‘Man in Black’ dies

Johnny Cash, the country music bad boy-turned-revered elder statesman, died early yesterday morning at a Nashville hospital. He was 71 years old.

The singer had been suffering for years from a variety of ailments, including autonomic neuropathy, a nervous system disorder similar to Parkinson’s disease. A bout with pneumonia nearly killed him in 1998.

According to his manager, Lou Robin, it was complications from diabetes that resulted in a fatal respiratory failure, only three days after Mr. Cash completed treatment for an inflamed pancreas.

His death came four months after the passing of his second wife, June Carter Cash. A star in her own right as a member of the pioneering Carter Family, she helped bring the singer back in the late 1960s from the brink of drug and alcohol addiction and guided him into a Christian faith to which he increasingly devoted himself over the remainder of his life.

He is survived by daughters Rosanne, Tara, Cindy and Kathy and son John Carter Cash, and a brother, Tommy Cash, who was also a country singer.

Johnny Cash died after having revivified a five-decade career that earned him the respect of each succeeding generation of rock, pop and country stars.

His late-period recordings, produced by Rick Rubin, included spare, acoustically driven interpretations of modern pop and rock songs from artists as varied as Depeche Mode, Tom Waits, Nick Lowe and Loudon Wainwright.

Just last month, the trend-assimilating, age-defying singer earned an MTV Video Music Award for the clip accompanying the song “Hurt,” a cover of a song originally performed by Nine Inch Nails, an industrial-electronica band.

Born in Arkansas to a Depression-era sharecropper, Mr. Cash worked cotton fields and migrated north to a Michigan auto-plant production line; he sold appliances in Memphis, Tenn., and did a stint in the Air Force during the Korean War.

While stationed in Germany in 1950, he made two fateful discoveries: the guitar and alcohol. Four years later, Mr. Cash was singing in Memphis with his longtime backing band, the Tennessee Two — bassist Marshall Grant and guitarist Lou Perkins.

The late Sam Phillips, the legendary Sun Records producer who shepherded Elvis Presley to fame, convinced Mr. Cash — who referred to himself simply as John in those days — to give pop music a try, and to add a youthful-sounding “y” to his first name.

Part of Sun’s “Million-Dollar Quartet” — including Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins — Mr. Cash’s collaboration with Mr. Phillips produced four No. 1 country singles, including “I Walk the Line.”

Mr. Cash charted a total of 137 songs on Billboard’s singles tabulation between 1955 and 2003 with hits such as “A Boy Named Sue,” “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town,” “Ring of Fire” and “Folsom Prison Blues.”

He sold more than 50 million records and nabbed 11 Grammy Awards, including one this year for the song “Give My Love to Rose” in the best male country vocal category.

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