Tommy Cash: Walking the Line WhenYour Brother Is Johnny
The Major League Baseball record for most home runs by two brothers is 768. Hank Aaron had 755 and Tommie Aaron had 13.
The country music version of that somewhat lopsided stat might be “most top-20 singles by two brothers.” The number is 79 and it’s held by the Cash brothers — Johnny with 74 and Tommy with five.
Like Tommie Aaron, Tommy Cash dwelt in the shadow of an older brother, and that was, frankly, fair. While he became a working professional, which 98% of all aspirants do not, he lacked the elite skills of his more famous sibling.
Tommy Cash, who died Friday at the age of 84, could have been mistaken for Johnny if he were singing in a crowded bar. He had the same rough voice and Arkansas twang. The voice just wasn’t quite as resonant, or maybe quite as confident. It was a decent country music voice that didn’t stand out, very possibly because Johnny, eight years older, had claimed the brand before Tommy got into the game.
The late-‘60s years when Tommy was having his modest hits, notably the eulogy “Six White Horses,” were the years when Johnny was becoming an American institution. Tommy didn’t come close to Johnny as a songwriter, so he often inserted a segment of Johnny’s songs into his own show. Tommy wasn’t a footnote, but there were probably times when he felt like one — and a significant part of the world agreed. If you Google “Tommy Cash” today, you get little on Johnny’s brother and hundreds of links to a 32-year-old Estonian rap artist.
It wasn’t any secret that Johnny and Tommy had their tensions. “Brothers don’t get along sometimes,” Johnny said one night in 1987 when he invited Tommy on stage for a duet, “But they always make up because they love each other. We’ve been down the road together, shared a lot of the same problems.”
The song they sang that night was Jimmy Long’s “Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine,” which launched Gene Autry to stardom in 1932. It’s a four-handkerchief love note to an aging father, and kind of an amusing choice, since one of the more famous moments in Johnny’s upbringing under Ray Cash came after Johnny’s older brother was killed in a machine accident and Ray said he wished it had been Johnny instead.
Reconciliation apparently ran in the Cash family. In 2008, five years after Johnny died, Tommy wrote and recorded “My Brother Johnny Cash,” a tribute to “a man of honor, a man of words, a man of black not plaid.” While Tommy lionized Johnny’s legacy, he did not follow the familiar blueprint of cherry-picking only the triumphs of its subject. “At times depression laid him low,” went one verse, “when pills couldn’t take him higher.”
Truth is, Tommy Cash for his whole career faced the near-impossible task of reminding people he was Johnny Cash’s brother, which was one of his most marketable assets, and carving out an identity of his own.
One of his first singles, on Musicor in 1965, was “I Didn’t Walk The Line,” an unsubtle allusion to Johnny’s signature hit of a decade earlier. With lyrics like “I didn’t walk the line / And you’re no longer mine,” it’s not a big surprise Tommy’s belated sequel didn’t make the charts.
Tommy’s sibling song catalog took a more explicit turn in 1987 when he and Tommy Jennings, the brother of Johnny’s fellow star and frequent collaborator Waylon Jennings, recorded “My Mother’s Other Son.”
That one is genuinely clever, playing off a dozen of their famous brothers’ hit songs with lines like “I never met a boy named Sue and I hope I never do” or “I look like hell in black.”
The punchline lies in the chorus, a declaration that a psychologist might love to parse: “I’m proud to be the brother of my mother’s other son / I’m happy for the fame that’s come his way / We don’t share a spotlight, but we share my mother’s dream / So look out now, this mother’s son is gonna have his day.”
Okay, maybe that declaration was a trifle optimistic.
It’s a good song, though, and Tommy Cash over the years became a better musician. In “My Brother Johnny Cash,” there’s a lovely moment when he mentions Johnny’s late wife June Carter Cash and punctuates it with a guitar riff from “Wildwood Flower,” a signature Carter Family song.
Tommy’s website notes that he was a guest on the Grand Ol’ Opry, that he played Vegas and Branson, that he did numerous voiceovers, that he played around the world and that he recorded 20 albums. He was no failure as an artist.
But he wasn’t quite successful enough to make music his living, and for years he also sold real estate. After Johnny and June died, Tommy handled the listing for their estate.
After all those years for which there was no blueprint, the Johnny and Tommy story finished with a chapter that was almost eerily normal.
