The hit song that made Johnny Cash famous, but which he couldn’t stand: “I really didn’t like it”
He begged the producer not to release it. He thought it sounded flat. Then it changed his life forever.
For many fans, the voice of Johnny Cash is the voice of American country music – low, weathered, and as steady as a freight train heading through dusk. Over a career that spanned five decades – he’s been everywhere, remember – Cash sang of sin and salvation, of whiskey and redemption. But the song that first sent him hurtling into the spotlight in 1956 was, rather incredibly, one he actually wanted to bury.
Cash was just 23 when he wrote it. Fresh out of the Air Force, newly married, and selling appliances door to door in Memphis, he was still figuring out who he was, both musically and personally. The track in question, with its sparse rhythm and shifting key changes, didn’t sound like anything else on the radio. That’s part of why it worked. But Cash thought it sounded awkward and didn’t like how it came out in the studio.
“I really didn’t like it,” he told Sam Phillips, head of Sun Records, after hearing it on the radio for the first time. He even asked Phillips to stop sending it out. Phillips, luckily for us, refused.
What hit song did Johnny Cash dislike?
“I keep a close watch on this heart of mine
I keep my eyes wide open all the time
I keep the ends out for the tie that binds
Because you’re mine, I walk the line, mmm"
That’s right... I Walk the Line was the now classic that Johnny wasn’t particularly fond of. Here’s a reminder...
Why did Johnny Cash hate I Walk the Line?
The sound Cash created for the track was unusual. At Phillips’ suggestion, he sped it up from its original slow tempo and shoved a piece of paper into his guitar strings to create that distinctive “boom-chicka-boom” beat. The lyrics were an attempt to talk himself into fidelity on the road – “a prodding to myself,” as he called it, after touring with Elvis and feeling the tug of temptation.
The melody? He lifted it from a reel-to-reel tape accidentally played backwards. The chords? They move in strange ways, modulating down instead of up, then back again. The humming at the start of each verse? Inspired by a doctor back in Arkansas who used to hum while walking the halls.
In time, Johnny Cash embraced the song’s legacy. But he never fully warmed to it. Even years later, when it had been immortalized, referenced, and re-recorded dozens of times, he still remembered how unsure he’d felt that day in Memphis.
The man in black may have walked the line successfully, but he nearly tripped over the song that started it all.
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