2. He was a cryptographer for the Air Force during the cold war
J. R. Cash enlisted in the United States Air Force in July 1950, at which point, informed by the Air Force that he couldn’t sign up using only initials as a first name, he became John R. Cash. Cash took his basic training at Lackland Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas, followed by training at nearby Brooks Air Force Base before deploying to West Germany. While in training he met and fell in love with Vivian Liberto and during his overseas deployment he courted her in letters, to which she responded in kind. He reached the rank of staff sergeant during his four years of service and upon receiving his honorable discharge in 1954 he returned to Texas and marriage to Vivian in San Antonio.
While stationed at Landsberg Air Force Base in Germany Johnny started his first band, the Landsberg Barbarians. It was at Landsberg where he saw a film one evening entitled Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison, a film noir production of what became known as B movies in the United States. Cash used the film as the inspiration to write what would become one of his signature songs, Folsom Prison Blues. After Cash returned to Texas and married Vivian, he moved his family to Memphis, where he found work as an appliance salesmen, though he continued to play guitar with friends, as he had with the Barbarians while in Germany. Johnny Cash also took classes preparing him to be a radio announcer, using his distinctive baritone voice to support his growing family
3. The man who discovered Elvis also discovered Johnny Cash
Cash began playing regularly with a duo who called themselves the Tennessee Two, Marshall Grant (bass) and Luther Perkins (guitar), developing a style which was later called rockabilly. In 1954 Cash auditioned for Sam Phillips, singing in the gospel style with which he was most comfortable, but when Phillips told him that his studio, Sun Records, was no longer interested in recording gospel music, Cash performed some of his newer rockabilly numbers. Cash recorded Hey, Porter in September 1954. Its B side was Cry, Cry, Cry. Released in May of the following year, the B side was the more popular of the record, and was responsible for its reaching number 14 on the charts, selling over 100,000 copies.
In July, 1955, Johnny returned to Sun Studios to record the song he had written in Germany, Folsom Prison Blues. The song reached the top five in the country charts in early 1956. He would go on to record the song again many times throughout his career, often in live performances, and it became the song with which he opened most of his concerts. The original recording had no drums, a piece of paper slipped under Cash’s guitar strings replicated the sound of a snare as Johnny strummed the chords of the song. “I sat with my pen in my hand, trying to think up the worst reason a person could have for killing another person, and that’s what came to mind”, Cash later said of his famous line about shooting a man in Reno, “just to watch him die”.