Johnny Cash

Johnny Cash was an American country-and-rockabilly singer-songwriter whose five-decade music career produced one of the foundational documents of 20th-century American country music — particularly his 1968 live-album At Folsom Prison and his 13 Grammy Awards. He was born John R. Cash on February 26, 1932, in Kingsland, Arkansas. His father Ray Cash was a Kingsland-area Arkansas cotton-and-tobacco farmer, and his mother Carrie Cloveree Rivers was a homemaker. The 1935 family relocation to Dyess, Arkansas — under the New Deal-era Federal Emergency Relief Administration's Dyess Colony Resettlement Project — launched his early-career path.

His U.S. Air Force service across 1950–1954 — including his 1952–1954 service as a U.S. Air Force Security Service Morse Code radio interception specialist at the Landsberg, West Germany Air Force base — preceded his 1954 Memphis Tennessee Sun Records audition with the Tennessee Two (his backing band of guitarist Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant).

His 1955 first commercial Sun Records single "Cry, Cry, Cry" — released June 1955 by Sam Phillips's Sun Records — launched his 1950s American rockabilly-and-country-music public profile. His 1956 single "I Walk the Line" — written for his first wife Vivian Liberto Cash — produced his late-1950s American country-music chart breakthrough.

His January 13, 1968 Folsom State Prison concert — and the subsequent May 1968 Columbia Records release of the live-recording album At Folsom Prison — produced his late-1960s American country-music public profile. The 1968 live-album At Folsom Prison sold over three million American copies and won the 1969 Grammy Award for Best Country Vocal Performance, Male. His subsequent late-career career renaissance across 1994–2002 — under American producer Rick Rubin's American Recordings label — produced six American Recordings albums (1994–2010, with the final two posthumously-released albums) that produced his later international country-music public profile. He died on September 12, 2003, at age 71, in Nashville, Tennessee, of complications from diabetes.

His name Johnny is the English diminutive of John (from the Hebrew Yochanan). Johnny has been continuously among the most-popular American boys' names since 1880.