This Week in Texas Music History we learn that though he may not have shot a man in Reno, the Man in Black did spend a night in a West Texas jail.
Episodes written by Jason Mellard, Alan Schaefer, and Avery Armstrong
On October 4, 1965, Johnny Cash was arrested in El Paso for possession of amphetamines. He had just completed a short Texas tour and then hailed a cab from El Paso to Juarez to purchase several hundred pills. Narcotics agents apprehended him on his return, and he spent a night in jail before posting bail. Given “Folsom Prison Blues,” the live San Quentin and Folsom albums, and his advocacy for the incarcerated, many people assume Cash himself had done time, but this one night in El Paso was the Man in Black’s most significant spell behind bars.
1965 had been a professionally successful year for Cash. His Orange Blossom Special album climbed country and pop charts. He had found new collaborators in New York folk circles, most notably Bob Dylan. He recorded the double-LP Johnny Cash Sings the Ballads of the True West, an ambitious, historical collection of American song.
But personally, Cash struggled in 1965. His marriage with his first wife, Vivian Liberto, was on shaky ground, and he became increasingly absent from his home and family. But Vivian, whom Cash met while stationed in her native San Antonio, continued to stand by her husband. When the singer returned to El Paso for trial in December 1965, Vivian accompanied him. In a final twist to his West Texas saga, as they left the courthouse, an Associated Press photographer snapped a photo of the couple, and Vivian’s appearance led to a scandal over Cash’s apparent interracial marriage. Vivian had African American ancestry but was then unaware of it, having been told by her family that their complexion owed to their Sicilian heritage. Racist groups seized the spectacle and called for boycotts of Cash concerts while attacking the singer, Vivian, and their children.
Cash was vocal in his response to the attacks on his family, all the while immersed in a troubled marriage threatened by his struggle with addiction. By 1966 his marriage with Vivian had ended, and a new artistic and romantic relationship with June Carter had opened the next chapter in Cash’s career.
