‘I Didn’t Walk the Line’: Tommy Cash’s parody of his older brother
Not every Noel has a Liam. Not every Danielle has an Este or Alana. Not every Pusha has a Malice. Not every June has a…you get the idea. Just because two siblings get into the music industry, it doesn’t mean they have equal or even similar levels of talent. For every Britney, there must also be a Jamie Lynn, or for every Enrique, a Julio Jr. However, of all of them though, few played the “my brother’s famous” card as brazenly and shamelessly as Johnny Cash‘s brother, Tommy Cash.
Now, to be clear, I’m not talking about the rapper and frequent Charli XCX collaborator set to represent his home nation of Estonia in the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest. That is a different person, but it is an extremely funny thought. No, this Tommy Cash was born on April 5th, 1940, eight years after his slightly more famous older brother. By the time he was a teenager, it looked like he wasn’t going to follow his brother into music.
Instead, Tommy was something of a basketball prodigy. He captained his high school team to a state championship and made the all-state team. Working with his high school coach, Tom Parks, had such an effect on the young Tommy that in his teens, he was dead set on becoming a basketball coach just like his idol. Then, two things happened that changed his life forever.
The first was his family moving to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1956 from their home in Mississippi. The second was taking a job there as a DJ for a local radio station, KWAM, a job he also took when he was deployed to Frankfurt, Germany, as part of his military service. It was here that he discovered that he shared his elder brother’s love for music, and after his success in the industry, he reasoned, “Why couldn’t I do the same?!”
How did Tommy Cash follow Johnny Cash into music?
By 1965, possibly on the strength of his brother’s contacts, he self-released a single called ‘I Guess I’ll Live’, the success of which he parleyed into a record deal with Epic Records. There are some artists who want nothing more than to strike out on their own. To have nothing to do with their famous siblings and be taken seriously on their own terms. Then there was Tommy Cash, whose second single was called ‘I Didn’t Walk the Line’.
If you really, really want to be charitable to him, it could be a parody. The key lyric is, after all, “I didn’t walk the line / And you’re no longer mine”. Considering Tommy was doing a legitimately uncanny impression of his older brother in the song, this hits more like those Asylum versions of famous blockbuster films, y’know? Like instead of Transformers, you’d see Transmorphers? Not Iron Man, but Iron Hero?
This wasn’t the only time he traded in on his connection to the ‘Man in Black’, either. In the early 1980s, Tommy teamed up with fellow Country music fail-son Tommy Jennings (Waylon’s kid brother) to release a tribute to being the overlooked child in the family called ‘My Mother’s Other Son’.
This was a song that, in all its Dylan-besting glory, runs as follows: “I’m proud to be the brother of my mother’s other son / And I’m happy for the fame that’s come his way / We don’t share a spotlight, but we share my mama’s dreams / So look out now, this mother’s son is gonna have his day”. Like the vast, vast majority of this man’s work, it didn’t chart.
Now, to be fair to the lad, he did actually have a few hits off his own back. His signature tune was ‘Six White Horses’, a number four hit on the US country charts in 1969. This was followed by a fistful of hits on the country charts over the next few years before settling back into obscurity by the mid-1970s. Props to him: he was a working musician right until his passing in September 2024.
He may have got there by trading in on his brother’s name, but if we had the opportunity to do the same, who amongst us would turn that down?
