Washington

The rock musician Bono once described him as “a character of truly Biblical proportions, with a voice, all wailing freight trains and thundering prairies, like the landscape of his beloved America. He has a soul as big as a continent, full of righteous anger mixed with human compassion.”Johnny Cash, who died on September 12 in Nashville, aged 71, always claimed to be embarrassed by such praise. But he did concede that his music “covers a lot of territory”, and so did he: from a childhood picking cotton in the hard-luck towns of the American south, he embarked upon a raucous career marked by drug addictions and trashed hotel rooms, gaining international superstardom with songs including ‘I Walk The Line’ and ‘Ring of Fire’.

By the end, he was a cultural icon, credited with bridging the worlds of rock and country, reinvesting American popular music with political engagement and raw emotional honesty. “I’m not bitter. Why should I be bitter? I’m thrilled to death with life,” Cash told CNN’s Larry King in December 2002, reflecting on Shy-Drager Syndrome, the degenerative neurological disorder which had been robbing him of feeling in his limbs, and the glaucoma that had destroyed 60 per cent of his eyesight. He died at Nash-ville’s Baptist Hospital, his manager Lou Robin said, due to complications from diabetes, resulting in respiratory failure.

Cash, nicknamed ‘The Man In Black’ because he rarely appeared in public in any other colour, had not toured since 1993. But he was still active in the studio, earning his eleventh Grammy this year for ‘Give My Love To Rose’. Enjoying a resurgence of popularity over the last decade among younger fans, he was nominated for seven MTV Music awards last month, though illness prevented him attending.

“He was a great, great man,” Elvis Costello said. “His influence spread over many generations of different people,” said Mick Jagger, recalling how the Rolling Stones had incorporated his songs into their repertoire. Sheryl Crow said that Cash — despite being a country musician — had come to embody “what rock’n’ roll was: he was the radical outlaw, but he was also writing these songs that were gut-wrenching ... he’s always been the Man in Black — the introspective, outspoken, fiery, do-or-die man.” Accounts of Cash’s childhood now seem almost like a stereotypical Hollywood rendering of the hard US south, but he was the real thing. Born in in 1932 in Kingsland, Arkansas, he helped his family pick cotton, but suffered deeply aged 12 when his brother, Jack, 14, died in an accident while sawing trees. He later suggested his haunted music owed much to the tragedy.

From early on he was intent on a career in singing and playing guitar. He wrote the first song that would become a hit, ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, while serving as a radio operator in the air force, in Germany. It was in the air force, Cash said, that he encountered a sergeant who liked to joke that his regular service-issue black shoes were actually blue suede, and should not be stepped on. The anecdote provided Carl Perkins with the inspiration for the song that Elvis Presley later covered.

A year after leaving the forces, the Memphis label Sun Records released his first record, ‘Cry, Cry, Cry’. ‘I Walk The Line’ followed soon after, propelling him into the upper echelons of the industry — even though he had tried to stop his label sending the record to radio stations because he thought “it sounded so awful”.

“He created a new, minimalist style in country music — it had become florid, over-arranged. He took it back to basics,” said Charles K Wolfe, a leading historian of US country and folk music. “It was a pared-down, straightforward style, and that tended to lead directly into rockabilly and to rock’n’ roll.”After the success of an early live performance in front of prison inmates, he took to staging large concerts in jails. “Convicts are the best audience I ever played for,” Cash said. It was part of his wide-ranging concern for marginalised people that also manifested itself in vocal support of the Native American rights movement in the US, hardly a country music staple.

But Cash saw the inside of jail on an involuntary basis, too, albeit briefly, as a consequence of a severe addiction to amphetamines and barbiturates in the early 1960s that had him popping up to 100 pills a day. Much later, he recalled the response of a warden in a smalltown jail where he had ended up spending a night: “He said: ‘My wife is a big fan of yours... when I went home last night and told her I had Johnny Cash in my jail, she cried all night’.”

Famously, on one occasion, Cash was fined $82,000 for destroying 500 acres of protected forest in California after accidentally starting a fire. Eventually, apparently suicidal, he drove a tractor off a cliff into a lake near his home, and had to be resuscitated. He turned a corner, and credited his subsequent stability to his second wife, the singer June Carter Cash. In 1969, his records outsold the Beatles as he embarked on touring and recording with renewed energy, later becoming one of only three musicians to be inducted into both the Country and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame.

“People say, well, he wore that body out,” he later reflected. “Well, maybe I did. But it was to a good purpose.”In recent years, Cash and his wife had settled into a more sedate routine in their hometown of Hendersonville, Tennessee, meeting fans not at concerts but at local malls. When June Carter Cash died in May following heart surgery, her husband’s health worsened. Until then, he had been stoical. In December, when King asked him if he thought his illness could be cured, he said: “I don’t think so. But that’s all right. There’s no cure for life, either.”