Marshall Grant Passed Away
I just read on AOL that Marshall died yesterday, he was 83...I have is book on the table next to my TV chair......Always felt good to see it sitting there....
Marshall Grant, Bass Player With Johnny Cash, Dies at 83
By WILLIAM GRIMES
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Marshall Grant, a bass player who, as an original member of Johnny Cash’s band, the Tennessee Two, helped create the group’s pulsing “boom-chicka-boom” sound, died on Sunday in Jonesboro, Ark. He was 83.
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His death was confirmed by the Memorial Park Funeral Home and Cemetery in Memphis. Mr. Grant, who lived in Hernando, Miss., was in Jonesboro for the Johnny Cash Festival, an event to raise money to restore Cash’s childhood home in Dyess, Ark.
Mr. Grant, who played acoustic and electric bass with Cash from 1954 to 1980 and was the road manager for the group, provided the thumping foundation on “Folsom Prison Blues,” “I Walk the Line,” “Ring of Fire,” “The Man in Black” and many other songs and on the live albums that Cash recorded at Folsom prison and San Quentin.
Luther Perkins, the other original member of the Tennessee Two, played lead guitar and created the scratchy rhythm pattern overlaying Mr. Grant’s bass lines. With the addition of the drummer W. S. Holland in 1960, Cash’s backup became the Tennessee Three.
The group’s signature sound came into being overnight — literally — as Mr. Grant recounted on a number of occasions. Shortly after he switched from rhythm guitar to bass, which he did not know how to play, he and his fellow musicians began experimenting with the group’s new configuration.
“We finally got it tuned, and then we stuck adhesive tape all over the neck with the notes on it, and then we started playing little rhythm patterns,” he said on being inducted into the Musicians’ Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville with Mr. Perkins in 2007. “The only thing that we could do was what the world now knows as the boom-chicka-boom-chicka-boom sound that we established that first night.”
Marshall Grant was born on May 5, 1928, near Bryson City, N. C. He moved to Memphis in 1947 and worked as a mechanic at several auto dealerships At the Automobile Sales Company, a Plymouth dealership, he began playing guitar with two fellow employees, Mr. Perkins and A. W. Kernodle, known as Red.
Cash was introduced to the group by his older brother, Roy, the service manager at the dealership, after returning from military service in the Air Force.
Initially, Cash, Mr. Grant and Mr. Perkins all played rhythm guitar, but when a collective decision was made to have Mr. Grant play bass, he bought a battered instrument for $25.
Inspired by Elvis Presley, the group auditioned for Sam Phillips at Sun Records, playing gospel songs, which Mr. Phillips said he could not sell. Mr. Kernodle, who was now playing steel guitar, found the experience unnerving and dropped out of the group.
It was while working out the accompaniment for “Hey Porter,” a song written by Cash, that the group hit on its signature style. After a return audition at Sun, Cash and the Tennessee Two were signed by Phillips, and along with Presley, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis, became part of the brilliant constellation of stars that emerged from Sun’s studios.
Mr. Grant recorded and toured with Mr. Cash for the next 25 years. A teetotaler and nonsmoker, he took on the arduous task of shepherding Cash to performances through the years of his well-documented drug abuse and erratic, self-destructive behavior. “I took every step that he took, I looked out after him,” he said in a 2008 interview with the Web site classicbands.com. “I did everything you could do for a person.”
He chronicled the ups and downs in a memoir, “I Was There When It Happened: My Life With Johnny Cash” (2006). The title alludes to the gospel song that the group played for Phillips at their first audition.
The relationship came to grief in 1980. After a series of disputes, Cash fired Mr. Grant, who sued for wrongful termination and embezzlement of retirement money. The suit was settled out of court.
“Marshall was a solid, solid rock,” Roseanne Cash told The Nashville Tennessean. “I cannot imagine what would have happened on those tours without him. He understood how complicated my dad was, that he was a great musician who had real demons.”
After parting ways with Cash, who died in 2003, Mr. Grant managed the Statler Brothers, with whom he had recorded the 1965 hit “Flowers on the Wall.” He later reconciled with Cash and performed with him onstage in 1999.
In addition to his wife, Etta, survivors include a son, Randall.