Johnny Cash: The Songwriter Whose Biggest Song Wasn't His

The song most people would name first if you asked them for a Johnny Cash song, "Ring of Fire," wasn't written by Johnny Cash. It was written by June Carter, years before she married him, about the unsettling, unwanted feeling of falling for a man who was already married to someone else. Cash recorded it, made it a number one country hit, and is now permanently associated with a song describing someone else's account of falling for him.

That's worth knowing before anything else about his catalog, because Cash's actual writing credits are a more complicated, more interesting story than "the man in black wrote everything he sang."

A childhood shaped by a cotton farm and a dead brother

Cash was born J.R. Cash in 1932 in Kingsland, Arkansas, to a family so poor that a New Deal resettlement program was what got them a farm to work at all. His older brother Jack died at fourteen after a table-saw accident at the family sawmill, an event Cash referred back to for the rest of his life as the point where a kind of darkness entered his songwriting. He enlisted in the Air Force after high school and was stationed in Germany, where he first started performing with a group of fellow airmen called the Landsberg Barbarians.

A backwards tape and a song that changes key five times

The melody for "I Walk the Line" came, by Cash's own account, from an accident: friends had borrowed his reel-to-reel recorder in Germany, and when he got it back and played a tape of his own band's practice session, it had been left running backwards. The haunting, unfamiliar sound that came out stuck with him. When he actually sat down to write the song, back in Texas warming up for a show with his bassist Marshall Grant, he built it around an unusual structural choice: the key changes with every verse, five times across the song. Cash solved the practical problem of hitting the new pitch cold, on stage, by humming the new root note out loud before he sang it. He kept doing it for the rest of his career and eventually just told audiences why: "People ask me why I always hum whenever I sing this song. It's to get my pitch."

If you've ever built a technical workaround into a song because you didn't have another way to solve the problem, that's exactly what Cash's humming became, an accident of necessity that turned into a signature.

A song built on someone else's foundation

"Folsom Prison Blues," the song that gave Cash his signature line, "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die," wasn't built from nothing either. Cash wrote it in 1953 after watching the prison drama Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison, but the melody and a substantial amount of the lyric came directly from "Crescent City Blues," a song by arranger Gordon Jenkins that had been released on an obscure 1953 concept album two years earlier. Jenkins wasn't credited on Cash's original Sun Records single. Once "Folsom Prison Blues" became a career-defining hit, Jenkins sued, and in the early 1970s Cash settled and paid him roughly $75,000 to waive any further claim to the song.

It's an uncomfortable footnote to one of the most famous outlaw anthems in American music, and also a useful, unglamorous reminder that even signature songs sometimes start as someone else's idea, reshaped hard enough to become unmistakably your own, at a legal cost if you're not careful about where the inspiration came from.

A love song written before the love was allowed to happen

June Carter co-wrote "Ring of Fire" with Merle Kilgore in 1962, inspired by a line she'd underlined in an old book of Elizabethan poetry: "Love is like a burning ring of fire." At the time, she and Cash were both still married to other people, and by most accounts the song was Carter working through the disorienting, unwanted pull of falling for someone she couldn't have yet. Cash recorded his version the following year with a mariachi-style horn arrangement he said had come to him in a dream, and it became the biggest hit of his career. He and Carter married in 1968, five years after his recording of her song about not wanting to be in love with him had already gone to number one.

Writing his own explanation, eventually

Not everything in Cash's catalog came from someone else's pen or someone else's melody. "Man in Black," released in 1971, is entirely his own, a direct, first-person explanation of the all-black stage wardrobe he'd worn for most of his career: written for the poor, the beaten down, the prisoner still paying for a crime the world had moved past, the soldiers dying in a war he thought had gone on too long. It's the clearest example in his catalog of Cash writing without a borrowed melody or someone else's manuscript underneath it, using the song directly as a public statement rather than a story about somebody else.

What's worth taking from his career

Cash was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1977 and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1980, honors that reflect a career built as much on interpretation and reinvention, especially his late-career American Recordings sessions with producer Rick Rubin, as on original composition. His catalog is a useful corrective to the idea that a great songwriter's discography has to be entirely their own words and music from note one. Some of it was borrowed and reshaped until it became legally and artistically his own problem to defend. Some of it was written about him by someone else entirely, years before either of them knew where it was headed. And some of it, when he needed to say something directly, was entirely his.

If you're trying to figure out whether a song you're building on someone else's foundation is still yours, or you've got a story only someone else can tell about you and need help turning it into something that sings, go find your co-writer.

Sources: Wikipedia: Folsom Prison Blues, MPR News: Johnny Cash, Gordon Jenkins Settled Dispute, Wikipedia: Ring of Fire, Gold Radio: How Johnny Cash's Future Wife Wrote One of His Biggest Songs, 500 Songs: I Walk the Line, Far Out Magazine: Johnny Cash Explains Man in Black, Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame