PROGRAM #2

Get
Rhythm

JOHNNY CASH HAD A LOVE for gospel, country music and the blues, the foundation of rockabilly. A sharecropper’s son, he grew up during the Depression in the Dyess Colony of Arkansas, a cooperative town created by the Roosevelt Administration to help family farms as part of the New Deal. Johnny was part of the massive migration from fields to factories that began before World War I, and he left Dyess for opportunities in the big cities. After stints in an auto factory and the military, Johnny formed Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two in Memphis with bassist Marshall Grant and guitar player Luther Perkins. Together, they recorded some of the best loved songs in the American songbook: “Folsom Prison Blues,” “I Walk the Line” and “Ring of Fire.”

Johnny Cash wrote “I Walk the Line” - his first #1 hit song - as a pledge of devotion to his first wife, Vivian Liberto. He recorded it at Sun Studio in Memphis in April 1956, with Marshall Grant and Luther Perkins, who were both working as automobile mechanics at the time. Later, they added a drummer, W.S. “Fluke” Holland, and became known as Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three. Advertisement for Johnny Cash's single, “I Walk the Line,” and B-side, “Get Rhythm,” Billboard magazine, May 12, 1956. (Wikimedia Commons)

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