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After the show, I was asked if I wanted to meet Cash. I'd covered hundreds of bands and musicians. I'd interviewed everyone from Neil Young to Pete Townshend to David Bowie. I'd never felt any nervousness or trepidation and was pretty comfortable around creative and famous people. Striking up rapport, getting on an artist's wavelength, that's what I did. But Johnny Cash was an icon and close to an idol. The Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville inducted Cash in 1980. Twelve years later the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland followed suit. Johnny Cash was the towering, craggy-faced, world-weary (but God-fearing) man-in-black who'd emerged from many a dark hole and come out on top. He made Christmas albums and children's albums. He recorded those two classic prison albums at San Quentin and Folsom and had served time himself. Even if his pill-popping, badass days were well behind him – and I'm glad they were – he wore the tracks of his life on his face. I'm brought backstage jelly-legged. Several people are ahead of me in the small line of greeters, so I have time to think of what I'll say. (Note to self: Be clever, be smart, have something to say that's not a cliché.) Now, it's my turn. We shake hands, and I give him the firmest grip of which I'm capable. We look each other in the eye and say hello. And I stammer, "Um, I know your daughter Roseanne and your step-daughter Carlene. I've covered them a few times…" I stumbled on a bit with some lame anecdote, but whatever it was, my words sounded stupid even to me, although Johnny was polite enough to nod and smile. Finally, I choked out something about how much I loved what he'd done and moved on. As it happened, I got to chatting with Cash's guitarist, Marty Stuart – then a relative newcomer, but now a star in the country field. When the theater people needed to shut down the backstage area, Stuart invited me back to his hotel room to continue our chat. (No, nothing illicit happened.) We just talked for an hour: music, life, and love of Johnny Cash. And at the end, Marty said he was a Cash collector (as well as being a sideman) and had some mementos and records Cash had given him. He said he had several copies of Cash's first album, the one he made for Sam Phillips' Sun Records called Johnny Cash With His Hot and Blue Guitar. Cash recorded the album a year after my birth, and I Walk the Line was the hit. Marty asked me if I would like one. I was flattered and flabbergasted, and, of course, said "I'd love one," and gave him my address.  Worn and weathered, the Man in Black in 2001. About three weeks later, the album showed up in the mail. I wasn't shocked – Marty seemed very sincere – but I was kind of surprised. I mean, he'd actually done it. Rather than keep it sealed – as collectors do to maintain the highest value – I opened it and played it, just as it was meant to be, just as I did with A Boy Named Sue. The thick disc seemed as if it weighed a pound, but it sounded great on the stereo. That open-air concert was the last time I saw Johnny Cash. By the mid 1990s Cash had relaunched his career with famed rock producer Rick Rubin on American Records. At this point, Cash had harvested a massive amount of rock cred. The single and video from the album, Delia's Gone, was a short, haunting song, about a man who kills his young wife. The video showed Cash burying a dead spouse, played by Kate Moss. I was scheduled to cover him at a Boston club in 1994 on a night I was headed home from Florida. I planned to jump a cab after my plane touched down. Except it didn't. A major snowstorm swirled around Boston that night, and the plane circled Logan, but ended up landing in Baltimore. For me, no Cash. Like a lot of folks, I became reacquainted with Cash's music on those mid-late 1990s CDs he did with Rubin. The religious one, My Mother's Hymn Book, was an understated gem. But we especially dug Cash's take on the rock, country-rock and reggae songs, even when he sounded out of his element (which he occasionally did). There was Bob Marley's Redemption Song with ex-Clash guitarist Joe Strummer (two different outlaw types on one song), Steve Earle's Devil's Right Hand (two country outlaws of different generations), the Eagles' Desperado, his former-son-in-law Nick Lowe's The Beast in Me, U2's One, Neil Diamond's Solitary Man and Nick Cave's Mercy Seat, about a condemned not just accepting, but welcoming his electrocution. Best of all was Cash's stark, heartbreaking version of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt. Better than the song itself was the video, which shows a frail, white-haired Cash singing this painful lament of self-recrimination. Key line: "Everyone I know/Goes away in the end." Cutaway shots to his grim-faced wife June added to the poignancy. I saw it and cried. June Carter died May 15, 2003 of heart failure. Johnny Cash died Sept. 12, 2003 from complications of diabetes. I cried again. Jim Sullivan has written about popular culture and music for more than 25 years for many national publications. You can contact him at
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