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Kris Kristofferson did his best to get Johnny Cash to listen to his songs when he was still a struggling artist. At the time, though, Cash was a major star and had grown accustomed to receiving tapes from young musicians. When Kristofferson realized Cash likely hadn’t listened to his tape, he stole a helicopter to make sure his music got to the country star.

Kris Kristofferson took a helicopter in order to get his song to Johnny Cash

Kristofferson began sweeping floors at Columbia Records. While working there, he gave one of his tapes to June Carter Cash and requested that she pass it on to her husband.

“Kris came right into the control room at Columbia sweeping up and slipped his tape to June, who gave it to me,” Cash said, per Rolling Stone. “I put it with a big pile of others that had been given to me.

Johnny Cash was an early fan of Bob Dylan, finding it astonishing that Dylan was able to find success with that type of music. He was also likely impressed when he realized Dylan was just in his early 20s. When Cash first heard Dylan’s music, he thought he was listening to a much older artist.

Johnny Cash thought Bob Dylan was a much older musician

Cash became a fan of Dylan in some of the earliest stages of the singer’s career. He didn’t realize that he was listening to a new, young artist, though.

“The first time I heard him — I don’t know where it was, I believe in Las Vegas — I thought it was an old country singer,” he said, per the book Cash on Cash: Interviews and Encounters With Johnny Cash. “And then I realized somebody told me who he was — and I said,...

As a member of The Monkees, Mike Nesmith was responsible for writing some of the band’s most unforgettable songs. Although behind-the-scenes of The Monkees television show, the powers-that-be relied on a stable of prolific songwriters to pen many of the band’s tunes, Nesmith muscled his way into their league with a series of songs that remain fan favorites to this day. However, he could not shake one song in particular, which appeared on deluxe editions of two Monkees albums and two of his solo recordings.

The Monkees’ Mike Nesmith, Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz, and Peter Tork | Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images Mike Nesmith was a songwriter before The Monkees

Before being cast as one-fourth of The Monkees, Mike Nesmith was a songwriter. Per TCM, in 1963, Nesmith performed at various folk venues, including The Troubadour. He met Randy Sparks of the New Christy Minstrels there and earned a songwriting publishing deal.

In 1969, The Johnny Cash Show premiered with a little help from Bob Dylan. When network executives pitched the show to Cash, he wasn’t sure he wanted to do it. He eventually agreed to do it as long as he could pick the guest stars. Cash said that he specifically wanted Dylan on the show. Though Dylan typically wouldn’t have agreed to appear on television, he did it for Cash. Cash understood this, so he decided to personally ask Dylan to appear.

Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash | ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images Johnny Cash was extremely impressed with Bob Dylan

When Cash first heard Dylan, he thought he was a seasoned country singer, not a 22-year-old from Minnesota.

“The first time I heard him — I don’t know where it was, I believe in Las Vegas — I thought it was an old country singer,...

Bob Dylan grew up listening to Johnny Cash and had the unique pleasure of not only meeting one of his idols but discovering that admiration went both ways. Dylan and Cash exchanged letters back and forth before they met. Eventually, after much insistence on Cash’s part, Dylan agreed to appear on The Johnny Cash Show. While there, Cash passed on messages from Dylan to a journalist. Dylan could have been rude. He wasn’t though, which was proof of Dylan’s friendship with Cash.

Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash | Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images Johnny Cash insisted that Bob Dylan appeared on his show

In 1969, The Johnny Cash Show premiered after some hesitation on Cash’s part.

“I said, ‘I don’t want to do that, it’s too confining, it’s awful hard.’ You gotta give your life to that camera,” Cash said, per the book Cash on...

Lynn Kellogg-Simpers, who played the original Sheila in the 1968 Broadway production of Hair, has died at 77. She had non-terminal leukemia complicated by Covid-19, according to her husband, John Simpers.

He said she had recently attended a gathering in a theater in Branson, Missouri. Many in attendance were not wearing masks.

In addition to Broadway, Kellogg-Simpers’s television appearances include the daytime series The Edge of Night, The Beverly Hillbillies, It Takes a Thief” and Mission: Impossible.”.

She also had a supporting role in the Elvis Presley film, Charro!

A talented singer, Kellogg-Simpers appeared on The Johnny Cash Show and entertained Vietnam War troops. She also toured as a folk musician.

Late in her career, she developed the Sunday morning series Animals, Animals, Animals starring Hal Linden, which won a Peabody Award and a Daytime Emmy for outstanding children’s informational series.

W.S. “Fluke” Holland, longtime drummer for Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins and the original drummer in Cash’s famed Tennessee Three backing band, died Wednesday at the age of 85.

Dubbed the “Father of the Drums” by Cash, Holland died at his home in Jackson, Tennessee, following a short illness, the Commercial Appeal reported.

Despite his presence on some of Sun Records’ most essential recordings and his decades-long tenure alongside Perkins and Cash, Holland was not a drummer by trade: As he told the Jackson Sun in 2016, he would happen...

Harold Reid, whose bass voice, songwriting, and gift for humor distinguished his long career as a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame vocal group the Statler Brothers, died at his home in Staunton, Virginia, Friday evening after a lengthy battle with kidney failure, according to Reid’s bandmate Jimmy Fortune. He was 80.

Fortune posted a message on Facebook that read in part, “Our hearts are broken tonight. Our prayers and our thoughts are with [Reid’s wife] Brenda and his children and grandchildren and with my other brothers, Don and Phil.

Millions in Ireland, Northern Ireland and throughout the world celebrate St. Patrick’s Day on March 17th, commemorating the death some 1,556 years ago of the patron saint of Ireland. While much is still unknown about St. Patrick, who wasn’t actually born in Ireland but in what was at the time Roman Britain, Ireland’s influence on American culture (green beer and corned beef and cabbage notwithstanding) is undeniable, especially when it comes to music.

Throughout his lifetime, Arkansas-born Johnny Cash was obsessed with his ancestry. His family’s roots...

In a 1970 newspaper interview, songwriter Kris Kristofferson recalled his arrival in Nashville a few years earlier by saying he “rocketed straight to the bottom.” A couple of years later he would become one of the most-covered songsmiths in town, with songs including “For the Good Times,” “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” and “Me and Bobby McGee” leading the charge. “Nashville was like Paris in the Twenties,” he told Rolling Stone in a 2009 profile by actor-director Ethan Hawke. “We’d stay up all night trying to knock each other out with our songs.

As the 1960s dawned, Hollywood actor Kirk Douglas became a screen legend with a single role, in the historical epic Spartacus. At around the same time, Johnny Cash, a larger-than-life country-music star, would make an inauspicious big-screen debut in Five Minutes to Live, with results that would suggest he was a much more effective singer than actor. By the time their paths crossed onscreen in the 1971 western A Gunfight a decade later, Douglas was a respected film icon and Cash was the star of his own network TV series, as...

Bob Dylan’s late-Sixties Nashville studio sessions — and his collaborations with Johnny Cash — are explored in the mini-documentary The Story Of Travelin’ Thru, 1967 – 1969, the companion visual to the just-released 15th volume in Dylan’s Bootleg Series.

The seven-minute film features new interviews with Rosanne Cash, Darius Rucker and Jason Isbell, and includes archival footage from Dylan’s Nashville sojourn, including in-the-studio video of Dylan and Cash.

“It was a revolution in music, in attitude, and understanding how incredibly powerful the cross-pollination of country and folk and rock was, and natural for the time,...

In February 1969, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash holed up in a Nashville studio for two days of loose, free-flowing sessions where they sang each other’s songs, jammed with rockabilly icon Carl Perkins, broke into spontaneous covers like “Mystery Train” and “You Are My Sunshine” and even wrote the the tune “Wanted Man” that Cash would debut at San Quentin prison just one week later. Their duet on “Girl From the North Country” appeared on Dylan’s LP Nashville Skyline later that April and select tracks from the sessions leaked...

Johnny Cash wanted to make a big impression when his ABC music variety show The Johnny Cash Show debuted on June 6th, 1969. The back-to-back success of his recent live albums At Folsom Prison and At San Quentin re-introduced him to a mainstream audience outside of the country community, and this was a chance to greatly expand on that at a time when everything on network TV attracted millions of viewers.

Four months earlier, Cash spent the day recording with Bob Dylan at Columbia Studio A in Nashville, though only their...

In 1944, one week after the accidental death of his older brother Jack, 12-year-old J.R. Cash answered the altar call and accepted Jesus Christ as his savior at the First Baptist Church, the tiny house of worship his family attended three days a week in Dyess, Arkansas. It was at that same church that J.R. would make his public singing debut, accompanied on piano by his mother, Carrie Cash. The song he sang was a late-19th-century hymn, “The Unclouded Day.”

By 1970, J.R. was known simply as Johnny Cash,...

Painter, poet and musician Joni Mitchell turns 75 years old today. Her artistry has encompassed pop, rock, folk and jazz, earning varying degrees of praise and criticism, especially for her more experimental, jazz-centric works, but she remains, unquestionably, one of the most influential songwriters of the past 50 years.

Born Roberta Joan Anderson in Fort MacLeod, Alberta, Canada, and raised in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, she began performing in public, accompanying herself on ukulele, in 1963. In August of that year, she appeared on Ckbi-tv in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, as a one-time replacement for a...

70 years ago today, Mickey Mouse welcomed BBC back to the airwaves for the first time after World War II. The television service had been shut down for nearly seven years when broadcasting ceased during the war. The 1933 cartoon Mickey’s Gala Premier was the final program broadcast on BBC on September 1, 1939 before it went off the air, and it was the first program transmitted when BBC was back in 1946. The cartoon chronicles Hollywood celebrities joining Mickey and Minnie at Grumman’s Chinese Theatre for the premiere of a new Mickey Mouse movie. Other notable June 7 happenings in pop culture history: • 1955: The game show The $64,000 Question premiered on CBS. It became one of the shows involved in the 1950s quiz show scandal. • 1963: The Rolling Stones’ first single, a cover of Chuck Berry’s “Come On,” was released. • 1969: The Johnny Cash Show premiered on ABC. • 1969: At the 22nd Primetime Emmy Awards,...

When Neil Patrick Harris returns to TV next week, he won't be cracking jokes in another sitcom. Best Time Ever With Neil Patrick Harris (debuting on September 15th on NBC) marks the return — overdue or not — of the variety show, that long-dormant format in which kooky skits, musical guests, and frenzied production numbers are jammed into an hour of family-friendly entertainment. "When you think of the variety shows we all grew upon — Sonny and Cher and Donny and Marie — those [programs] all said, 'Sit on the couch, be entertained with a little song,...

From Johnny Cash to Angela Lansbury, expect to see some familiar faces in the coming year

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The lost Johnny Cash gets released

According to Cash's son John, the country legend was a prolific hoarder, hanging on to everything from original audio tapes for The Johnny Cash Show to "a camel saddle gift from the prince of Saudi Arabia". That explains why it's taken several years since his death in 2003 for anyone to find Out Among the Stars, an album he recorded in the early 1980s. Columbia dismissed the album as not worth releasing, but John Cash describes the 12 tracks – which include a duet with Johnny's wife, June Carter – as "beautiful". 24 March.

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Barely has the set for a blistering revival of Chicago been cleared away than director Paul Kerryson sets about reinventing this joyous musical, inspired by John Waters's cult movie. It's a show that mixes the heart-rending and the hair-curling,...

It’s been a decade since Johnny Cash said goodbye to this world, and his legend is still a powerful pop culture force to be reckoned with.

The “Walk The Line” crooner will posthumously release a new album titled Out Among the Stars on March 25th, 2014, much to the delight of his millions of fans.

Out Among the Stars was originally recorded back in the early 1980s with Billy Sherrill, but when Columbia Records dropped him from the label it was lost until now.

Cash’s wife June Carter Cash ended up keeping the tapes all this time, and now the family has arranged to give the album a proper release.

Johnny and June’s son Josh Carter Cash explained, "They never threw anything away. They kept everything in their lives. They had an archive that had everything in it from the original audio tapes from The Johnny Cash Show...

Standing Backstage At The Beacon Theatre in New York, leaning against a crumbling brick wall in the dark, I could barely see Kris Kristofferson standing to my left. Willie Nelson was in the shadows to my right. Ray Charles was standing beside Willie, idly shifting his weight back and forth. A bit farther along the wall were Elvis Costello, Wyclef Jean, Norah Jones, Shelby Lynne, Paul Simon and respective managers, friends and family. Everybody was nervous and tight. We were there for Willie Nelson’s 70th birthday concert in 2003.

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