48 Facts About Johnny Cash

1. Johnny Cash was the only country music artist inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a "performer", unlike the other country members, who were inducted as "early influences".

2. Johnny Cash was a musician who was not defined by a single genre.

3. Johnny Cash made a spoken-word recording of the entire New King James Version of the New Testament.

4. Johnny Cash was baptized in 1944 in the Tyronza River as a member of the Central Baptist Church of Dyess, Arkansas.

5. Johnny Cash was hospitalized in 1998 with severe pneumonia, which damaged his lungs.

6. In 1996, Johnny Cash enlisted the accompaniment of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and released Unchained, which won the Best Country Album Grammy in 1998.

7. Johnny Cash wrote that his reception at the 1994 Glastonbury Festival was one of the highlights of his career.

8. Johnny Cash absolutely understood what they were tapping into, and loved it".

9. Around this time, Johnny Cash recorded an album of gospel recordings that ended up being released by another label around the time of his departure from Columbia.

10. In 1984, Johnny Cash released a self-parody recording titled "Chicken in Black" about Cash's brain being transplanted into a chicken and Cash receiving a bank robber's brain in return.

11. Johnny Cash realized that his record label of nearly 30 years, Columbia, was growing indifferent to him and was not properly marketing him.

12. In 1980, Johnny Cash became the Country Music Hall of Fame's youngest living inductee at age 48, but during the 1980s, his records failed to make a major impact on the country charts, although he continued to tour successfully.

13. Johnny Cash wore a shirt from Nudie Cohn which sold for $25,000 in auction in 2010.

14. Johnny Cash was the grand marshal of the United States Bicentennial parade.

15. Johnny Cash declined to play the first two and instead selected other songs, including "The Ballad of Ira Hayes", and his own compositions, "What Is Truth" and "Man in Black".

16. Johnny Cash gave a performance as John Brown in the 1985 American Civil War television miniseries North and South.

17. Johnny Cash has appeared on television, hosting Christmas specials on CBS in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

18. Johnny Cash regularly performed dressed all in black, wearing a long, black, knee-length coat.

19. Johnny Cash had met with Dylan in the mid-1960s and became closer friends when they were neighbors in the late 1960s in Woodstock, New York.

20. Johnny Cash used his stardom and economic status to bring awareness to the issues surrounding the Native American people.

21. Johnny Cash played at the D-Q University in the 1980s.

22. Johnny Cash performed benefits in 1968 at the Rosebud Reservation, close to the historical landmark of the massacre at Wounded Knee, to raise money to help build a school.

23. Johnny Cash faced resistance and was even urged by an editor of a country music magazine to leave the Country Music Association: "You and your crowd are just too intelligent to associate with plain country folks, country artists, and country DJs.

24. Johnny Cash wrote three of the songs himself and one with the help of Johnny Horton, but the majority of the protest songs were written by folk artist Peter La Farge, whom Cash met in New York in the 1960s and whom he admired for his activism.

25. Johnny Cash performed at the Osteraker Prison in Sweden in 1972.

26. Johnny Cash played his first famous prison concert on January 1, 1958, at San Quentin State Prison.

27. Johnny Cash began performing concerts at prisons starting in the late 1950s.

28. Johnny Cash stayed off drugs for several years, but relapsed again.

29. Johnny Cash took an "altar call" in Evangel Temple, a small church in the Nashville area, pastored by Reverend Jimmie Rodgers Snow, son of country music legend Hank Snow.

30. Johnny Cash proposed onstage to June on February 22, 1968, at a concert at the London Gardens in London, Ontario, Canada.

31. Johnny Cash credited that experience with helping him turn around and save his life.

32. Johnny Cash attempted to bribe a local deputy, who turned the money down.

33. Johnny Cash was last arrested in 1967 in Walker County, Georgia, after police found he was carrying a bag of prescription pills and was in a car accident.

34. Johnny Cash posted a $1,500 bond and then was released until his arraignment.

35. Johnny Cash was unrepentant and claimed, "I don't care about your damn yellow buzzards.

36. Early in his career, Johnny Cash was given the teasing nickname "the Undertaker" by fellow artists because of his habit of wearing black clothes.

37. In 1958, Johnny Cash left Phillips to sign a lucrative offer with Columbia Records.

38. Johnny Cash was in the studio, and the four started an impromptu jam session.

39. Johnny Cash auditioned for Sam Phillips by singing mostly gospel songs, only to learn from the producer that he no longer recorded gospel music.

40. Johnny Cash worked up the courage to visit the Sun Records studio, hoping to get a recording contract.

41. In 1961, Johnny Cash moved his family to a hilltop home overlooking Casitas Springs, California, a small town south of Ojai on Highway 33.

42. Johnny Cash enlisted in the United States Air Force on July 7, 1950.

43. Johnny Cash was significantly influenced by traditional Irish music, which he heard performed weekly by Dennis Day on the Jack Benny radio program.

44. Johnny Cash suffered for more than a week before dying on May 20, 1944, at the age of 15.

45. Johnny Cash had sympathy for the poor and working class.

46. In March 1935, when Johnny Cash was three years old, the family settled in Dyess, Arkansas, a New Deal colony established to give poor families a chance to work land that they had a chance to own as a result.

47. Johnny Cash was born on February 26, 1932 in Kingsland, Arkansas, to Ray Cash and Carrie Cloveree.

48. Johnny Cash was known for his deep, calm bass-baritone voice, the distinctive sound of his Tennessee Three backing band, which is characterized by train-sound guitar rhythms, a rebelliousness coupled with an increasingly somber and humble demeanor, free prison concerts, and a trademark, all-black stage wardrobe, which earned him the nickname "The Man in Black.