said about Elvis Presley in his autobiography, in late night interviews, in the spoken tributes he gave on television specials, is richer and stranger and more complicated than the version of the story that circulates online. Because cash never kept a secret about Elvis. What he kept was a feeling. And the difference between those two things is the whole story.
It starts not in Nashville, not in a recording studio hung with Golden Records, but on a sidewalk in Memphis in the summer of 1954 in front of a drugstore where a skinny kid with a guitar and a voice nobody had heard anything like was playing to two or 300 people who had no idea they were watching history.
Johnny Cash was 22 years old when he first saw Elvis Presley. Cash had just gotten out of the Air Force 4 months earlier, had moved to Memphis with his new wife, Vivien, and was trying to figure out how to turn music into a living. He was walking with Viven on Lamar Avenue when they heard the sound.
A crowd had gathered outside the cat’s drugstore, a ribbon cutting opening, the kind of thing every small business on every block in Memphis did in those days to pull people in from the street. Standing on a flatbed truck in the parking lot was a 19-year-old kid nobody had heard of yet, playing the same two songs over and over.
He only had one record to his name. He played it and played it. Cash wrote about it years later in his autobiography. He said the kid sang those two songs over and over again, and two or 30 hundred people, mostly teenage girls, had come out to see him. Afterward, Cash and Viven walked over. He said Elvis was polite. He said he didn’t say much.
He said he didn’t have to. His charisma alone kept everyone’s attention. Elvis invited them to come see him play at the Eagle’s Nest, a club on the edge of town promoted by a disc jockey named Sleepy John. Cash went. The place was nearly empty. He said it was an adult club and since Elvis’s audience was mostly teenagers, they had it almost to themselves.
A handful of people sitting in the dark while this kid played. Cash said he thought Elvis was great anyway. He said he was great even with 12 people watching. That is where it began. Two young men from the rural south, both of them hungry, both of them carrying something in their voices that the people who ran the music industry in New York and Los Angeles hadn’t quite figured out how to categorize [music] yet.
Meeting in the parking lot of a drugstore and recognizing something in each other that neither one of them could explain. The place where both of their lives changed was a building at 706 Union Avenue in Memphis. Sam Phillips had started Memphis Recording Service out of a converted radiator shop in 1950, renaming it Sun Records in 1952. The walls were lined with acoustic tile that Philips had glued up himself.
There was one microphone. There was no budget for mistakes. What Philillips was chasing was not a formula. He was chasing a feeling. He said later he was looking for a white boy who had the negro sound and the negro feel. Elvis Presley walked through the door in the summer of 1953, paid $4 to record a vanity disc for his mother, and Phillips’s assistant, Marian Kisker, wrote in the margin of her notepad, “Good ballad singer. Hold.
Phillips signed Elvis the following year. Cash auditioned not long after and recorded his first songs at Sun in 1955, cutting Hey Porter and Cry, Cry Cry on the same equipment Elvis had used months before. What Sam Phillips gave both of them was permission. He let them be from where they were from.
He let them bring in the gospel they had grown up with and the country they had heard on the radio and the rhythm and blues that drifted out of the black clubs along Beiel Street. And instead of sanding it all smooth, he let them stack it. He pressed record and he let whatever happened in that room happen.
Cash later said that Get Rhythm was written with Elvis in mind, that he’d composed it imagining Elvis recording it. But by the time he brought it to Phillips, Elvis was already gone. Signed away to RCA Victor for what was then the largest artist contract ever paid. Phillips used that money to keep Sun alive. Cash put Get Rhythm on the B-side of I Walk the Line instead.
In November of 1955, RCA Victor bought Elvis Presley’s contract from Sun Records for $35,000. Cash remembered that moment. He said they all did. One day, Elvis was playing in the parking lot of a drugstore for 200 teenagers. Less than 2 years later, somebody had written him a check that most of them would never see in their lifetimes.
They toured together in 1955 and 1956. Cash and Elvis and Carl Perkins. A loose confederation of young men sleeping in the back of cars and eating what they could find between shows, playing to crowds in armories and high school gyms across Arkansas and Louisiana and Texas. Tickets cost a dollar. Sometimes they cost less.
Cash said Elvis was a fabulous rhythm player and that everyone backstage, every single person would stop what they were doing when Elvis went on because none of them wanted to miss it. He said he never once missed the chance to stand in the wings and watch. He said of Elvis, “Every man backstage was standing there. He had something magnetic that had nothing to do with [music] the choreography or the costumes or the production.
It was in the room before he said a word. George Klene, one of Elvis’s oldest friends, told a story from a 1957 train tour. A young girl ran up to Elvis on the platform and screamed, “Johnny Cash!” mistaking him for Cash in the crowd. Elvis found it hilarious. He dropped his voice low, walked with a different kind of gravity, sang a few lines of, “Hey, Porter,” and signed her autograph paper as, “Best wishes, Johnny Cash.
” He knew Cash’s voice that intimately. He knew exactly how to do it. He’d been listening to Cash’s records the way the rest of America was listening to his. June Carter, who toured with both of them before she married Cash, said Elvis used to play Cash’s records and hum along. She told her son, John Carter Cash, that Elvis once said to her, “The whole world will know Johnny Cash.
He’s a friend of mine.” Cash returned the favor in 1959, opening shows by dropping into an exaggerated, hipswiveing impression of Elvis performing Heartbreak Hotel. While the crowd went wild, they imitated each other. They watched each other. They were for a few years at least running side by side on a road nobody had ever run before.
And the running was fast and the company was good. And none of them could quite believe any of it was real. The most famous afternoon they were all in the same room together happened on December 4th, 1956 at Sun Records. Carl Perkins was in the middle of a recording session, New Material, Matchbox, with his brothers Clayton and Jay, and drummer W. S. Holland.
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Sam Phillips had brought in a piano player named Jerry Lee Lewis to fill out the sound. Lewis had only been at Sun for a few months. Elvis stopped by in the early afternoon with his girlfriend of the moment, a woman named Marilyn Evans, just to visit. He hadn’t recorded at Sun in over a year by then. He was an RCA Victor artist now, famous enough that the girls outside knew his car.
Sam Phillips called the local newspaper. Entertainment editor Bob Johnson arrived with a photographer named George Pierce and Johnson would coin the phrase that lasted milliondoll quartet. Cash’s role in that afternoon is the one historians still argue over. Cash himself insisted in his autobiography that he was there, first to arrive, last to leave, his voice on the tape, singing higher than usual to stay in key with Elvis.
He said, “My voice is on the tape. It’s not obvious because I was farthest away from the mic.” Others who have gone back to the recordings disagree. Peter Geralnik, who wrote the definitive Elvis biographies, suggested Cash may have stopped in briefly, possibly to collect a check from Phillips, and left before the real music started.
On the recordings themselves, Elvis’s voice is unmistakable. Jerry Lee Lewis’s piano fills the room. Carl Perkins is there throughout. Cash’s voice, if it is there at all, has never been definitively identified. What nobody disputes is the photograph. Four young men at the piano. Three of them leaning in. One of them grinning like he just invented something.
Cash is on the far right, one hand resting on the instrument, watching. He is watching Elvis. He is almost always watching Elvis. They sang gospel songs that afternoon. Farther along, just a little talk with Jesus. Blessed Jesus, hold my hand. Elvis, who had grown up in the Assembly of God church in Tupelo, Mississippi, knew every word of every song.
That was the thing people sometimes forgot about him. They focused on the hips, on the leather, on the screaming girls. Cash always focused on the voice. He said Elvis was a very good singer. He said it like it was the most important thing he could say about a person because for him it was. The years after Sun Records pulled the four of them in different directions with a force that had nothing gentle about it.
Elvis went to Hollywood, made 27 films through the 1960s, and stopped performing live for 8 years. Cash went dark in a different way. The pills started around 1957. Amphetamines first to stay awake through the touring schedule that never stopped. Then barbiterates to come down. Then the combination of both that became the architecture of his days.
At 6′ 1 in tall, his weight dropped to 155 lbs. He wrecked every car he owned. He was arrested seven times. In October of 1965, US customs agents at the El Paso airport found 688 amphetamine capsules and 475. Tranquilizers hidden in his luggage. He’d bought them in Huarez across the border because it was easy. Because everything was easy except for the part where he had to put them down.
The Grand Ole Opri banned him in 1965 after he smashed the microphone stand and dragged it across the stage, breaking the foot lightss. That same night, he wrecked his Cadillac, breaking his nose and jaw. His first wife, Vivien, was watching all of it from a distance. By then, his marriage was ending.
His body was losing weight it couldn’t afford to lose. He said later that during those years he put himself in a position that only by the grace of God he survived. He meant it literally. Cash was a man who believed in grace with the same physical conviction that he believed in gravity. He had grown up in a sharecropper’s cabin in Das, Arkansas, a government resettlement community in the Mississippi River Delta, and the church had been the center of every week of his childhood.
When he lost the thread of it in those years, he lost a thread of himself along with it. The darkest moment, according to Cash’s own account, came in the fall of 1967. He drove to Nicac Cave on the Tennessee River south of Chattanooga with the intention of crawling inside and not coming out.
He wanted the darkness to take him. He crawled deep enough that his flashlight burned out and he lay in the absolute black and he said what happened next was that he became conscious of a very clear simple idea. He was not in charge of his destiny. He said he felt the presence of God. He crawled toward a breeze he could feel in the dark and found the opening and walked out into the sunlight and found June Carter and his mother standing there.
The historical record is complicated. The Tennessee Valley Authority was filling Nicac Lake that fall, and some researchers have noted the cave may have been flooded. But what was not complicated was what happened to Cash in the months after June Carter along with her parents Maybel and EJ Carter moved in with him to help him through withdrawal.
She threw out his pills. When he yelled, she read Bible passages back at him. On March 1st, 1968, in London, Ontario, in front of 5,000 people, Cash stopped midshow and proposed. They married that same month. Two events happened in 1968 that changed both men’s trajectories in ways that echoed each other without either of them intending it.
On January 13th, Cash walked into Folsam State Prison in California and performed two concerts for the inmates. He had played prison shows before, going back to San Quentin in 1958, but this time a recording crew was there. The album that came out of it, Johnny Cash at Folsome Prison, went to number one on the country charts and reached the pop charts in a way that Cash’s records almost never had.
He had been dropped from his management company. His sales had fallen through the floor. The music industry had essentially written him off. And then he walked into a prison in black clothes and sang to men who were never getting out. and the whole country stopped to listen. That was January. In December, Elvis Presley stood on a television stage at NBC studios in Burbank, California in a black leather suit with a guitar in his hands for the first time in 8 years, and sang That’s All Right with Scotty Moore beside him. And the
feeling in the room was so close to a religious experience that people in the audience couldn’t find words for it afterward. Producer Steve Binder had fought Colonel Tom Parker for months to make that special something real. Parker had wanted Christmas carols and a tuxedo. Binder wanted Elvis back. For one night, he got him.
The special aired December 3rd, 1968. It was the highest rated television program that week. Elvis closed it with a song called If I Can Dream, written overnight by a vocal arranger named Earl Brown, who had been moved by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy that year, and wrote it as a response. 800,000 copies sold.
Elvis had been sitting in a room in a Hollywood mansion making movies nobody wanted to see. And in one television special, he reminded a country that had almost forgotten what he was actually capable of. Cash and Elvis did not appear on each other’s shows. They did not write letters about the parallel shape of what they had both just survived.
But the people who knew them both said later that there was something the two of them shared, an understanding of what it felt like to come back from a place you probably shouldn’t have come back from. an understanding that had no language, but that each of them would have recognized in the other instantly. What happened to Elvis after the comeback is the part of the story that Cash found hardest to speak about directly because he had seen it coming and had chosen out of respect not to interfere.
By 1969, Elvis was performing in Las Vegas. The International Hotel brand new 26 stories on Paradise Road opened that summer and Elvis was its headlining act. Two shows a night, seven nights a week, four weeks at a stretch. He was backed by a full orchestra, a gospel choir, a rock band, the whole TCB ensemble.
James Burton on guitar, Glenn Harden on piano, Jerry Chef on bass, Ronnie Tut on drums. The shows were extraordinary at first. He played for 101,000 people in those first four weeks and sold out every single night. He was 42 when he started those residencies. By the time they were ending, something was very wrong. His physician, Dr.
George Nicopoulos, had been prescribing medications to him in quantities that were by any standard of medical practice shocking. In the first 8 months of 1977 alone, Necopoulos would prescribe more than 10,000 individual doses of sedatives, amphetamines, and narcotics in Elvis’s name. Elvis was hospitalized and placed in drug treatment programs.
He would do them briefly and then stop. By September of 1974, he was slurring on stage, barely able to finish sentences. Journalists who had covered him in 1969 would come to shows in 1975 and 1976 and stare at someone they could barely recognize. His weight fluctuated, his face was swollen. The costumes that had once seemed like a kind of theater now seemed like a costume for hiding what was underneath.
His personal entourage, the group of friends and employees who had been around him for nearly two decades, who were known in the press as the Memphis Mafia, had grown into a kind of fortress around him. Access to Elvis required passing through layers of handlers who were themselves dependent on his income, his goodwill, his continued existence as a working performer.
Old friends called and were told he was busy. Former colleagues drove to Graceland and were turned away at the gate. Cash watched this from a distance and chose not to add himself to the list of people who had tried to push through and been embarrassed. He wrote about it later with the kind of precision that comes from having made a decision you have had years to examine.
He said in his autobiography, “I took the hint when he closed his world around him. I didn’t try to invade his privacy. I’m so glad I didn’t either because so many of his old friends were embarrassed so badly when they were turned away at Graceand.” He added that in the 60s and 70s he and Elvis had chatted on the phone a couple of times and swapped notes now and again.
If Elvis was closing at the Las Vegas Hilton as cash was getting ready to open, Elvis would call to wish him luck, but that was about the extent of it. He said he and I liked each other, but we weren’t that tight. He said they weren’t close at all in his later years. This is the part of the story that the dramatized videos circulating online tend to get wrong.
They present Cash as having been a close confidant of Elvis in his final years, someone who had special knowledge of what was happening inside Graceland, someone who was keeping secrets. Cash never claimed any of that. What he claimed was the opposite, that he had kept a respectful distance. that he had watched a man close his world and had honored that closure. He was not inside.
He was not there. What he had was the particular grief of someone who stands on the outside of a house and can see through the window that something is going badly and who makes the choice not to knock because the house belongs to someone else. On August 16th, 1977, Elvis Presley was found unresponsive on the bathroom floor of Graceland by his fiance, Ginger Alden.
He was 42 years old. He was pronounced dead at Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis that afternoon. The official cause of death listed cardiac arhythmia, though toxicology results would later reveal the presence of at least 10 prescription drugs in his system. The full pharmacological truth of what happened to Elvis Presley on that bathroom floor is still technically disputed.
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