Ray Cash was the father of the late great Johnny Cash, and the dark truth about Ray began to unravel when Johnny was still alive.
Almost three decades ago, a television interview with Johnny appeared on Later With Bob Costas. In that interview, Johnny spoke lovingly about his father, but was that the real truth, or was Ray more evil than good?
The Academy Award-winning movie Walk the Line was based on Johnny’s book, “Man in Black,” which he co-wrote with a journalist named Patrick Carr.
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Johnny Cash’s Dad, Ray, ‘Was Not His Biggest Fan’
In the movie, Ray is a harsh father who blames Johnny for a tragic family event. After the movie was released, The Guardian reported that Johnny’s dad “was not his biggest fan.”
But Johnny’s truest admirers knew there was another side to his story, and one fan with inside knowledge set the record straight when they threw shade at what was allegedly fictional in the movie.
Shockingly, this Johnny Cash insider claimed that Ray was wrongly portrayed in Walk the Line as a “hard and abusive man who never has a kind word for his son.”
According to the insider, Johnny only had “good memories” of Ray from childhood. Johnny also claimed that Ray was “about the greatest man” he ever knew.
Johnny’s Father Said, ‘The Devil Did This! He Took the Wrong Son!’
The tragic family event is a “horrible sawmill accident” that claimed the life of Johnny’s older brother, Jack. In the movie, Ray blames Johnny for the accident in the most devastating way possible when he stumbles home after drinking too much and mutters to Johnny, “The devil did this! He took the wrong son!”
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But Johnny’s own words in his autobiography tell a different story about what happened on the tragic day that the Cash family lost Jack.
Johnny was twelve years old, and he remembered seeing his father “coming down the road in an A-model Ford” being driven by the preacher from their church. When Johnny saw Ray, he thought, “I knew something was wrong.”
Instead of viciously accusing him or verbally abusing him, Johnny wrote that his father told him, “Throw away your fishin’ pole and get in,” and Ray later admitted, “Jack’s been hurt awful bad.”
How Johnny Cash Viewed His Father
In the interview with Bob Costas, Johnny claimed that his father was “a simple country man” and a “cotton farmer.” Johnny described Ray as a “man of charity and compassion and tolerance” as well as a “veteran of Word War I” and a “walking talking piece of history.”
But another Johnny Cash historian studied the relationship between Ray and Johnny, and allegedly, Ray isn’t quite the man that Johnny said he was.
Ray was born in Arkansas in 1897. While in France during the First World War, the historian found evidence that Ray saw no action and “didn’t prove much of a soldier.”
After the war, Ray returned to Arkansas and began farming cotton. The historian noted that it was “hard work, and Ray was a hard worker,” but physically, Ray was described as “shorter than his wife” and a “stump of a man, whose face forever seemed on the brink of rage or tears.”
The historian also claimed that Ray “shared the racial attitudes of his day” and “no black farmers and no real black workers lived” where Ray did. In contrast, the historian said Johnny was “more progressive than his father or most southern white men of his time.”
Ray and Johnny’s Relationship: ‘Tense and Troubled’
More shockingly, the historian called Ray and Johnny’s relationship “tense and troubled,” and allegedly, there were incidents in Johnny’s childhood that Johnny remained bitter about for his entire life.
One incident involved Johnny’s pet dog attacking the family’s chicken coop. When Ray discovered what the dog had done, he allegedly took the animal’s life, and Johnny never forgot that.
When Johnny was married to his first wife, Vivian, he wrote her a letter that said, in part, “My dad used to drink all the time,” and he claimed that “didn’t make things so happy at home…”
Johnny’s letter also revealed the shocking moment that he saw Ray cry for the first time. It happened when Jack passed away, and Johnny claimed that his father had been “hard-hearted and cruel, but since then, he’s changed.”
The historian also found evidence that Ray stopped drinking—at least for a while—when Jack passed away in 1944, and Ray also became more religious. While Johnny and Ray both battled drinking and substances, Ray allegedly became a better father figure and eventually had a healthier relationship with his son, Johnny Cash.
