The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame will be inducting its class of 2015 in a ceremony this Saturday, April 18th. Johnny Cash was inducted into the Rock Hall in 1992, and the videos below show his acceptance speech and performance of “Big River” with fellow legends on stage.
Straddling the country, folk and rockabilly idioms, Johnny Cash crafted more than 400 plainspoken story-songs that described and addressed the lives of coal miners, sharecroppers, Native Americans, prisoners, cowboys, renegades and family men. Cash came by his common touch honestly, having been born in Kingsland, Arkansas, during the Great Depression on February 26, 1932. At age three, he moved with his family to Dyess, Arkansas, where he worked the cotton fields. Cash’s roaming days included laboring at an auto plant in Michigan, serving in the Air Force in Germany and working as an appliance salesman in Memphis.
A prototype for the black-clad rebel rocker, Cash became a full-time musician after his two-sided hit—“So Doggone Lonesome”/”Folsom Prison Blues”—shot to Number Four on the Billboard country chart in 1956. From Sun, he jumped to Columbia Records in 1958, where he recorded such favorites as “Ring of Fire,” “Understand Your Man,” “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town” and “Tennessee Flat-Top Box.” But Cash never forgot his roots.
Read more at RockHall.com.