Johnny Cash, one of the most important and influential figures in country music, died in 2003 at the age of 71, 4 months after the death of his wife, June Carter Cash. Before his death, Cash personally chose Joaquin Phoenix to play him in the new biopic Walk The Line (in cinemas 3 February). Here, Cinemas Online takes a look at the life and career of the original Man in Black.

Cash was born on the 26 February 1932 in Kingsland, Arkansas, and was named J.R. Cash by his parents, who couldn't decide on names, only initials (he later took the name John R. Cash when enlisting in the U.S.A.F, changing again to Johnny after signing with Sun Records). By the age of five he was working in the cotton fields, singing along with his family as they worked. The family farm was flooded on at least one occasion, which later inspired him to write the song "Five Feet High And Rising". Johnny was very close to his brother Jack growing up. In 1944, Jack was pulled into a whirling table saw in the mill where he worked, and almost cut in two. He suffered for over a week before he died and Cash often spoke of the horrible guilt he felt over this incident, as he had been out fishing that day. On his deathbed, Jack said he had had visions of Heaven and angels before he died. Almost sixty years later, Cash spoke of looking forward to meeting his brother in Heaven. (This was to become a little-known, personal obsession of his to investigate the incident.)

After his Air Force service ended, Cash married Vivian Liberto in 1954 and moved to Memphis, where he sold appliances while studying to be a radio announcer. At night, he played with guitarist Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant (the Tennessee Two). Cash worked up the courage to visit Sun Records, hoping to garner a recording contract. Sun producer Cowboy Jack Clement met with the young singer first, and suggested that Cash return to meet producer Sam Phillips - after auditioning for Phillips, singing mainly gospel tunes, Phillips told him to "go home and sin, then come back with a song I can sell." Cash eventually won over Phillips and Clement with new songs delivered in his early frenetic style. His first recordings at Sun, "Hey Porter" and "Cry Cry Cry", were released in 1955 and met with reasonable success on the country hit parade.

Cash's next record, Folsom Prison Blues, made the country Top 5, and "I Walk the Line" was No. 1 on the country charts, making it into the pop charts Top 20. In 1957, Cash became the first Sun artist to release a long-playing album, beating Elvis Presley. Although he was Sun's most consistently best-selling and prolific artist at that time, Cash felt constrained by his contract with the small label. Elvis Presley had already left the label, and Phillips was focusing most of his attention and promotion on Jerry Lee Lewis. The following year, Cash left Sun to sign a lucrative offer with Columbia Records, where his single "Don't Take Your Guns to Town" would become one of his biggest hits.

In 1955, Cash's first daughter, Rosanne, was born. Although he would have three more daughters (Kathy, Cindy and Tara) with his wife, their relationship began to fall apart due ot his constant touring schedule. It was during one of these tours that he met June Carter, his second wife. Cash proposed onstage to Carter at a concert in London, Ontario on February 22, 1968; and the couple married a week later in Franklin, Kentucky.

As his career was taking off in the early 1960s, Cash began drinking heavily, and became addicted to amphetamines and barbiturates. Friends joked about his "nervousness" and erratic behavior, many ignoring the signs of his worsening drug addiction. For a brief time, Cash shared an apartment in Nashville with Waylon Jennings, who was also heavily addicted to amphetamines. Although in many ways he was spiralling out of control, his frenetic creativity was delivering some of his biggest hits. His song "Ring of Fire" was a major crossover hit, reaching No. 1 on the country charts and entering the Top 20 on the pop charts. The song was co-written by June Carter and Merle Kilgore and originally performed by Carter's sister, but the signature mariachi-style horn arrangement was conceived by Cash, who claimed to have heard it in a dream. The song, written about Cash, describes the personal hell Carter went through as she wrestled with her forbidden love for Cash (they were both married to other people at the time) and as she dealt with Cash's personal "ring of fire" (drug dependency and alcoholism.)

Although he carefully cultivated a romantic outlaw image, many fans are surprised to learn that he never served a prison sentence, although he landed in jail seven times for misdemeanors, each stay lasting a single night. His most serious run-in with the law occurred while on tour in 1965, when he was arrested by the narcotics squad in El Paso, Texas. Although the officers suspected that he was smuggling heroin from Mexico, he was actually smuggling 1,163 illegal amphetamines inside his guitar case. (He escaped with only a suspended sentence.) He was arrested the following year in Starkville, Mississippi, for trespassing late at night onto private property to pick flowers. He actually wrote "Folsom Prison Blues" after seeing a documentary called "Behind the Walls of Folsom Prison."

For his album Bitter Tears, Cash recorded "The Ballad of Ira Hayes", a Peter LaFarge song that told the true story of a Pima Indian who was one of the Marine heroes of the epic WWII battle at Iwo Jima. Despite his heroism, Hayes returned home to crushing despair and racial prejudice: "Ira Hayes returned a hero, celebrated throughout the land / He was wined and speeched and honored, everybody shook his hand / But he was just a Pima Indian, no water, no home, no chance / At home nobody cared what Ira had done, and when do the Indians dance?" Though "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" was a No. 3 country single, many stations refused to play it, deeming it too risky. Cash took out a full-page ad in Billboard magazine denouncing country radio for its reluctance. "'Ballad of Ira Hayes' is strong medicine," he wrote. "So is Rochester, Harlem, Birmingham (referring to then-recent race riots) and Vietnam." When invited to perform at the White House for the first time in 1972, President Richard Nixon's office requested that he play "Okie from Muskogee," a Merle Haggard song that negatively portrays youthful drug users and war protesters; and "Welfare Cadillac," a Guy Drake song that derides the integrity of welfare recipients. Cash refused to play either song - he apparently found both songs morally reprehensible - and played a series of his own more left-leaning, politically-charged songs, including "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" and "Man in Black" (which contains angry, anti-war lyrics, which Cash almost certainly wrote about the Vietnam War).

Personal problems followed him to his new home on Old Hickory Lake in Hendersonville, Tennessee (outside of Nashville). His longtime guitarist, Luther Perkins, died in a house fire in August 1968 after falling asleep while smoking. Less than two months later, the home of his next door neighbor and close friend, Roy Orbison, burned down, claiming the lives of two of Orbison's three young sons. Cash was profoundly affected by these incidents, and he attempted to take the first steps on a long, hard road to recovery. He locked himself in his home and underwent detox, relying heavily on his friends, and especially Carter and her parents, Ezra and Maybelle. He and Carter were married soon after. The love ballad "Flesh and Blood" is one of the first of many songs Cash would write about his second wife.

Over the next two years, he recorded and released two massively successful live albums, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison (1968) and Johnny Cash at San Quentin (1969). The Folsom Prison record was charged by a blistering rendition of his classic "Folsom Prison Blues," while the San Quentin record included the crossover hit single "A Boy Named Sue", a Shel Silverstein-penned song that reached No. 1 on the country charts and No. 2 on the US Top Ten pop charts. Shortly after his historic concert at Madison Square Garden in the waning days of the 1960s, his son John Carter Cash was born.

According to Cash his lowest point, and the point at which he realized he was sick because of the drugs, came when Cash drove his Jeep to Chattanooga, Tennessee and crawled into the Nickajack caves. Cash stated that he originally crawled into the caves to die because of the guilt and depression his drug addiction had caused to himself and others. However, while inside Cash said he felt an overwhelming presence of the Lord inside him and decided to change his life there and then. He began the long process of crawling out of the caves and when he emerged, June and his mother were waiting there to take him back to his home in Hendersonville, Tennessee.

After he quit using drugs in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Cash rediscovered his Christian faith, taking an "altar call" in Evangel Temple, a small church in the Nashville area. Cash chose this church over many other larger, celebrity churches in the Nashville area because he felt he was just another man there, rather than a celebrity. He could worship with other people and not be anything more than a common man.

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