Johnny Cash Quotes - Page 8

I worked there [on Pontiac] three weeks, got really sick of it, went back home and joined the Air Force.

I took the easy way, and to an extent I regret that. Still, though, the way we did it was honest. We played it and sang it the way we felt it, and there's a lot to be said for that.

My contract with mercury PolyGram Nashville was about to expire. And I never had really been happy. The company, the record company, just didn't put any promotion behind me. I think one album, maybe the last one I did, they pressed 500 copies. And I was just disgusted with it. And about that time that I got to feeling that way, Lou Robin, my manager, came to me and talked to me about a man called Rick Rubin that he had been talking to that wanted me to sign with his record company.

The hardest thing for me in Vietnam wasn't seeing the wounded and dead. It was watching the big transport jets come in, bringing loads of fresh new boys for the war.

I love to go to the studio and stay there 10 or 12 hours a day. I love it. What is it? I don't know. It's life.

My mother told me to keep on singing, and that kept me working through the cotton fields. She said God has his hand on you. You'll be singing for the world someday.

My mother always told me that any talent is a gift of God and I always believed it. If I quit, I would just live in front of the television and get fat and die pretty soon.

When I finally stopped [singing], he had been saying, like, the last day or so, he'd been saying, now, I think we should put this one in the album. So without him saying I want to record you and release an album, he kept - he started saying, let's put this one in the album. So the album, this big question, you know, began to take form, take shape. And Rick [Rubin] and I would weed out the songs.

I did [picking cotton] from - until I was 18 years old, that is. Then I picked the guitar, and I've been picking it since.

What I said, what are you [Rick Rubin] going to do with me that nobody else has been able to do to sell records with me?

I Walk The Line was my third record.

Understand your man, meditate on it.

I'm so uncomfortable wearing colors in public. I really am. Even denim. If I've got a day off in a town, I want to go out for a walk I'll put on denim. But almost everything I've got the black on.

I haven't been familiar with hard work. It was no problem for me. But first I hitchhiked to Pontiac, Mich. and got a job working in Fisher Body making those 1951 Pontiacs.

When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and cry.

My father was a cotton farmer first and - but he didn't have any land or what land he had, he lost it in the Depression. So he worked as a woodman and cut pulpwood for the paper mills, rode the rails in boxcars going from one harvest to another to try to make a little money picking fruit or vegetables.

He drank his first strong liquor then to calm his shaking hand, and tried to tell himself at last he had become a man.

[My mother] made the money to send me.

A song stylist is, like, to take an old folk song like "Delia's Gone" and do a modern white man's version of it.

I would take songs that I'd loved as a child and redo them in my mind for the new voice I had, the low voice.

Sam Phillips responded most to a song of mine called, "Hey Porter," which was on the first record.

It just took the right time. I was fully confident that I was going to see Sam Phillips and to record for him that when I called him, I thought, I'm going to get on Sun Records. So I called him and he turned me down flat. Then two weeks later, I got turned down again. He told me over the phone that he couldn't sell gospel music so - as it was independent, not a lot of money.

I used to sing Bill Monroe songs. And I'd sing Dennis Day songs like songs that he sang on the Jack Benny show.

Rick Rubin had his hair - I don't think it's ever been cut and very - dresses like a hobo, usually - clean but . Was the kind of guy I really felt comfortable with, actually. I think I was more comfortable with him than I would have been with a producer with a suit on.

We [with Rick Rubin] would focus on the ones that we did like, that felt right and sounded right. And if I didn't like the performance on that song, I would keep trying it and do take after take until it felt comfortable with me and felt that it was coming out of me and my guitar and my voice as one, that it was right for my soul.