The music legend Johnny Cash wanted to portray on film
In 1960, less than four years after the famous “Million Dollar Quartet” sessions in Memphis, Johnny Cash was already on a very different trajectory from his old pal Elvis Presley.
Elvis, of course, had been plucked from the original ascent of his superstardom to serve in the US Army for two years, putting his career on hold, while Cash, having already completed his military service years earlier, was the one caught up in the rockstar lifestyle.
As one of the most popular new artists in country music, Cash’s busy recording and touring schedules had him endlessly criss-crossing North America, through big cities and small, lonesome towns, a rigorous existence that directly led to his long battles with alcohol abuse and amphetamine addiction. If Elvis had cleaned up his image by trading his pompadour for a crewcut, Johnny had gone the other direction, establishing himself as one of the new breed of ‘outlaw’ country singers.
Interestingly, back in February of 1960, a reporter asked Cash directly how he felt Elvis’s music might change when he returned from the army. “The rock and roll type singing [Elvis] did before going into the service isn’t popular anymore,” he said, claiming that guitars were also getting replaced with “saxophones, violins and rhythm sections”.
Cash didn’t think Presley would be returning to his country music roots either, predicting, pretty accurately, “He’ll probably sing Frank Sinatra type melodies”, adding that Elvis would probably make a priority of returning to movie acting, as well.
At this point, Cash himself had acted in a couple of TV westerns, but he wanted to make the leap to the silver screen, having seen Presley’s box office success as a leading man in Love Me Tender and Jailhouse Rock. He even had a specific idea in mind for his first big role, desiring to play one of his country music heroes, a musician who’d followed an eerily similar track to Cash a decade earlier.
The great Hank Williams, who was an alcoholic with a painkiller addiction and a penchant for getting into bar fights, never saw his 30th birthday. His various health problems led to his death from heart failure while on tour in 1953, at 29. Johnny Cash turned 28 in 1960 and was getting warnings from some of his friends that a fate like Hank’s might be waiting for him. At the time, though, these parallels just convinced him that he might be all the more suited to playing Williams in a biopic.
“I’ve met all the boys who worked with Hank, and I’ve also studied the history of his life,” said Cash, who’d recently recorded a cover of Williams’ song ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’, adding, “Even though I never met him, I feel I know him as well as anybody else and would have no trouble playing the part.”
The only thing Johnny might have overlooked, as a cinema acting novice at the time, was that he neither looked nor sounded anything like Hank Williams, but then again, that didn’t stop Joaquin Phoenix from playing Cash 50 years later.
