Why Did Johnny Cash Always Sing for the Forgotten People?

Because I was almost forgotten myself. Because I came from nothing, and I never forgot what that felt like.

When I was a boy, we sharecropped in Arkansas. My father, Ray Cash, worked that land from sunrise to sunset, and we still barely had enough. I remember the hunger. I remember my brother Jack dying in a sawmill accident when I was just a kid, and our whole family breaking apart from the grief. I remember knowing that we didn't matter to most of the world. We were just poor people trying to survive.

When I got into music and started having success, I could have forgotten all that. A lot of people do. They climb out of the dirt and they don't want to remember what it felt like down there. But I couldn't do that. I'd have been lying about myself.

The poor, the prisoner, the soldier — these were my people because they were me, in a different circumstance. When I walked into Folsom Prison, I saw men that had been written off by society. The guards treated them like they were less than human. But I knew the truth: they were just like me. They were just like you. They'd made mistakes, or they'd been dealt a hand they couldn't handle, or circumstances had broken them. But they were still human. They still deserved dignity and to be heard.

That's why I wore black. It wasn't some costume or act. Black represents the coal miner, the farmer, the prisoner, the widow. It represents anyone who's been pushed to the margins and forgotten. I wanted people to know that I saw them. That their pain mattered. That I wasn't too big or too famous to remember where I came from.

If you have a voice, you have a responsibility to use it for people who don't have one. That's biblical. Jesus spent his time with the least, the last, and the lost. That's what He taught us. Music gave me a voice, and I couldn't waste it singing only for the comfortable. That wouldn't have been honest. That wouldn't have been me.