“I was the ace. I was who they called when the hardest jobs came up.”
Johnny Cash wrote that about his Air Force job in his 1997 book, “Cash: The Autobiography.” With Veterans Day coming on Wednesday, Nov. 11, it’s a good week to remember that the Man in Black wore Air Force blue first.
Cash grew up on a cotton farm in Dyess, Ark. He enlisted on July 7, 1950, shortly after the Korean War began. After training in San Antonio, the Air Force sent him to the 12th Radio Squadron Mobile in Landsberg, a small town in southern Bavaria. His job was to listen to Soviet Army radio traffic and copy down the Morse code.
It was a lonely post for a young man from Arkansas. “He (Johnny Cash) was here against his will, with no friends, not able to leave,” base historian Herbert Wintersohl told Stars and Stripes in 2018. When Cash came back to Germany as a star in 1959, he told the same paper that “I was in a security unit and I couldn’t get around much.”
So he filled the empty hours with music. Stars and Stripes reports that he bought a guitar at a store off base, and the Encyclopedia of Arkansas says his first guitar cost five dollars. A fellow airman, Orville Rigdon, helped him learn to play it. “He taught me some of my first chords on the guitar,” Cash told Guitar Player magazine.
Before long there was a band. Cash and his buddies called themselves the Landsberg Barbarians, a play on the name of the base newspaper, the Landsberg Bavarian. “I think it was three guitars and a mandolin,” Cash said. “We played these honky tonks and gasthauses at night in little towns around the base.” A gasthaus is a German country inn.
The most important thing Cash found in Landsberg came from the base movie theater. Soon after he arrived in the fall of 1951, he sat down to watch a new Warner Bros. picture called “Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison.” It was a tough drama about life behind the walls of the famous California prison, starring Steve Cochran.
The movie stayed with the young airman. American Songwriter has noted that Cash, stuck far from home, felt a little like a prisoner himself. By 1953, still in Germany, he had written “Folsom Prison Blues.”
Cash never tried to dress the story up. “There wasn’t much romance to the writing of ‘Folsom Prison’,” he said in the 1970 book “The Johnny Cash Story,” as quoted by Far Out Magazine. To hear him tell it, he saw the movie and liked it, so he wrote the song. “That’s all there was to it.”
He recorded it at Sun Studio in Memphis on July 30, 1955. In early 1956 it climbed to No. 4 on Billboard’s country chart. Then on Jan. 13, 1968, he sang it for the men inside Folsom State Prison itself. That live version went to No. 1 on the country chart and won him a Grammy.
His official channel shared this performance from his ABC series, “The Johnny Cash Show.”
Johnny Cash sings “Folsom Prison Blues” on his TV show
Cash left the Air Force on July 3, 1954, as a staff sergeant. He later joked about how slowly those years went by, as uDiscover Music recalls: “I spent 20 years in the Air Force from 1950 to 1954.”
He passed away in 2003 at age 71. For decades, the song he dreamed up after a movie in Bavaria was often the first one he played in concert, right after four famous words: “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.”