Johnny Cash’s Daughters in Conversation: ‘Becoming Our Father’
Interviews
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1h 16m
Johnny Cash's four daughters, Rosanne, Kathy, Cindy, and Tara, discuss their father's overseas experiences as an Air Force serviceman, based on the photos and letters he sent to their mother, Vivian Liberto, who was Cash's girlfriend at the time. The program is in conjunction with a Country Music Hall of Fame Museum exhibit, "I've Been Everywhere: Becoming Johnny Cash," which features reproductions of photos and notes from Cash's Air Force scrapbooks.
Cash grew up poor in the farming town of Dyess, Arkansas, and his childhood glimpses of the outside world came mostly from listening to the radio. After enlisting in the military in 1950, he was stationed in Germany, and relished traveling across Europe and recording his adventures for then-girlfriend Vivian Liberto, who would become his first wife and the mother of his daughters.
In conversation with the Museum’s Peter Cooper, the Cash sisters reflect on the hardships of Cash's childhood, how these overseas experiences were personally formative for their father, and how the scrapbook images offer an early glimpse into someone who was already preparing for his singular destiny.
"This was a young man, nineteen years old, and he'd just got off the farm," says eldest daughter Rosanne, who went on to her own award-winning music career. "You sense a young man on the verge of his entire life, when everything is possible."
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