her own daughter, 2-year-old Carrie.

As the child races for her granddaddy’s knee, Rosanne flops in a chair and smiles as she shares an image from the previous evening’s ceremony that she just can’t get out of her mind.

It was the moment during the musical jam when her father joined a line of celebrated rock guitarists, including Keith Richards and John Fogerty, on a rollicking version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”

“That was the most psychedelic experience of my life,” Rosanne says, laughing so hard that she doubles up in the chair.

“I mean I’m the kid who wore a black armband to school the day Hendrix died. . . . so the last thing I ever thought I would see was my daddy on a stage playing acoustic guitar on ‘Purple Haze.’ ”

Cash laughs good-naturedly. Wearing his trademark black shirt and pants, he looks completely relaxed.

In the days before the induction, however, the veteran country music star had been a bit anxious--wondering how he would be received by the 1,000 guests at the dinner.

Though eligible for the Hall of Fame since the organization was started seven years ago, Cash had been bypassed by voters until this year because some Hall of Fame judges questioned his rock ‘n’ roll credentials.

“When I kept getting nominated all those years, I thought, ‘That’s great, but it’ll never happen to me.’ I felt there are so many who deserve to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame before I do,” he says, leaning back on a couch.

“So when I got voted in this year, I figured there’s got to be some people who resent me being here, but that’s not the way it turned out. I got the biggest kick out of it (the jam) when Keith Richards saw that I was watching Fogerty to get the keys we were supposed to be playing in.

“Keith leaned over and said, ‘Thank God you’re watching him, because I sure don’t know what the hell I’m doing either.’ ”

Cash laughs.

“You know what really blew me away last night?” he asks, leaning forward teasingly. “I was standing at the urinal in the rest room before the dinner and I heard this voice behind me singing ‘Loading Coal,’ which is probably one of the most obscure songs I ever recorded. I wondered who in the world could be singing that song and when I looked around I saw Keith and he had this big smile on his face. So I turned around and we sang the chorus together. That’s when I guess I knew everything was going to be OK.”

Cash was so welcome at the induction dinner that many of the musicians on stage with him--including Fogerty and Richards--felt that, if anything, the Hall of Fame voters owed Cash an apology for waiting this long to induct the man who toured and recorded in the ‘50s with a Memphis stable of rock pioneers that included Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins. The other four have been in the Hall of Fame for years.

“Of course, he belongs,” said Fogerty, the creative force behind Creedence Clearwater Revival. “The surprising thing is he didn’t get in sooner. I think people tend to forget that rock was basically a melting of country and rhythm & blues, and Johnny Cash’s records were a part of that birth process.”

Cash, who’ll be 60 this month, is a humble but proud man who may have thrilled young audiences in the same honky-tonks and auditoriums as the other Memphis rockers in the ‘50s, but he always seemed a step apart.

Unlike Presley and Lewis--the two other biggest stars in the Sun Records line-up--Cash made music that offered more than attitude and a beat. Cash’s songwriting, largely shaped by his own upbringing, frequently reflected deeper emotions than were customarily found in popular music in the ‘50s.

Cash was born in rural Arkansas during the Depression and if his parents weren’t exactly dirt poor, times were pretty tough. His father worked in sawmills, on the railroad and as a cotton farmer, barely making enough to support his family. Young Cash never forgot the struggle of his parents and others in the region, and he would use his music to express the heroism he saw in their everyday lives.

Country music--showcased Saturday nights on the Grand Ole Opry broadcasts--was the favorite sound in all the farm houses all through the South because it prided itself on telling the story of the common folk.

But Cash, who also loved spiritual music, wrote songs that seemed closer to the commentary and observation of folk music than to the conventional design of most commercial country and pop in the ‘50s. He may have been trying to sell his music to young audiences just like Elvis and Jerry Lee, but the subject matter of Cash’s songs was usually more adult--songs with content .

Country music is filled with prison songs, but there is a dark, unsettling edge about “Folsom Prison Blues” that offered the first evidence of Cash’s power as a social realist. Though it was written almost 40 years ago, this song about a convict’s loneliness and regret as his listens to a passing train remains one of Cash’s most popular numbers:

When I was just a baby,

My mama told me son

Always be a good boy

Don’t ever play with guns

But I shot a man in Reno

Just to watch him die

When I hear that whistle blowin’

I hang my head and cry.

At the same time, Cash’s emphasis in the ‘60s on songs with social messages--support for underdogs and outcasts--as well as his ambitious concept albums demonstrated an artistic integrity that would influence everyone in rock from Bob Dylan and the Byrds to Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen.

Such early records as “Folsom Prison Blues” and “I Walk the Line” were as big with young rock audiences as with older country ones in the ‘50s and he used his influence in the ‘60s and ‘70s to break down the barriers that radio programmers started building between country and rock.

On his ABC-TV show in 1969 and 1970, Cash introduced such artists as Dylan and Joni Mitchell to the country audience, as he showcased country talents like Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard to pop viewers.

Though his record sales today pale alongside such upstarts as Garth Brooks and Clint Black, Cash was for years the biggest-selling artist in country music. His “Johnny Cash at San Quentin” album in 1969 spent four weeks at No. 1 on the pop charts and sold more than 2 million copies.

Of all his songs, “Man in Black” perhaps best defines the point of view that Cash represents as a musical figure and cultural hero.

Well, you wonder why I always dress in black?

Why you never see bright colors on my back

And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone.

Well, there’s a reason for the things that I have on.

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down.

Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town

I wear the black for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,

But is there because he’s a victim of the times.

It’s precisely this type of individual identity and statement that is missing from much of today’s country music despite its recent commercial explosion. It’s a point that Cash acknowledges.

“I don’t know, but there’s something about all this uproar over country now that smacks of the ‘Urban Cowboy’ craze (of the late ‘70s), something about it doesn’t quite fit,” he says during an interview in his hotel room.

“I think Clint Black and Garth Brooks and some of the others have got some staying power, but time will tell . . . as it does for all of us. The question is how they handle their fame . . . whether they listen too much to the applause or whether they continue to reach deeper into themselves to find something unique.”

Mostly, though, Cash’s mind on this morning isn’t on today’s country. He is talking about the old days--back with Elvis and Jerry Lee and Roy and Carl, and how Elvis once asked him to write him a hit.

“There was never any sense of us going in different directions--them being rock or me being country--at that time,” Cash says, reminiscing about the days in the mid-’50s when the five classic artists toured together and recorded for Sam Phillips’ landmark Sun Records label.

Among Cash’s other rock-related singles: “Get Rhythm, “Home of the Blues,” “Ballad of a Teenage Queen,” “Big River” and “Guess Things Happen That Way.” Columbia Records is releasing a three-disc box set next month that will include 15 tracks from Cash’s Sun days as well as 60 from the later Columbia Recordings. The set, titled “The Essential Johnny Cash: 1955-1983,” will contain Cash’s versions of songs written by Dylan, Springsteen and Elvis Costello.

“The truth is we all played the same audiences in the beginning and we all sang each other’s songs when we weren’t on the same shows because we had only recorded a few songs ourselves. Whenever Elvis wasn’t on the show with us, we’d sit backstage and go, ‘OK, who’s going to do ‘Mystery Train’ tonight? It wasn’t until later that people started talking about us as different.”

And what about that song for Elvis?

“Elvis said he needed a song for his next recording session and he knew I had given Carl the idea for ‘Blue Suede Shoes,’ so he asked me to write something for him. I came up with ‘Get Rhythm.’ But he left Sun Records for RCA Records and Sam Phillips wouldn’t let me give him the song. He wanted me to release it,” Cash recalls, speaking in his deep, distinctive drawl as he rubs his right hand through his thick black hair.

Hey, get rhythm

When you get the blues

C’mon get rhythm

When you get the blues

Get a rock and roll feelin’

In your bones

Put taps on your toes and get gone

Get rhythm, when you get the blues.

Unable to record the Cash song, Presley decided to record “Blue Suede Shoes” himself, even though it was already a hit for Perkins. Presley was so hot at the time that the song became a hit all over again.

Cash said he got the idea for the song while in the Air Force in Germany in the early ‘50s.

“There was a man named C.V. White from Richmond, Va., who worked with me and every time C.V. got a three-day pass, he would put on his dress blues, spit shine his black Air Force issue shoes and say, ‘Cash, don’t step on my blue suede shoes.’

“I’d say, ‘Oh, C.V., they’re just Air Force black,’ but he’d reply, ‘Tonight man, they’re blue suede shoes and I’m going out on the town.’ I always thought that would be a good idea for a song and I told Carl about it one night in Mississippi and that’s what he did.”

While the rest of the Sun roster gravitated toward the teen-age rock world, Cash’s growing interest in folk music pushed him more toward an adult country audience.

“I used to go to this record store in Hollywood (in the early ‘60s) that had a huge folk music section and I bought every Alan Lomax field recording I could find,” he recalls. “I would sit and listen to those records for hours and days and weeks. You could feel the real, human stories in those songs and tales, and that’s what I wanted to do with my music, too.

“That’s what was so exciting about last night. People in the music business might draw all sorts of lines between country and rock and folk and gospel, but there were no lines on that stage.”

The phone is ringing again--someone else offering congratulations. Cash pauses before taking the call.

Looking at daughter Rosanne, who is telling the Hendrix story to a late arrival, the American country-rock institution smiles.

“You know, Rosanne, I had such a great time at the induction last night that I think I’ll go back again some day. . . . I can’t wait to play ‘Purple Rain’ with Prince.”