Cash, born in 1932 during the Great Depression, experienced hardships during his childhood. My father, born in 1914, was a young man during the depression, struggling to support a growing family. Because of the depression both men learned to cope with the hard side of life, each in their own way. Both men came from farming families, Cash being born and raised in Arkansas, my father growing up on the Kansas plains. Their similar charm and good looks brought them both into early marriages, both of which failed. And both men, at one time or the other, learned what the inside of cold, lonesome jail walls looked like. Then, as years passed, both men remarried, this time for life.
In 1950 Cash was in St. Louis, Missouri attending boot camp after enlisting in the Air Force. About that time my dad was struggling along behind a plow horse on our Missouri farm. Dad’s struggle ended when the farm went up on the auction block. After that, we moved into town and he began driving a truck across the Great Plains—and sometimes southward to Arkansas where we moved to a couple of times.
Out of Cash’s meager Air Force pay he managed to shell out a five-spot for his first guitar and the legend of Johnny Cash was soon to follow. He had already began writing poetry and had sold one to the servicemen’s newspaper, Stars and Stripes . This piece he called “Hey, Porter.” A few years later it showed up on the Country Music charts as a hit for one of the country music’s newest stars, Johnny Cash.
I first heard “Hey, Porter,” as my dad would plug coins into jukeboxes at truck stops. During those years I rode the truck with Dad at times during the summer. Sometimes that truck took us to John Tyson’s pre-chicken grain elevator in Springdale, Arkansas and back. Other times it carried us across the Great Plains as far as Flagstaff, New Mexico where she broke down once along a lonely tar-bubbling, mirage-floating stretch of sole-burning asphalt. During all those wonderful jaunts Cash’s music about hard times and hard-working folks just naturally rode along.
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