Johnny Cash opened every single episode of the Johnny Cash Show the same way. He walked up to the microphone at the Ryman Auditorium and said four words: “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.” Then the show started. He did that 58 times over two years, and he meant it the same way every time. He wasn’t pretending to be someone. He wasn’t putting on a show for the network. He was Johnny Cash, the Ryman was his stage, and he’d use it the way he wanted, whether ABC agreed or not. He’d fought to film in Nashville instead of a Hollywood soundstage. The network wanted something slicker. Cash wanted the Ryman’s wooden church pews and gospel choir loft and the feel of a room where real music had always lived. He got his way. Then the fights started.
First, ABC’s censors came after Kris Kristofferson‘s “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” The lyric “wishing Lord that I was stoned” needed to go. They wanted “wishing Lord that I was home” instead. Cash said no. He sang the original lyric on national television and didn’t change a single word. They only wanted one word. He said no. “Sunday Morning Coming Down” won the CMA Award for Song of the Year. The word stayed in. Cash was right, and they were wrong, and country music’s biggest prize proved it.
Pete Seeger was next. In March 1970, Cash told ABC he was bringing Seeger to the Ryman. The network didn’t want that. Seeger had been effectively shut out of American network television after CBS cut his anti-war song from The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour a few years earlier. He was seen as too political, too dangerous for a prime-time audience. ABC tried for weeks to talk Cash out of it. Cash brought him on anyway. Seeger showed up and sang folk songs and didn’t perform a single protest song that night. ABC’s fears came to nothing. Cash knew they would. By then the Ryman had already hosted Bob Dylan‘s first time on network television — Dylan and Cash had sung “Girl from the North Country” together on that stage on the very first episode in June 1969. Kris Kristofferson had his first time on network TV there. Louis Armstrong came on and died eight months later.
On February 17, 1971, Cash filmed an episode called “Johnny Cash on Campus” in front of a student audience at the Ryman. He’d been spending time with students at Vanderbilt University, and the conversations had gotten under his skin. He’d gone to the studio the day before and recorded a brand new song. He’d kept rewriting it through the night and into the morning of the taping. When he stood up to perform it, he had cue cards in front of him because the lyrics were still fresh off the page. The song was “Man in Black.” The students gave him a standing ovation. ABC thought it was too controversial. It was the third time Cash had pushed back against the network in two years after the “stoned” fight and Pete Seeger. He wasn’t slowing down.
Related: 1969 Johnny Cash and Linda Ronstadt’s Duet, Almost Canceled by June Carter Over a Wardrobe Crisis, Was Wildly Unexpected
In 1971, all three major networks looked at their schedules and decided they were done with country and rural programming. They wanted younger city audiences. Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies and Hee Haw all got canceled the same year. So did The Johnny Cash Show. ABC ended it as part of this across-the-board decision, and nobody picked up the phone to tell Cash. The last episode went out on March 31, 1971. The show just stopped. Cash heard about it from other people.
The Show That Didn’t End There
CBS brought Cash back in 1976 for a four-week show called Johnny Cash and Friends. He hosted Christmas specials on CBS every year from 1976 through 1985. None of them felt like what happened at the Ryman from 1969 to 1971 — the arguments, the guest list, the songs they tried to stop him from singing, and the sense that he was building something the network had no real claim over.
All 58 episodes are still on YouTube. Cash refused to change one word. He refused to back down on Pete Seeger. He refused to be the version of himself that ABC wanted. They canceled the show without picking up the phone. He kept making music for another 32 years.
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