Fact #61461
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Short story:
Bob Dylan meets Johnny Cash on the last day of The Newport Folk Festival, Freebody Park, Newport, Rhode Island, USA. The three-day event also features Pete Seeger, Jose Feliciano, Sleepy John Estes, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Phil Ochs and Jim Kweskin And The Jug Band.Full article:
Johnny Cash : We had more of a correspondence before we met. We wrote each other a lot of letters. I never have shown those letters to anybody, not even June. Bob Dylan's a very private person and he would really be embarrassed if I did. I have probably a dozen or more locked in my vault. I will eventually destroy them. There's no big secrets in them, but it's a period of Bob's life right after he first started. He had his first album out when I discovered him. I was working joints in downtown Las Vegas, The Nugget and places like that, and I was staying up all night playing Bob Dylan after I got through.
So I wrote him a letter care of John Hammond at Columbia and I got a letter right back from Bob in New York. I fired one right back and then he wrote me one from California, then one from Hibbing, one from Woodstock. It was just rambling thoughts, you know? What he was feeling about things, and looking forward to meeting me. I was the same. I was writing him letters on airplanes and mailing them in those vomit bags. The 1964 Newport Folk Festival was where we met, he and I and June and Joan Baez. We hung out together that whole time up there and had a great time.
(Source : not known)
Bob Dylan : Johnny Cash recorded some of my songs early on, too. I met him about ’63, when he was all skin and bones. He traveled long, he traveled hard, but he was a hero of mine. I heard many of his songs growing up. I knew them better than I knew my own. Big River, I Walk the Line. ‘How high’s the water, mama?’ I wrote It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) with that song reverberating inside my head. I still ask, ‘How high’s the water, mama?’
Johnny was an intense character, and he saw that people were putting me down. Playing electric music. And he posted letters to magazines, scolding people, telling them to shut up and let him sing. In Johnny Cash’s world of hardcore Southern drama, that kind of thing didn’t exist. Nobody told anybody what to sing or what not to sing. Critics didn’t do that kind of thing.
I’ve always got to thank him for doing that. Johnny Cash was a giant of a man. The Man in Black. And I’ll always cherish the friendship we had until the day there is no more days.
(Source : speech at The Musicares Person Of The Year Event, Feb 2015)
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So I wrote him a letter care of John Hammond at Columbia and I got a letter right back from Bob in New York. I fired one right back and then he wrote me one from California, then one from Hibbing, one from Woodstock. It was just rambling thoughts, you know? What he was feeling about things, and looking forward to meeting me. I was the same. I was writing him letters on airplanes and mailing them in those vomit bags. The 1964 Newport Folk Festival was where we met, he and I and June and Joan Baez. We hung out together that whole time up there and had a great time.
(Source : not known)
Bob Dylan : Johnny Cash recorded some of my songs early on, too. I met him about ’63, when he was all skin and bones. He traveled long, he traveled hard, but he was a hero of mine. I heard many of his songs growing up. I knew them better than I knew my own. Big River, I Walk the Line. ‘How high’s the water, mama?’ I wrote It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) with that song reverberating inside my head. I still ask, ‘How high’s the water, mama?’
Johnny was an intense character, and he saw that people were putting me down. Playing electric music. And he posted letters to magazines, scolding people, telling them to shut up and let him sing. In Johnny Cash’s world of hardcore Southern drama, that kind of thing didn’t exist. Nobody told anybody what to sing or what not to sing. Critics didn’t do that kind of thing.
I’ve always got to thank him for doing that. Johnny Cash was a giant of a man. The Man in Black. And I’ll always cherish the friendship we had until the day there is no more days.
(Source : speech at The Musicares Person Of The Year Event, Feb 2015)