Bye Bye Johnny

Johnny Cash was buried on Monday 15th September after a private ceremony at the First Baptist Church in Hendersonville, Tennessee, where he had lived with his family. Irish country and western singer Sandy Kelly was among the small number of close family and friends from the music world who were invited to the service. She had become a close friend of Cash after meeting him at a concert in Omagh, Co Tyrone.

“The Cash family have been part of our family and we’ve been a part of theirs since 1990. I had recorded Patsy Cline’s ‘Crazy’ at the time and was on tour with Waylon Jennings who went back to Johnny and told him about it. Johnny rang me and said that he and June had heard the song and he asked me to come to Omagh where he was performing. I wasn’t five minutes into the place when I was rehearsing with the band and we performed together that night.
“When I was in Nashville soon after that, he asked me to his house where he was having a party. He took me aside and told me he had a song called ‘Woodcarver’ which he’d been carrying around for years and which he wanted to record with me. We did it and it became my first gold record. I went to Branson, Missouri with him and we’ve performed together all over the UK and the US.
“I was shocked to hear that he had died. I was in Gatwick Airport coming home from a tour when I heard the news. I hadn’t seen him in about a year though I’m in touch with Tommy his brother every three weeks, and my son Willie, who’s a singer-songwriter, moved to Nashville at the beginning of this year. The Cash family have been very good to him.
“Even though he had been ill for a long time the feeling at the funeral among the family was that he would have lived longer had June not died earlier this year. They were soulmates and he was devastated by her death. It was a beautiful ceremony. The casket was open and he still looked lovely dressed in his black suit with flowers and pieces of raw cotton arranged around. Apparently he’d picked cotton as a boy. Kris Kristofferson opened the proceedings and held things together throughout. They had a gospel choir, The Fisk Jubilee Singers who were wonderful, Emmylou Harris sang a song – she was devastated – and Sheryl Crow sang as well while they showed old movie footage of Johnny playing with the kids when they were young.
“Everyone tried to put into words what Johnny had meant to them. Rosanne Cash put it best when she said, ‘I can almost live in a world without Johnny Cash because he will always be with us. But I can’t live without Daddy.’ Vince Gill said, ‘If God had a voice it would sound like Johnny Cash.’ At the end everyone sang together a very moving version of ‘Will The Circle Be Unbroken’.”