Johnny Cash: The Life Robert Hilburn. Little, Brown and Company, 2013.

Johnny Cash: The Life Robert Hilburn. Little, Brown and Company, 2013.Robert Hilburn, longtime music critic for the Los Angeles Times (1970-2006), has produced a biography of Johnny Cash that is likely to be as definitive a biography of "the man in black" as we are to see. Hilburn knew Cash well and was the only journalist present at Cash's legendary Folsom Prison concert in 1968. He knows and has interviewed many people who were close to Cash, and he has access to deeply personal letters between Cash and family members and friends. Although Hilburn deeply respects the man and his music, Johnny Cash: The Life is not a hagiographical work. He gives the reader Cash, warts and all. His book belongs on a shelf with Peter Guralnick's biographies of Elvis Presley and Sam Cooke.The broad outlines of Cash's life are well known to Cash fans and to many members of the general public even if they are not fans of Cash or of country music. Hilburn fills in these broad outlines with often chilling details. He makes clear that Cash had an addictive personality. Most notably he was addicted to cigarettes (from an early age), sex, and drugs (primarily amphetamines and more potent pain killers). In some ways, Cash's life reads like a cliche of the road life of musicians. The road can be a killer, and it can lead to bad habits. Cash was not immune.Cash was married to two women, Vivian Liberto Cash and, more famously, June Carter Cash. Vivian and Johnny met in San Antonio when she was seventeen and he was about to deploy to Germany as a member of the US Air Force. They married in 1954 and divorced twelve years later. Most of this time they lived apart; Johnny in Tennessee and Vivian in California. They had four daughters, including Roseanne, who would also become a country music legend. While Cash wrote I Walk the Line as an assurance to Vivian, he walked over that line numerous times in their marriage. A relationship with Los Angeles teenage rockabilly star Lorrie Collins (who would marry Cash's manager) and one with Billie Jean Horton, the widow of both Hank Williams and Johnny Horton, were the most prominent of these affairs. In Hilburn's account, Cash proposed to Billie Jean shortly after Johnny Horton's death and while still married to Vivian. Not surprisingly, Vivian and her daughters were harmed psychologically by what seemed to them to be an utter indifference on Cash's part. Cash would have estranged relationships with each of his daughters for the rest of his life. Cash's marriage to June Carter is the stuff of legend, and most of that legend seems to be true enough. But even in this marriage, Cash could not remain faithful. Hilburn even suggests the possibility of an affair with Anita Carter, June's sister. At one point, June filed divorce papers, but they were able to reconcile and renewed their wedding vows in 1980.Cash's problems with drugs are well known, but the harrowing account given by Hilburn shows that the problems went much deeper than is commonly understood. Cash consumed pills the way many people consume popcorn. In the mid-1960s, there were so many overdoses and near-overdoses "that everyone in the touring party cited various times and places" (293) when Cash had slipped into a drug-induced unconsciousness. …