Johnny Cash once lost a fight to an ostrich: “That day, he was not happy to see me”
Johnny Cash, The Man in Black, one of the toughest guys in rock music history, it turns out, can still lose a fight or two, especially when he’s battling the biggest bird on the planet. It might seem unusual for one of the world’s most celebrated country rock musicians to find himself in a bust-up with an avian avenger, but some things are stranger than fiction and a lot of them happened to Johnny Cash.
Though it might feel like a sketch comedy piece thrown out of the read-through for being too far-flung, Cash, in fact, did have a fight with an ostrich and got KO’d quicker than you can say “Hello everybody, I’m Johnny Cash”.
Let us set the scene; it is 1981 and Cash’s mystique as one of the baddest men in music was beginning to wane. Having made his name in the 1950s as a serious gunslinging country artist, Cash’s career shot into infamy. His dalliance with drugs and violence made him an outlaw icon, but times had changed. The singer was far away from his bristling counter-culture bravado of the 1960s and a few steps away too from his evangelical gospel image of the ’70s. In truth, Cash was very lost creatively and had started to shun the public eye.
As such, Cash was, for the most part, enduring a semi-retirement at the ‘House of Cash’ in Tennesee—the complex of studios and farms that the ‘Jackson’ singer had made his HQ. Cash had been battling addiction throughout all these career peaks and troughs but had seemingly gained a hold of his addiction problems. Such wars are delicately poised, and what might seem like an innocuous moment can push an afflicted addict back into bad habits. For Cash, eye surgery and, bizarrely, a run-in with his pet ostrich nearly put him back on the pills for good.
The tale is a compelling reminder not only of Cash’s immense gratitude for a sturdy belt—claiming it saved his life—but also to his prowess as a storyteller. These captivating details reinforce the notion that Johnny Cash may have led one of the most intriguing lives in history. The excerpt was taken from Cash’s expertly titled 2003 autobiography Cash: The Autobiography and paints an incredibly wild series of events. “Ostrich attacks are rare in Tennessee, it’s true, but this one really happened, on the grounds of the exotic animal park I’d established behind the House of Cash offices near my house on Old Hickory Lake,” he writes.
“It occurred during a particularly bitter winter, when below-zero temperatures had reduced our ostrich population by half,” a tragic state of affairs for any farmer, ostrich or otherwise, is not being able to look after your animals. It may have been what led to the unfortunate exchange: “The hen of our pair wouldn’t let herself be captured and taken inside the barn, so she froze to death. That, I guess, is what made her mate cranky. Before then he’d been perfectly pleasant with me, as had all the other birds and animals, when I walked through the compound.”
“That day, though, he was not happy to see me,” Cash recalled, “I was walking through the woods in the compound when suddenly he jumped out onto the trail in front of me and crouched there with his wings spread out, hissing nastily.”
Thankfully, Cash escaped that time, with the singer noting: “Nothing came of that encounter. I just stood there until he laid his wings back, quit hissing, and moved off. Then I walked on. As I walked I plotted. He’d be waiting for me when I came back by there, ready to give me the same treatment, and I couldn’t have that. I was the boss. It was my land.”
This kind of proclamation is usually backed by imagined fanfare when dreamed up by the confident defender of one’s property against the mammoth muscles of a huge beast. But, as Cash found out, that fanfare usually drifts into the distance to be replaced by sirens: “The ostrich didn’t care. When I came back I was carrying a good stout six-foot stick, and I was prepared to use it. And sure enough, there he was on the trail in front of me, doing his thing. When he started moving toward me I went on the offensive, taking a good hard swipe at him.”
“I missed,” he added. “He wasn’t there. He was in the air, and a split second later, he was on his way down again, with that big toe of his, larger than my size-thirteen shoe, extended toward my stomach. He made contact—I’m sure there was never any question he wouldn’t—and frankly, I got off lightly.” Though you may not be aware, such a powerful kick to one’s stomach can have a habit of leaving the receiver in either the hospital or a nearby graveyard.
That’s not to say Cash escaped entirely unharmed, though: “All he did was break my two lower ribs and rip my stomach open down to my belt, If the belt hadn’t been good and strong, with a solid belt buckle, he’d have spilled my guts exactly the way he meant to. As it was, he knocked me over onto my back and I broke three more ribs on a rock—but I had sense enough to keep swinging the stick, so he didn’t get to finish me. I scored a good hit on one of his legs, and he ran off.”
The moment is just another in a series of bizarre tales including Johnny Cash. While most of them centre on something thuggish or outlandish happening, nobody could’ve expected Cash to be decked by an ostrich. Least of all, Cash himself.
