Johnny Cash Quotes About Songs

Quotes about: Songs

• I start a lot more songs than I finish, because I realize when I get into them, they're no good. I don't throw them away, I just put them away, store them, get them out of sight.

  Johnny Cash

  Song, Sight, Rock N Roll

  "Music's Man in Black". Academy of Achievement interview, www.achievement.org. June 25, 1993.

• You've got a song you're singing from your gut, you want that audience to feel it in their gut. And you've got to make them think that you're one of them sitting out there with them too. They've got to be able to relate to what you're doing.

  Johnny Cash

  Song, Thinking, Singing

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

• I love songs about horses, railroads, land, Judgment Day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak and love. And Mother. And God.

  Johnny Cash

  Love, Mother, Song

• They're powerful, those songs. At times they've been my only way back, the only door out of the dark, bad places the black dog calls home.

  Johnny Cash

  Dog, Song, Powerful

• After about three lessons [my] voice teacher said, "Don't take voice lessons. Do it your way. You're a song stylist. Always do it your way."

  Johnny Cash

  Song, Teacher, Voice

• Every week, Dennis Day sang an old Irish folk song. And next day in the fields, I'd be singing that song if I was working in the fields.

  Johnny Cash

  Song, Next Day, Singing

  Source: wrvo.org

• I always loved those songs. And with my high tenor, I thought I was pretty good - you know? - almost as good as Dennis Day.

  Johnny Cash

  Song, Tenors, Knows

  Source: wrvo.org

• I had a song called "Folsom Prison Blues" that was a hit just before "I Walk The Line." And the people in Texas heard about it at the state prison and got to writing me letters asking me to come down there. So I responded and then the warden called me and asked if I would come down and do a show for the prisoners in Texas.

  Johnny Cash

  Song, Writing, Texas

  Source: wrvo.org

• By the time I actually recorded Bitter Tears I carried a heavy load of sadness and outrage; I felt every word of those songs... I expected there to be trouble with that album, and there was.... when it was released, many radio stations wouldn't play it.... The very idea of unconventional or even original ideas ending up on "country" radio in the late 1990s is absurd.

  Johnny Cash

  Country, Song, Sadness

• Because you're mine, I walk the line.

  Johnny Cash

  Country, Song, Eyes Wide Open

  Song: I Walk The Line

• My way of communicating with God as a boy (and often even now) was through the lyrics of a song. . . . So I didn't have the problem some people do who say, "I don't know how to pray." I used the songs to communicate with God. . . . To me, songs were the telephone to heaven, and I tied up the line quite a bit.

  Johnny Cash

  Song, Prayer, Boys

• When I record somebody else's song, I have to make it my own or it doesn't feel right. I'll say to myself, I wrote this and he doesn't know it!

  Johnny Cash

  Song, Records, Feels Right

• Backstage at the Grand Ole Opry, I got on my knees and told her that I was going to marry her some day. We were both married to someone else at the time. ‘Ring Of Fire’—June and Merle Kilgore wrote that song for me-that’s the way our love affair was. We fell madly in love and we worked together all the time, toured together all the time, and when the tour was over we both had to go home to other people. It hurt.

  Johnny Cash

  Love, Song, Hurt

• The first time I knew what I wanted to do with my life was when I was about four years old. I was listening to an old Victrola, playing a railroad song...I thought that was the most wonderful, amazing thing...That you could take this piece of wax and music would come out of that box. From that day on, I wanted to sing on the radio.

  Johnny Cash

  Song, Years, Listening

  "Music's Man in Black". Academy of Achievement interview, www.achievement.org. June 25, 1993.

• A song stylist is, like, to take an old folk song like "Delia's Gone" and do a modern white man's version of it.

  Johnny Cash

  Song, Men, White Man

  Source: wrvo.org

• We went down [Folsom Prison] and there's a rodeo at all these shows that the prisoners have there. And in between the rodeo things, they asked me to set up and do two or three songs. So that was what I did. I did "Folsom Prison Blues," which they thought was their song - you know? - and "I Walk The Line," "Hey Porter," "Cry, Cry, Cry." And then the word got around on the grapevine that Johnny Cash is all right and that you ought to see him.

  Johnny Cash

  Song, Two, Hey

  Source: wrvo.org

• Gospel music is so ingrained into my bones. I can't do a concert without singing a gospel song. It's what I was raised on.

  Johnny Cash

  Song, Singing, Bones

  Source: blankonblank.org

• I would take songs that I'd loved as a child and redo them in my mind for the new voice I had, the low voice.

  Johnny Cash

  Song, Children, Voice

  Source: wrvo.org

• The requests started coming in from other prisoners all over the United States. And then the word got around. So I always wanted to record that, you know, to record a show because of the reaction I got. It was far and above anything I had ever had in my life, the complete explosion of noise and reaction that they gave me with every song. So then I came back the next year and played the prison again, the New Year's Day show, came back again a third year and did the show.

  Johnny Cash

  New Year, Song, Years

  Source: wrvo.org

• When I get an idea for a song it would gel in my mind for weeks or months, and then one day just like that, Ill write it.

  Johnny Cash

  Song, Writing, Creativity

  "Music's Man in Black". Academy of Achievement interview, www.achievement.org. June 25, 1993.

• Gospel music was the thing that inspired me as a child growing up on a cotton farm, where work was drudgery and it was so hard that when I was in the field I sang all the time. Usually gospel songs because they lifted me up above that black dirt.

  Johnny Cash

  Song, Children, Growing Up

  Source: blankonblank.org

• Sam Phillips responded most to a song of mine called, "Hey Porter," which was on the first record.

  Johnny Cash

  Song, Hey, Records

  Source: wrvo.org

• When I finally stopped [singing], he had been saying, like, the last day or so, he'd been saying, now, I think we should put this one in the album. So without him saying I want to record you and release an album, he kept - he started saying, let's put this one in the album. So the album, this big question, you know, began to take form, take shape. And Rick [Rubin] and I would weed out the songs.

  Johnny Cash

  Weed, Song, Thinking

  Source: wrvo.org

• It makes me so mad that some people underestimate the wisdom and energy of young people. All because they don't look the way older folks think they should look. I'm working on a song about it. Maybe some of those closed minded people will realize long hair and tattoos don't mean they should be ignored. Close minded people are part of what's wrong with this world.

  Johnny Cash

  Tattoo, Song, Mean

• I sang those old gospel songs for my mother, and she said, is that you? And I said, yes, ma'am. And she came over and put her arms around me and said, God's got his hands on you.

  Johnny Cash

  Mother, Song, Hands

  "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, kbbi.org. November 24, 2016.

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