“Can you hear the singing?”: the tragic death that changed Johnny Cash’s life forever
Johnny Cash never gained his title of being the ‘Man in Black’ without precedent, but the startling tragedies he endured can still never fail to take your breath away.
His childhood in the rural sticks of Arkansas was always somewhat in the shadow of his older brother, Jack: only two years his senior, but the absolute idol and hero to everything that Cash ever did in his formative years, between playing, working, and generally learning his place in the world. Jack was the forger, Johnny was the follower.
As the pair grew up, Cash’s worship of his brother only continued to build as they both stepped on the path towards becoming men. As the musician later recalled: “He was very strong. He was muscle-bound. He worked out and was in great shape for 14 years old. Jack had been called to preach. Being called to preach in our religion means that you have dedicated yourself to be a minister. Every night, he was at the table with his library, reading the Bible. He was a great influence on me.”
Yet it was almost as though, being such a heroic figure in his young life, Jack was simply too powerful to stay in Cash’s life for long. May 1944 would be the time that would forever stick in the mind of the ‘Man in Black’ for all the wrong reasons thereafter, because it was when he predicted the death of his own brother.
On the face of it, it was a day like any other, but the unnerving thing was that Cash, Jack, and their mother knew intrinsically that morning that something was going to go gravely wrong. But nevertheless, despite Cash’s offers to go fishing with him, Jack went off to work at the local sawmill. As it turned out, that would be the worst mistake he would ever make.
For reasons still partly inexplicable to this day, Jack fell into the table saw and was severely cut through his abdomen, with his injuries allegedly being made worse by the fact that he attempted to drag himself off the machinery and across the floor. But the circumstances still remained questionable – as Cash said:
“A neighbour went down to the shop with him that day and disappeared after the accident. I always thought of it as murder.”
With the full picture of Jack’s death never being determined, it had a profound and lasting effect on his younger brother, as it would on anyone. But when that went hand in hand with a songwriting talent, it was almost only natural that Cash would end up looking on the more mournful side of life as his main muse.
Jack spent 12 days in a coma before passing, with Cash recalling a rare lucid moment in the minutes before he died, where he woke up and said: “‘Mama, can you hear the singing? Do you see the angels?’ She said, ‘No, I can’t.’ He said, ‘Oh, I do. How beautiful.’ And then he died.” The profundity of that would never be lost, and it was a memory that stayed with the ‘Man in Black’ until his very own dying day.
Of course, it’s hard to say whether the tragic death of his brother at such a tender age was the primary influence for the style of Cash’s music in the years that followed, as bleak as it could often be. But regardless, it was clear that through all his hardened image, there was a real broken heart that lay underneath it.
