High-tech homecoming
‘Johnny Cash Official Concert Experience’ pairs band, footage of icon.
Fifty years after Johnny Cash’s last performance at Little Rock’s Robinson Center Music Hall in 1973, a special one-night event will bring The Man in Black and his music back to life there.
“Johnny Cash — The Official Concert Experience” combines multimedia elements, including video from his career and from episodes of “The Johnny Cash TV Show,” sync’d to a live band and singers to showcase the musical legend’s iconic performance style.
“The idea of the show is that it does celebrate the music, first and foremost,” said tour director Dean Elliott. “I would say the majority of the show is music. However, there are a few components here that make it a bit more interesting than just a straight tribute show.
“One is, for a certain number of songs we’ve actually taken the original audio and extracted Johnny Cash’s voice. The band will be performing live and you’ll see Johnny Cash on screen and hear his voice and see him perform. And you’ll hear and see the live band on stage. That’s super-exciting to be able to sort of perform Johnny Cash live again.”
The evening will feature a number of songs from Cash’s catalog but is not meant to be a chronological trip through the singer’s life.
“Nothing’s in chronological order, just in the same way that the Johnny Cash TV show didn’t really go in chronological order,” Elliott said. “All the hits are in there, ‘Walk the Line,’ ‘Folsom Prison Blues,’ ‘A Boy Named Sue.’ We do songs from the later albums, and we do really early stuff like ‘Hey, Porter’ and ‘Cry, Cry, Cry.’ We do some gospel stuff and the country stuff.”
Born in 1932 in Kingsland (Cleveland County), J.R. Cash was the son of sharecroppers Ray and Carrie Cash. Starting in 1935, the couple and their seven children would live and work the land in Dyess (Mississippi County) in an agricultural colony set up by the U.S. government to help farmers reeling from the Great Depression.
Music was a central element of the household. Carrie Cash played piano and introduced the boy the world would come to know as Johnny Cash to the guitar. According to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, Cash first sang for radio station KLCN in Blytheville, and during a stint in the Air Force after high school graduation in 1950, he scribbled out songs in his spare time.
One of those tunes, ‘Folsom Prison Blues,’ would be among his first smash hits. Recorded in 1955 with the Tennessee Two at Memphis’ seminal Sun Studios, ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ was a followup to Cash’s debut ‘Hey Porter’ and ‘Cry, Cry, Cry,’ ushering in what would come to be known as outlaw country.
In time, Cash became one of entertainment’s greatest humanitarians, singing of the plight of the disenfranchised and outcast, themes rarely touched on by coun
try music at that time. Some of his concert venues reflected this social consciousness, the most famous of which were his performances at Folsom Prison in 1968 and San Quentin Prison in 1969. Both were captured as live albums that further defined his image as a rebel against the music industry’s staid country formula.
Elliott’s involvement is a testament to the timelessness of Cash’s work as well as its universal appeal.
“I’m originally from England. I’m obsessed with that sound, that rockabilly, country, ’50s, Sun Studio sound,” he said. “I was introduced to Johnny Cash probably when I was in my early teens. I just loved the simplicity of the music, the directness of his vocals and his lyrics. I liked the fact that it was slightly darker. It wasn’t always just about love, which a lot of those songs from the ’50s were. They were about prisons and stuff exotic to a Brit, I guess.
“The one thing that is my passion is really looking at the authenticity of that sound. How do we re-create that? To me, that sound is dangerous, it’s exciting, it’s new. That sound is 60 years old now, but when you hear it on a record, it still excites me.”
Debbie Horton is one of the musicians tasked with reproducing that sound. A guitar player with decades of performances under her belt, she was a Cash superfan who attended many of his shows and formed a friendship with the singer. One night, he surprised her by calling the 20-year-old up on stage to play a number, making her, she said, the only woman to ever play lead guitar for Cash.
She said performing in the new show is the thrill of a lifetime.
“The concert is going to be fantastic,” she said, “and they have this big screen with Johnny on it and the live band,” with which she’ll play guitar. “I don’t know how they do it. I call it alien technology. Johnny’s going to be up there singing and we’re going to be playing. It’s going to be beautiful.”
Considering the length of his career, Cash played relatively infrequently in his home state through the years. According to records on johnnycash.com, he played Little Rock 10 times on tour, including shows in Robinson Center Music Hall in 1955, twice in 1957 and in 1973. He also played the Arkansas State Fairgrounds in 1971 and Barton Coliseum on three consecutive nights in 1959 and once more in 1975. Two other Little Rock appearances, one in 1965 and one in 1966, are listed without identifying the venue.
His most famous Arkansas performance was for 800 prisoners at the Cummins Unit (Lincoln County) on April 10, 1969. Held during Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller’s campaign for prison reform, the concert was recorded by KATV but not broadcast nationally (see arkansasonline.com/1031cash).
Cash’s final Little Rock concert was in 1996 at the Cabe Festival Theater at Wildwood Park for the Arts. It was during a period of the star’s renaissance after the release of “The American Recordings,” the first in a series of albums that connected with audiences in a way he hadn’t enjoyed for a decade. Produced by Rick Rubin, the final recordings of Cash’s life, some released posthumously, breathed new life into his musical legacy.
Cash died Sept. 12, 2003, at the age of 71.
“What a big circle this is to come back now in 2023 to be on a stage playing guitar for Johnny Cash again, a film version of him this time,” Horton said. “But nonetheless he’s up there on that screen and people are going to enjoy his music again and I get to play it. You can’t make this stuff up! Crazy, but I love it.”