"Johnny Cash is one of the most beloved and influential country-music stars of all time, having composed more than six hundred songs and sold more than ninety million records. He received twenty-nine gold, platinum, and multiplatinum awards for his recordings and has been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the Country Music Hall of Fame, and the Hollywood Walk of Fame. This is the first time Cash's fifty years of...

"How the world shows it loves Johnny Cash:: a Brazilian records "Hurt" and posts it to YouTube;an elderly shopkeeper in Northern Ireland plays Johnny Cash every day on his tape recorder ; a young man in Tomb, a farm town in southern Norway, sports a Johnny Cash tattoo; a woman in the Netherlands maintains the Johnny Cash Infocenter, an exhaustive resource of Johnny Cash materials worldwide--and gets to wear June Carter's clothing and sleep in Johnny...

"Cash sang about and for people on the margins. He famously played concerts in prisons, where he sang both murder ballads and gospel tunes in the same set. It's this juxtaposition between light and dark, writes Richard Beck, that makes Cash one of the most authentic theologians in memory. In reflecting of Cash's lyrics, and the passion with which he sang them, we gain a deeper understanding of the enduring faith of the Man in Black"--Back cover

Traces Johnny Cash's childhood, including his distant father to his early attempts at a music career. At this point in his life he marries his girlfriend Vivian. During a tour with singer/musicians Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, he encounters singer June Carter, and his love for her, and her rejection of him through the years, spurs him into drugs, drinking, and depression. June is both a sassy spitfire singer whose charm breaks hearts and eventually...

"On February 2, 1959, Waylon Jennings, bassist for his best friend, rock star Buddy Holly, gave up his seat on a charter flight. Jennings joked that he hoped the plane would crash. When it did, killing all aboard, on 'the Day the Music Died,' he was devastated and never fully recovered. Jennings switched to playing country, creating the Outlaw movement and later forming the genre's first supergroup, the Highwaymen, with Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson,...