The House That Cash Built
John Carter Cash, the only son of one of America's most famous
couples, manages both his late parents' legacy and a career of his own

by Michael McCall

John Carter Cash walks up the side-entrance stairs leading into Cash
Cabin Studio, a small, old-fashioned wooden structure situated in a
patch of untouched woodland amid the booming housing developments of
Hendersonville. The lanky, longhaired 36-year-old stops at the top
step to explain why his busy recording studio sits in such an unusual
location.

His explanation proves that the prodigal son knows exactly where he
stands.

To his left, he points out the overgrown remnants of a dirt road where
his father, Johnny Cash, and his mother, June Carter Cash, would drive
between their sprawling family home on Old Hickory Lake and this small
country structure. It sits on the quiet back portion of Sumner County
acreage The Man In Black bought in 1968, right before he married June
Carter.

The ultra-modern, 13,800-square-foot main home was perched on a cliff
overlooking the lake and would be home to the couple for their entire
marriage. They built the country cabin, with less than 1,000 square
feet, as a getaway in the woods. It's modeled on the rural home in
Poor Valley, Va., where June was born.

"No one uses the road anymore," the son explains matter-of-factly. "We
put a fence up after we sold the house last year."


To his right, a new house is under construction, with pickup trucks
raising dust and hard-hatted workers shouting to each other. John
Carter is building the stone-and-wood home for his family—wife Laura
Cash and their three children, 10-year-old Joseph, 4-year-old Anna
Maybelle and 3-month-old Jack Ezra. Though large, the home is modest
by country music royalty standards; it'd fit inconspicuously in any of
the gated communities under development nearby.

John Carter held onto this woodland property because of the cabin,
which he began converting into a recording studio in 1999, the same
year he helped his mother record her comeback album, Press On.

But the location perfectly sums up his place in life as the only child
born of the Cash-Carter marriage. John Carter now lives in the balance
between what his parents left him and what he's building on his own.
On one side, his past remains ever-present and in need of daily
tending. On the other side, his future rises, demanding more attention
all the time.

So here he stands, ready to start building a legacy of his own, yet in
charge of making sure his parent's legacy—in music, in image, in
spirit—gets all the detailed care it deserves. That means he'll
interrupt a recording session to tell a big-name liquor company, once
and for all, that they cannot license one of his father's songs for a
commercial.

"John Carter has been given this incredibly heavy load to carry, and
he carries it so well," says Margie Hunt of Hunt Music Services, a
former Sony Music senior marketing director who oversaw the historic
reissues of the Johnny Cash catalog for many years. "You can't imagine
how immense a job it is. Everyone in the world wants a piece of the
Cashes. Requests come in every day of the year. But John Carter
handles it all with grace and serenity. It makes me proud for John and
June to see that their creative lives have been put in such good hands."

John Carter, who has the towering height and broad shoulders of his
father and the easy smile of his mother, lets out a laugh when he
hears such praise. "It is a lot of work," he admits. "I talk every day
to someone about my parents."
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And that's the trickiness of his position. Barely three years gone—our
interview is on May 15, the third anniversary of his mother's
death—Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash are still very present in their
son's life. Psychologically, that's something he's had to learn to
reckon with. He's the first to admit there was a time he wasn't so
good at handling the pressure of being the only son of one of
America's most famous couples.

"I've learned to maintain my own identity, even though I stay immersed
in their lives," he explains, leaning back in the comfortable office
chair that sits in front of his studio's production board. "That's
where I struggled for so long, especially in my 20s. For a long time
it was a point of contention in my life. I wanted so bad to be in
music, but how could I compete with what's come before me? How could I
deal with being compared to that?"

Like many in his generation, and like many in his family, he turned to
excessive partying and losing himself in acts of wild aimlessness.
"For quite a while I was in a haze," he says. "Addiction runs in my
family like a current. It's in our blood. Every one of us has been
affected by addiction. For the most part, we've all been addicts,
myself included. I saw my sister Rosie pass away from it. Others have
come close."

There but for the grace of God, he intimates. He often found himself
at the mouth of the cave, ready to find out how far into the darkness
he could drop. He struggled for years to establish himself as a
singer, songwriter and entertainer. But he'd also interrupt his
progress to accompany his parents when they took their show on the
road each year. He spent 15 years playing guitar and singing harmony
in his father's stage show. Off the road, he'd grow frustrated with
his own lack of progress—and his lack of his own identity. And, of
course, being who he was, he had no lack of access to friends and,
well, cash.

"I'd try to escape my life," he says. "I looked at what I'd been given
and at who I am as a burden, and I'd run from it as far as I could. I
pushed away those things that should've given me the most comfort. It
was all about me, and all about what I wanted and couldn't have."

But, at some point, he always stopped himself. Then he'd come back
home—to his family and to his religion.

"Whenever I'd fall, I'd reach out," he says, his quiet voice growing
even fainter. "Whenever I'd hit bottom, I'd dig in and pray to God to
help me up. It was about four months before my mother died that my
life turned around, that I began to have a clarity and understanding
that I hadn't before. I've become a more consistent person. I'm a
little more predictable now, and that's a good thing."

He hints at receiving organized assistance, but the code of recovery
keeps him from openly discussing how he came to sobriety and how he
maintains it. "All I can say is something changed within me because of
something bigger than me," he continues. "I have to have faith. I have
to wake up each day and acknowledge my faith and say that I'm glad to
be here and glad to be who I am."

Indeed, he believes finding his faith is the reason he endured the
back-to-back deaths of his mother, his father and his sister, all of
whom died within six months of each other in 2003.

"I don't know that I could have gone through all of that if I hadn't
been where I am spiritually and if I didn't have my wife Laura with
me," he says. "I had to learn that the most precious blessings in life
aren't things like power and wealth and fame and material stuff. It's
a smile from a child. It's a tender word. It's having people around
you who love you. It's having good health and appreciating every day
you have."

The young Cash's inner strength began to emerge as he attended funeral
after funeral. Then came meeting after meeting to discuss wills, legal
obligations, estate affairs and family business complicated by the
scores of close-knit adult offspring who share the blood of his mother
and father.

"He's come a long way from the days when he'd walk around Lower Broad
with an iguana on his shoulder," says an amused Marty Stuart, who was
once married to John Carter's half-sister Cindy Cash and who traveled
with John Carter for years as the guitar player in Johnny Cash's band.
"Man, I could not be prouder of anybody than I am of John Carter. To
go through what he endured in a year's time, and then have the entire
circus dumped on his shoulders, that would not be an easy place for
anybody to be. But you know what? He's truly become his father's son.
He's at peace with himself and what he has to do."

For Stuart, John Carter became a source of friendship and strength to
lean on when he faced his own problems with backsliding into alcohol
and drugs. "He was a beacon I turned to," Stuart says. "He gave me
words of encouragement when I most needed them."

John Carter drew on every ounce of that strength while sorting through
the estate his parents left him. "Just the physical possessions they'd
accumulated were overwhelming," he says, noting that his mother was a
voracious collector who had to rent extra storage units to hold all
the antiques, specialty items and career memorabilia she and her
husband gathered over their lifetime. "It took two years just to go
through everything, catalog it and clean up the houses. There was no
way the family could split it all up, there was just too much of
everything. And then there were the taxes, too. So a large portion of
what they owned had to go."

In a Sotheby's auction, the Cash-Carter family sold more than 800
items and raised more than $4 million, according to press reports.
"What became important to me to keep were things like my father's love
letters to my mother," he says. "I wanted to hold onto the words—even
more than the instruments and the clothes, although we kept some of
those too. But letters or hand-written songs were more important to me
than the extra black suits in the closet."

Carter also inherited his father's music publishing company and
recording catalog, which means overseeing the nonstop re-packaging of
previously released songs and, perhaps more importantly, the music
that's never been released publicly.

Those works include two major new albums. Personal File, a two-CD
collection of songs Johnny Cash recorded in 1973 with just his voice
and guitar, came out May 23. And, on July 4 comes American V: A
Hundred Highways, featuring the last recordings that Cash made with
producer Rick Rubin, including those he cut during a furious period of
music-making after his wife's death.

"Johnny Cash is bigger now than he ever was," John Carter says
bluntly. "June is too. But that perpetuity is something they got
rolling on their own. They were both already involved in taking their
love story to film. They had worked with the director, met with
actors, read the scripts. They had it set up to hand it over to me. So
I continued their work. It wasn't to further my vision of their lives,
but to make sure their vision of their lives got shared appropriately.
Hopefully that's what happened."

When he talks about the award-winning film Walk the Line, he does so
carefully. More than anyone, he's aware of the raw nerve it struck
within his family, especially the four daughters of Vivian and Johnny
Cash, who disliked how their mother, their father's first wife, was
portrayed in the movie. Others close to his father picked at other
aspects of the film, feeling it misrepresented or downplayed important
parts of his story.

"Walk the Line is the story of their love affair," John Carter
explains. "That was what they wanted the movie to be about. If you
look for anything else, you'll be disappointed. If you looked for an
accurate representation of his life with Vivian, then the film would
be lacking. If you look for my father's relationship with God, there
may be holes in it. But if you look for what they wanted—a story about
a lasting love affair—then it tells that beautifully."

More than at any other time during this interview, it's on this point
that John Carter treads the most familiar ground. He's repeated these
lines often. But he shows no bitterness and whispers no off-the-record
gripes, not toward any person and not toward the question itself. As
others have said, it's during the most trying or most exasperating
moments that he shows the most fortitude.
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"I remind myself that who my father was, John R. Cash the man, and the
woman my mother was are wholly different people from Johnny and June
Carter Cash. My parents live on in my heart, but they've gone on. But,
as performers, Johnny and June Cash are very much alive. It's their
work and their image I now oversee, and I have to make sure it's
represented correctly and with dignity. I have to see it as that.
Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to do this. I wouldn't be able to
respond to personal questions about them on a daily basis if I didn't
see it like that."

By now he's leaning forward, emphasizing his words, getting a little
worked up. So he catches himself, dropping back in the chair and
taking a deep breath. "You know, I answer questions like this all the
time," he says. "I've got to deal with my feelings for my parents
every day. I've got to go through my grief over missing them every day."

He laughs when he recalls some conversations he's had. "People will
say to me, `I loved your dad's Bitter Tears album,' " he says of his
father's concept album about Native Americans and their treatment by
the U.S. government. "They'll say, `It's hard to believe he didn't
have Indian blood in him!' Or they'll say they love `Folsom Prison
Blues' and say they can't believe he didn't actually spend time in a
federal prison…. So I go straight into these conversations with people
that deal with my parents on the most intimate levels of their lives.
People feel they know them. That used to be so daunting to me. It
angered me, to be honest. But I've come to think it's pretty cool.
It's the way my parents lived their lives; they were open books."

As cool as it may be, and as willingly as he's taken on his role as
gatekeeper of the family legacy, John Carter these days considers
himself a record producer first and foremost. It's where he is most
involved in making new music instead of managing the work of his parents.

He first learned the job of recording and engineering to make his own
rock records in the mid-'90s. He worked with two other local rock
bands at the cabin studio and produced his father's contribution to
the Grammy-winning soundtrack for Robert Duvall's film, The Apostle.
But he considers his work on his mother's landmark Press On album as
the point when he decided to concentrate on producing rather than
making his own music.

"I no longer have any desire to be a star or anything that goes along
with that," he says. "I experienced the limelight from the moment I
could open my eyes. They brought me on national television when I was
an infant. I don't remember a time when I wasn't around a crowd or a
stage growing up. I traveled on the road for 20 years with my father.
I love music, and I love to work in the studio. But I don't have any
desire to go back out on the road again."

For years, he helped his father create demos and, in some cases, final
recordings for the third and fourth installments of the American
Recordings series. He also produced an alternative-country band from
San Diego called, more than a little ironically, The Bastard Sons of
Johnny Cash. More recently, he's produced Marty Stuart's acclaimed
Badlands album; a Carter Family tribute record, The Unbroken Circle;
and a collection of current artists singing gospel standards, Voices
of the Spirit: The Gospel of the South, which featured Mavis Staples,
the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Vince Gill, Del and Ronnie McCoury, Earl and
Randy Scruggs, Marty Stuart, Connie Smith and others. He also produced
the young family gospel trio, The Peasall Sisters. He's currently at
work on albums by his half-sister Carlene Carter ("she's doing so
well, she's a miracle") and by cowboy country artists Wiley & the Wild
West. His upcoming projects include new albums by Ralph Stanley and
Billy Joe Shaver as well as a June Carter Cash tribute album.

"Yeah, it's a lot," he says. "But, you know, I love everything I'm doing."

Perhaps too obviously, he's reminded that it wasn't always this way.
"Well, I had to find out who I was and what was important to me," he
says. "I found that it was my faith in God, my family and my work.
Then I had to ask, `What is your work?' Or, maybe better, `What is
your joy?' And that joy is doing my production work and keeping my
parents legacy alive as best I can. That's who I am, that's what I
want to do."

With that, the phone rings. It's a national music magazine asking
questions about the Personal File album. John Carter politely covers
the receiver and takes a second to say goodbye. He's got other
questions—or more of the same questions—to answer now.