Johnny Cash
1932 – 2003 · United States
Known for: The Man in Black, country music's outlaw conscience
“How well I have learned that there is no fence to sit on between heaven and hell.”
Biography
He dressed in black for the poor and the prisoners, and sang in a voice like a train coming through the dark. Johnny Cash crossed country, rock, folk and gospel across five decades, recorded a live album inside Folsom Prison that became legend, and never stopped singing for the outcast and the broken.
His love story with June Carter saved his life; his late-career recordings with producer Rick Rubin, an ailing man covering Hurt, are among the most devastating in recorded music. The Man in Black wore his contradictions openly: faith and sin, tenderness and defiance, all in the same deep, unmistakable voice.