8 Things You May Not Know About Johnny Cash

We love lists, music and also love paying tribute to those who came before us – especially The Man in Black!

• Johnny Cash will be memorialized by the U.S. Postal Service by having his very own stamp in 2013. The vintage design incorporating Frank Bez’s photograph for the 1963 best of album Ring of Fire is intended to resemble a 45RPM record sleeve.
• Did The Man in Black, his informal nickname hint at his cover songs from black-clad subcultures? Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, Glenn Danzig or Nick Cave would think so!

• For the biographical drama Walk the Line (2005), Johnny and June Carter Cash picked Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon for the roles – who performed all of the songs themselves, without any dubs, also learned to play their instruments (guitar and auto-harp) from scratch and had six months of vocal training with music producer T-Bone Burnett.
• His track Redemption has a black/doom metal cover by Kekal. It is quite strange.

• He worked as a cryptographic intelligence unit, as a codebreaker during the Cold War and clearly he was one of the best – he also was the first American to pass along the news that Stalin was dead.
• Johnny Cash wrote two lists in his life – two that we know of, at least. One would be the 100 Essential Country Songs list. This personal list below would be the other one.

  

• Did Johnny Cash serve hard time? Nope, he was only in a police cell overnight but he was a passionate prison reformer who played lots of concerts in prison, Folsom and San Quentin having been only the most famous ones. The only prison gig he played outside the States was in Sweden, at Österåker Prison just outside Stockholm in 1972.
• Dyess, Arkansas, Cash’s hometown is planned to host a $10m tourist project – well under way!