Bob Dylan rose to fame years after Johnny Cash, but the older musician became a big fan. Though Cash likely had the connections to arrange a meeting with Dylan, he decided to write him a fan letter. He explained that Dylan’s star-turning album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was a constant companion to him. Dylan wrote his own fan letter in return, and the two men became friends.
Bob Dylan appeared on ‘The Johnny Cash Show’ in 1969
In 1969, Cash was at the height of his fame. He had success on the charts and on television with his music program, The Johnny Cash Show. The show hosted a number of artists across musical genres, including Dylan. He appeared on the premiere episode in June of 1969.
After Dylan played “I Threw It All Away” and “Livin’ the Blues,” he joined Cash on “Girl From the North Country.“
“When the set was over, Cash said, ‘It’s really fine to have a great man like Bob Dylan on the show,’” Rolling Stone reported from the taping. “Then he announced that the first take had been fine and that Dylan enjoyed the audience so much that he wanted to do the numbers again for them with amplification.”
They became friends after the younger musician received a fan letter
Cash and Dylan had a great appreciation for each other’s music, which the former expressed in a fan letter.
“I had a portable record player that I’d take along on the road,” Cash wrote in Cash: The Autobiography. “And I’d put on [The] Freewheelin’ [Bob Dylan] backstage, then go out and do my show, then listen again as soon as I came off. After a while at that, I wrote Bob a letter telling him how much of a fan I was. He wrote back almost immediately, saying he’d been following my music since ‘I Walk the Line,’ and so we began a correspondence.”
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Cash explained that they didn’t correspond through letters for long. They stopped because they met in person.
“Mostly it was about music: what we ourselves were doing, what other people were doing, what I knew about so-and-so and he didn’t and vice versa,” he wrote. “He asked me about country people; I asked him about the circles he moved in. I still have all his letters, locked up in my vault. It wasn’t a long correspondence. We quit after we actually met each other, when I went to play the Newport Folk Festival in July of 1964. I don’t have many memories of that event, but I do remember June and me and Bob and Joan Baez in my hotel room, so happy to meet each other that we were jumping on the bed like kids.”
Bob Dylan wrote a lengthy tribute to Johnny Cash after his death
After Cash’s death in 2003, Dylan offered a rare public statement about the other musician.
“I was asked to give a statement on Johnny’s passing and thought about writing a piece instead called ‘Cash Is King,’ because that is the way I really feel,” he wrote, per Rolling Stone. “In plain terms, Johnny was and is the North Star; you could guide your ship by him — the greatest of the greats then and now. I first met him in ’62 or ’63 and saw him a lot in those years. Not so much recently, but in some kind of way he was with me more than people I see every day.”
He expressed his belief that Cash’s writing exemplified what it meant to be human.
“Truly he is what the land and country is all about, the heart and soul of it personified and what it means to be here; and he said it all in plain English,” Dylan wrote. “I think we can have recollections of him, but we can’t define him any more than we can define a fountain of truth, light and beauty. If we want to know what it means to be mortal, we need look no further than the Man in Black.”
