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Death of the Man in Black

By RUBY

Saturday, September 13, 2003

His voice was a deep baritone with little range. But the sound and the man behind it had character, which made all the difference. When Johnny Cash stepped to a microphone, he could snap back heads with an almost perfect blend of medium and message -- the Man in Black telling tales, in carefully rendered cadence, of folks down on their luck or up against it.

Cash, 71, died Friday of diabetes-related respiratory failure, leaving behind a legacy that few in country music can match.

Born dirt poor in Arkansas, Cash wound up in Memphis in the early 1950s, hooked up with Sun Records and recorded in the same studio as Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison. His hits through the years are instantly recognizable by their sound or their lyric or their title, or all three: "A Boy Named Sue," "I Walk the Line" and others, including "Ring of Fire," co-written by Merle Kilgore and Cash's second wife, June Carter Cash, who helped her husband through hellish bouts with drugs and alcohol, and who died in May.

In all, Cash accumulated 11 Grammy awards -- the latest coming this year -- and was elected both to the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. "He's one of the greatest people in the world," Waylon Jennings once said of the man who for a time joined his friends Jennings, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson as the Highwaymen.

"I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die," Cash wrote in "Folsom Prison Blues," although Cash himself never served time. But he did have an aura of the outlaw about him, a reflection of the independence with which he lived his life and a quality that probably will burnish his work and his persona in death.

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