The truth about the fabled first meeting of Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash
The sun split the cloud above Newport Folk Festival like god’s own spotlight. Something auspicious was set to take place that day, and it would involve a young vagabond, but it wouldn’t happen on stage. No, that would be next year. This time out, it was 1964, and a shadier ceremony was unfurling backstage: Bob Dylan was meeting his hero.
It says a lot about Dylan’s prodigious talents that even at 23 years old, his old hero, Johnny Cash, was now meeting his hero, too. In a traditional country music ceremony, the ‘Man in Black’ handed an acoustic guitar over to Dylan in a passing of the torch. But this wasn’t just a showmanship gesture—there was more weight than six strings and hallowed timber being exchanged.
But contrary to popular legend, this was not the first time they had met. Sure, it was a notable juncture in their early friendship, but it wasn’t quite the first handshake. In fact, Cash was one of the first people in the entire country who became aware of Dylan. His self-titled debut album failed to chart. However, John Hammond, the Columbia exec who had first discovered the would-be folk star, sent a copy of the LP to Cash ahead of its release.
At a time when Dylan was being spoken about as ‘Hammond’s Folly’, Cash adored the record. He played it endlessly and recognised some of his own dark mystique in Dylan’s sound. From that moment, he was readying himself to hand over a guitar, later describing Dylan as “way ahead, out of sight”. But as a fellow with a flair for the dramatic, he wanted to wait for the right occasion to do so.
So, how did Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash really meet for the first time?
“My father told me he met Bob Dylan in a New York City hotel room in the early 1960s,” John Carter Cash told fans in 2014. “They had corresponded, writing letters back and forth. Dad said that when he met Bob, Dylan rushed into his room, jumped on the bed, and began bouncing up and down, chanting I met Johnny Cash, I met Johnny Cash.”30
It’s an image with a bit less grandeur than the backstage legend, but it didn’t stop Cash from being charmed. “They had a dear friendship,” his son added. “And although they didn’t spend a lot of time together in the last part of my dad’s life, they never ceased being friends.” They never stopped being fans, either.
While Dylan would eventually call Cash his true “North Star”, the country musician was the first to break the ice over their mutual respect. While he was touring and facing a terrible battle with amphetamine addiction, he would turn to Dylan’s vinyl nightly for comfort and inspiration. “I’d put on [The] Freewheelin’ [Bob Dylan] backstage,” he writes in Cash, “then go out and do my show, then listen again as soon as I came off. After a while at that, I wrote Bob a letter telling him how much of a fan I was. He wrote back almost immediately, saying he’d been following my music since ‘I Walk the Line’, and so we began a correspondence.”
They would meet a few times in the intervening months, but it would usually involve intoxication, an entourage, and not much time. However, backstage and at the Newport Folk Festival, things were different, and as though it was orchestrated by a scriptwriter a few decades in advance, it proved to be highly fateful.
He handed over a guitar and an attitude. Cash had, in many ways, been the first punk. “I shot a man in Reno” was a lyric awash with darkness during an era when the mainstream was largely light and happy-clappy. Cash didn’t care for expectations, though, and something about his gesture to Dylan fortified the same belief in Bob. The next time Dylan stepped out onto the Newport Folk Festival stage, he would be booed and heckled for the simple act of going electric and playing a few frenzied masterpieces.
Cash had somewhat prognosticated this fate. In the March 1964 edition of Broadside, the country hero had penned a small poem elucidating Dylan’s luminary ways, which concluded, “Shut Up! …And let him sing”. That line didn’t just forecast the rigmarole that the freewheeling “Judas” folk anti-hero would soon be embroiled in, but also marked the moment he ran out of damns to give.
In this sense, he was merely following in Cash’s footsteps. The ‘Man in Black’ even dared to play an electric guitar at Newport before Dylan did.
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