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Introducing the new column Love and Theft from Comal County, Texas. Our columnist Robert L. Kelly, the Wolf Cub that performs all over the Hill Country, offers his unique perspective on our rich music history.

“The idea behind this column is to examine how Love can lead to Theft,” Kelly said. “Imitation is, after all, the highest form of flattery, and when we love a work of art, we can’t help but take a piece of it forward with ourselves into our own works.”

“No harm is meant, and this column is not about accusing anybody of anything, rather it is an exploration and appreciation of the ancient and sacred bonds that link the first caveman to hum to himself while clapping his hands to the musical superstars of tomorrow and beyond.”

Johnny Cash, Lonnie Donegan, and the Rock Island Line

In 1976, Columbia Records released what is, among those who know, considered a mild highlight in the discography of Johnny Cash. The live album, Strawberry Cake, was recorded at the London Palladium and features many notable moments. The title track, a rewrite of the cowboy ballad “The Strawberry Roan”, is about a homeless man stealing a strawberry cake out of a fancy hotel lobby and making a break for it. Most famously, perhaps, just as June Carter Cash takes the stage to perform “Church in the Wildwood”, the IRA called in a bomb threat and the theater had to be evacuated, with the show resuming later that day.

While these moments are probably what most people who are aware of Strawberry Cake’s existence think of when they see it at a used record store or encounter the now mildly viral photo of Johnny Cash eating an admittedly delicious looking strawberry cake in the bushes with a bandana around his neck, I tend to think of a moment just on the other side of these two happenings. After the applause dies down from “Strawberry Cake”’s finish, Cash remarks: “I heard that Lonnie Donegan’s here tonight. Lonnie, would ya take a bow?” A voice in the crowd, presumably Donegan himself, shouts back “Do ‘Rock Island Line’!”

“That’s all I heard when we came over in 1958, was ‘Lonnie Donegan’, and we’d recorded that song on Sun Records two years before and nobody’d ever heard it. And I said ‘well, I always knew it was a good song, just didn’t get played on the right stations,’” Cash said. “We’re gonna do it for you here tonight, Lonnie Donegan!”

For some context, Lonnie Donegan was a skiffle singer who had had a hit with his version of “Rock Island Line” in 1956, the same year Cash had recorded it for Sun Records, which had put it out on his debut album, With His Hot and Blue Guitar. Cash performed “Rock Island Line” live many times; it was a staple of his concerts throughout his career. On the posthumous compilation CD Bootleg Vol. III: Live Around the World, the song appears twice, once on a radio appearance in 1962, and again in his 1964 Newport Folk Festival set.

Another CD I found at Yard Sale Records in New Braunfels, Texas, purporting to be a compilation of some kind, turned out to be a live album from around the time of his first release for Mercury Records in 1988, and featured the song prominently again.

After a visit to setlist.fm, I discovered that over a span from 1955 to 2003 Cash performed “Rock Island Line” 43 times. This information, especially before the 1980s, is very incomplete, with the bulk of these performances being listed from 1979 to 1994. There are no setlists available for most any performance between 1955 and 1978 unless it was recorded for radio, television, or an album. Regardless, this is a staggering amount of performances for a song I don’t think most people would associate with one of the defining artists of the 20th century, and it spans his entire career.

Quite circuitously, we have arrived at the thesis of this little article. Where did this song come from, and why did it have such a hold on Johnny Cash? The short answer is Lead Belly, the long answer is Huddie Ledbetter.

Lead Belly & the Lomaxes

“Rock Island Line” was first recorded in 1934 by musicologist and folklorist John Lomax, who accompanied Ledbetter, better known by his stage name Lead Belly, to the Cummins State Farm Prison in Arkansas to hear inmate Kelly Pace lead other inmates in what was then a pretty standard work song. 

It consisted of two verses: “Jesus died to save me all of my sins/Glory to God, I’m gonna need ‘im again” and “well, the train left Memphis at half-past nine/ It made it back to Little Rock at 8:49,” linked by the iconic chorus, “well the Rock Island Line is a mighty good road/Rock Island Line is the road to ride/ oh, the Rock Island Line is a mighty good road/If you wanna a ride, you gotta ride it like you find it/Get your ticket at the station for the Rock Island Line.”

This version of the song served as the basis for Lead Belly’s interpretation, recorded and released by Lomax’s son Alan in 1937. Ledbetter adds a few verses, as well as a spoken word introduction, describing an engineer coming to the titular railroad’s toll gate carrying livestock before launching into the song. Most versions of the song performed today include some iteration of this intro. Johnny Cash’s goes like this:

Now this here’s a story about the Rock Island Line

Well, the Rock Island Line, she runs down into New Orleans

There’s a big tollgate down there and you know

If you got certain things on board when you go through the tollgate

Well, you don’t have to pay the man no toll

Well, a train driver he pulled up to the tollgate

And a man hollered and asked him what all he had on board and said:

I got livestock

I got livestock

I got cows

I got pigs

I got sheep

I got mules

I got all livestock

Well, he said, “You alright boy! You don’t have to pay no toll

You can just go right on through”

So, he went on through the tollgate

And as he went through, he started pickin’ up a little bit of speed

Pickin’ up a little bit of steam

He got on through, he turned and looked back at the man, he said:

Well, I fooled you

I fooled you

I got pig iron

I got pig iron

I got all pig iron

So, we see in “Rock Island Line” that, in at least this instance, Cash was influenced by Lead Belly. This made me curious about other songs in Ledbetter’s catalog that may have had a direct impact on Cash’s songbook.

Not A One-Off Coincidence

While “Rock Island Line” may not seem like a significant part of Cash’s discography to the casual observer, the same cannot be said for the 1959 song “I Got Stripes”, which featured in two of the Man in Black’s most lasting cultural moments. The song is featured on the seminal album At Folsom Prison, as well as in a key scene of the 2005 biopic Walk the Line. This song is another Cash staple that has its origins in Lead Belly’s work.

Ledbetter released and recorded “On A Monday” in 1939, and its first verse is almost identical to “I Got Stripes”, which Cash co-wrote with Charlie Williams, a Nashville producer who also co-authored songs with Bobby Bare and Wanda Jackson. 

On a Monday, I was arrested

On a Tuesday, I was locked up in jail

On a Wednesday, my trial was attested

On a Thursday, nobody wouldn’t go my bail

The chorus of “On a Monday”, however, differs significantly.

Yes I’m all, almost done

Yes I’m all, almost done

Yes I’m all, almost done

And I ain’t gonna ring them yellow women do’ bell

Cash’s chorus lines up fairly well with Leadbelly’s second verse:

Take these stripes, stripes from ‘round my shoulder

Take these chains, these chains from ‘round my legs

Lord, these stripes, stripes sure don’t worry me

But these chains, chain’s is bound to kill me dead

The structure of “I Got Stripes” feels like a natural folk variation of “On a Monday”, much the way some of Cash’s credited Lead Belly covers are. Specifically 1962’s “Cotton Fields (The Cotton Song)” from The Sound of Johnny Cash, as well as the next year’s “Tell Him I’m Gone” from Blood, Sweat and Tears. On these tracks, Cash weaves in and out of his own verses as well as traditional ones associated with Ledbetter’s renditions. On certain live recordings of “Cotton Fields”, in particular I’m thinking again of Live Around the World, Cash even adds specific lines from Lead Belly.

There’s a Man Going ‘Round Taking Songs

On the last album released in Johnny Cash’s lifetime, the opener and title track “The Man Comes Around” begins with the line “There’s a man going ‘round taking names”. This is also the title of another song first recorded by Lead Belly. The Man in the title has been supposed to be everyone from the Grim Reaper to a slaver. In Cash’s estimation, the Man appears to be Jesus Christ. 

Johnny Cash was near the end of his life when he wrote “The Man Comes Around”, and the whole album feels like an extended farewell to the world, frequently returning to this idea of the Second Coming of Christ and the need to eventually pay for one’s sins. The dread of the Man coming around in Leadbelly’s song builds as the line repeats, and his father, mother, sister, and brother’s names are taken, and his heart is left “in vain”. In this context, the Man in Cash’s song is coming to take his name, presumably promising a reunion with father, mother, sister, and brother. As he says in the Carl Perkins penned “Daddy Sang Bass”, “we’ll be together again up yonder in a little while.”

I have no intention of trying to stir any pots, only to illuminate the love and admiration Cash must have felt for Lead Belly in order to borrow so frequently and transformatively over the course of his entire career. To my knowledge, there has been precious little written about the whispering influence Huddie Ledbetter had on Johnny Cash, but it’s all there and as plain as day for those with the eyes to see.

I find the symmetry remarkably neat and fascinating in Cash covering Leadbelly on his debut album, and taking one of the older icon’s own compositions and reworking it in that fine folk tradition we all strive to leave our mark on with his final living release.

Support the Artist

“Love and Theft” is a column by Robert L. Kelly.

More information about Robert Kelly can be found here.

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