Johnny Cash died on September 12, 2003. When Bob Dylan was asked for a statement, he did not offer a polite line about a fellow musician. He said he had thought about writing a piece called “Cash Is King,” because that was how he really felt.
“In plain terms, Johnny was and is the North Star; you could guide your ship by him.”
Dylan also said that even though he had not seen Johnny Cash much in recent years, in some way Cash had been with him more than people he saw every day. To understand where that feeling came from, you have to go back to a two-day recording session in Nashville in February 1969, and to the years of friendship that led up to it.
Two Days in Studio A
In February 1969, Bob Dylan was in Nashville making the album that would become Nashville Skyline. On February 17 and 18, Johnny Cash joined him at Columbia’s Studio A. Cash later described the sessions in the simplest possible way: Bob asked him to be a guest on the album, he went to the studio, and they just turned on the recorder for about two hours.
What came out of those two days was loose, warm and unplanned. The two men traded each other’s songs and dug into old favorites, including two medleys of Jimmie Rodgers material, country gospel, and early Sun Records rockabilly. Rockabilly pioneer Carl Perkins played guitar on six of the tracks, including his own “Matchbox.”
The tapes also caught the first known version of “Wanted Man,” a song Bob Dylan wrote that Johnny Cash would make his own. About a week later, Cash debuted it in front of the inmates at San Quentin State Prison, the concert that became his famous live album. The version on the Nashville tapes is the only time Dylan himself was ever recorded singing it.
For all of that music, only one duet made it onto Nashville Skyline: “Girl from the North Country,” a song Dylan had first recorded in 1963. It opened the album when it was released that spring.
The rest stayed in the vault. Fans traded rough bootleg copies for decades, but the Dylan-Cash sessions were not officially released until November 1, 2019, when Columbia and Legacy put them out as Travelin’ Thru, 1967–1969: The Bootleg Series Vol. 15, a full 50 years after the tape first rolled.
A Letter Before a Handshake
The friendship behind that session had started years earlier, with letters. Johnny Cash had become a fan of Bob Dylan’s early records and wrote to him to say so. Dylan wrote back, and the two began corresponding.
In 1964, Dylan was under fire from some folk critics who did not like the direction he was heading. Cash, already a major star, took up for him in public. In the March 1964 issue of Broadside magazine, he published an open letter, written almost like a poem, that ended by telling Dylan’s critics to shut up and let him sing.
Dylan never forgot it. When Cash died, he recalled that Johnny had written that letter before they had ever met, and he said plainly that it meant the world to him. More than 50 years later, Dylan brought it up again in his 2015 MusiCares Person of the Year speech.
The Guitar at Newport
Accounts differ on exactly when the two first met in person. Dylan himself remembered it as 1962 or 1963. But the moment most fans know came at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, where Johnny Cash gave Bob Dylan one of his guitars. In country music, handing a younger artist your guitar is a sign of deep respect.
Cash backed his admiration with his own records. In 1964 he took the melody of Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” wrote new words, and turned it into “Understand Your Man,” which spent six weeks at No. 1 on the country chart. He and June Carter also scored their first hit duet with Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe.”
After the Session
The friendship did not end in the studio. On May 1, 1969, Bob Dylan appeared at the Ryman Auditorium for the taping of the very first episode of The Johnny Cash Show. The two sang “Girl from the North Country” together, and the episode aired on ABC on June 7, 1969. Dylan rarely did television in those years, which made the appearance all the more meaningful.
Johnny Cash also wrote the liner notes for Nashville Skyline, and those notes won him a Grammy Award. Introducing “Wanted Man” at San Quentin, Cash called Dylan the greatest writer of our times.
Decades later, when Bob Dylan called his friend the North Star, he was not exaggerating for effect. He was describing a man who had defended him before they met, handed him a guitar at Newport, and sat beside him in a Nashville studio while the tape rolled.
Do you remember the first time you heard Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan sing “Girl from the North Country”? Share your memories in the comments.