... a sad day indeed... Johnny Cash, an icon of country music whose impact was as wide as American culture, died at Baptist Hospital about 2 a.m. today. He was 71 years old. After a long, sometimes confounding illness, Mr. Cash succumbed to respiratory failure related to diabetes, his manager Lou Robbin said in a statement. ''Johnny died due to complications from diabetes, which resulted in respiratory failure,'' Mr. Cash's manager, Lou Robin, said in a statement issued by Baptist Hospital in Nashville. ''I hope that friends and fans of Johnny will pray for the Cash family to find comfort during this very difficult time.'' Mr. Cash had been released from the hospital Wednesday after a two-week stay for treatment of an unspecified stomach ailment. Mr. Cash had battled a disorder of the nervous system, autonomic neuropathy, and pneumonia in recent years. His death follows that of June Carter Cash, his wife of 35 years, by only four months. Speaking at a 1999 tribute concert, rock star Bruce Springsteen asserted that Mr. Cash, ''took the social consciousness of folk music, the gravity and humor of country music and the rebellion of rock 'n' roll and told all us young guys that not only was it all right to tear up all those lines and boundaries, but it was important.'' Mr. Cash was a 1950s rockabilly who fused country and folk music in the '60s and made stark country albums with rock 'n' roll flourishes at the end of his career. He was an admittedly flawed man who battled drug addiction yet emerged as a high-profile Christian. He was a social activist who remained beloved by the right-leaning, country traditionalist set. He was a 1980s industry washout considered too old-fashioned for the country charts who signed with Rick Rubin's American Recording Co. in the 1990s and experienced an unprecedented career resurgence, winning Grammys and filling hip California venues such as The Viper Room and the House of Blues. He was a Country Music Hall of Famer and a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer. Mr. Cash confounded expectations at every turn, delighting listeners with his staggering rumble of a voice even as he confounded radio programmers and industry gate-keepers. His 14 No. 1 country hits I Walk the Line and Ring of Fire, among them don't approach marks made by Merle Haggard, George Strait, Conway Twitty and others. But his artistic and personal legacies go far beyond chart positions or records sold. Johnny Cash was born in tiny Kingsland, Ark. now is chiefly known as ''Birthplace of Johnny Cash'' Feb. 26, 1932. Mother Carrie Cash saw musical promise in her son J.R., the fourth of five children. She saved enough money for the teen to take a few singing lessons. Though J.R. loved the Gospel music he heard at the Pentecostal Church of God in Dyess, he was most smitten with the Grand Ole Opry and the country music he heard on the radio at lunch breaks during the week. Though it was music that thrilled Mr. Cash, it seemed incapable of removing him from Arkansas. Upon graduation from Dyess High School in 1950, he moved to Michigan, intending to work in an automobile plant. Making car hoods on an assembly line didn't suit him much better than cotton farming, so he joined the Air Force. The military refused to accept ''J.R.'' as a first name, and he became ''John R. Cash.'' During basic training in Texas, he met a high school senior named Vivian Liberto. His assignment to a base in Landsberg, Germany did not deter their burgeoning romance, as he wrote to her regularly. While in the service, he began strumming a guitar, composing music and verse and playing in a country band. Upon his 1954 discharge, Mr. Cash moved to Memphis, married Liberto, worked as a door-to-door appliance salesman, enrolled at the Keegan School of Broadcasting and put together an upstart country group to assist him in becoming a Gospel singer. He set his sights on Sun Records, a Memphis operation led by owner/producer Sam Phillips that was seeing some success with a new artist named Elvis Presley. Mr. Cash came to the Sun studio with his Tennessee Two (guitarist Luther Perkins and bass man Marshall Grant) with homesick train song Hey Porter! and the aforementioned Folsom Prison Blues, a song that borrowed liberally from Gordon Jenkins' Crescent City Blues recording (Jenkins successfully sued Mr. Cash, citing similar words and an identical melody, in the late 1960s). Not yet convinced that the man he called Johnny Cash had composed a hit, Phillips charged Mr. Cash to write ''an uptempo weeper love song,'' and he filled the order with Cry! Cry! Cry!, which would be paired with Hey Porter! as Mr. Cash's first single. Released in 1955, Cry! Cry! Cry! was a local and regional pop and country hit that ultimately peaked at No. 14 on Billboard's country music charts. Mr. Cash was among a group of Sun rockabillies including Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, but he and his Tennessee Two had a propulsive yet distinctly Southern ''boom-chicka-boom'' sound that immediately set them apart. In January 1956, Mr. Cash followed the tradition of Elvis Presley and Hank Williams by joining the Louisiana Hayride radio show. Six months later, he was given a slot on the Grand Ole Opry. Opry star Carl Smith introduced Mr. Cash by calling him ''the brightest rising star in the country music of America.'' That December, Mr. Cash again made headlines when he and Presley were photographed with Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins during a Sun session. That photograph is said to capture ''The Million Dollar Quartet.'' Mr. Cash's boom-chicka-boom sound garnered No. 1 hits I Walk The Line and There You Go, as well as now-classics Home of The Blues and Big River. Mr. Cash worked an exhausting touring schedule, and began taking amphetamines to help cope, starting a habit that would cause problems throughout much of his life. The pills did not rob him of his ability to connect with audiences, including those of the captive variety: On New Year's Day 1959, Mr. Cash's travels brought him to San Quentin prison in California, where he played a concert for the inmates. Eleven years later, the performer would record a live album at San Quentin, but this initial appearance was notable in that one of the incarcerated audience members was future country legend Merle Haggard. Unhappy with several matters, including Phillips' refusal to let him record a gospel album, Mr. Cash left Sun in 1958. While his decades on Columbia would see Mr. Cash rise to greater wealth and fame, many Cash-watchers consider the finest of the Sun recordings to be the artistic apex of his career. In July 1958, Cash ascended to the major label ranks, as he began work on songs that would comprise his Columbia debut album, The Fabulous Johnny Cash. A western song from that album, Don't Take Your Guns To Town, topped the country charts for six weeks in 1959, and Mr. Cash entered a new decade as a well-established artist in his prime. ''The 1960s were probably my most productive time, creatively speaking,'' he wrote in his autobiography Cash. ''Often I wasn't in my best voice, because the amphetamines dried my throat and reduced me, at times, to croaks and whispers, but that wasn't the story all the time, and my energy and output were high.'' On Feb. 11, 1962, June Carter joined the Johnny Cash road show. She was a daughter of acoustic guitar great Mother Maybelle Carter and a member of the Carter clan, a group known as ''The First Family of Country Music.'' Mr. Cash had for some time been enthralled by her beauty, humor and talent, and she quickly recognized both Mr. Cash's magnetism and apparent need for a caretaker. In addition to flushing pills and soothing nerves, she wrote Mr. Cash a song that described anxious feelings about their escalating relationship. It would become one of his best-known hits: Penned by Carter and Merle Kilgore, Ring of Fire hit No. 1 in 1963. ''A song like that goes on forever,'' Mr. Cash told The Tennessean in 2002. In early 1967, he and Vivian divorced, amid much pill-fueled debauchery (though the hit records continued, including his fiery Jackson duet with June Carter), but by late 1967, Mr. Cash committed himself to getting off drugs, though his Jan. 13, 1968, show at Folsom Prison was proof that he was still quite in touch with his dark side. The show's recording, released as Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, now is considered one of the most significant albums in country music history. Mr. Cash proposed to June Carter onstage Feb. 1, 1968, and married her a month later. By the late 1960s, Mr. Cash was touring with an ensemble that included Perkins, members of the Carter Family and upstart vocal group The Statler Brothers. Such a bevy of talent ensured audiences variety, and Mr. and Mrs. Cash kept just such a scene going at home by inviting musicians over to share stories and swap songs. ''My liberation from drug addiction wasn't permanent,'' he would later write. ''Though I never regressed to spending years at a time on amphetamines, I've used mood-altering drugs for periods of varying length at various times since 1967: amphetamines, sleeping pills and prescription painkillers.'' In February 1969, Mr. Cash again made an album at a penitentiary. This time, it was San Quentin, where he had previously visited three times. He had written a song called San Quentin for the occasion. Both San Quentin and Folsom Prison Blues were written in a first-person narrative that led many listeners to assume Mr. Cash himself had been to prison. He had not, though he spent a little time in jail on minor charges. A Boy Named Sue, a Shel Silverstein-penned story song recorded that night, was the biggest hit from the At San Quentin album. It was a five-week No. 1 country hit and it won the Country Music Association's single of the year prize. June 1969 brought At San Quentin's release, and it marked the beginning of ABC-TV's The Johnny Cash Show, which ran through 1970. Mr. Cash recorded most of the show's 56 episodes at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, and he insisted that guest performers would include then-controversial artists including Dylan, Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie. The atypical blend of country, rock, folk and jazz was intended to spotlight conjunctions, not collisions, and the program helped broaden Mr. Cash's fame among those who hadn't listened to country music. Mr. Cash would sell more than 6 million records in 1969, making it the most successful year of his career. In October, the Nashville Banner reported that Mr. Cash was selling more records than any other band or performer, in any genre. Vietnam was raging, Richard Nixon was president and Johnny Cash, a 37-year-old native of Kingsland, Ark., was bigger than The Beatles. Mr. Cash's biggest 1970 hits were an indication of his expansive musical vision. He and Mrs. Cash made it to No. 2 on the Billboard country chart with a version of folkie Tim Hardin's If I Were A Carpenter (for which the Cashes won a Grammy), and Mr. Cash scored a No. 3 hit with What Is Truth. Mr. Cash released two No. 1 hits in 1970: One was a version of Kris Kristofferon's Sunday Morning Coming Down, an empathetic portrait of an addict. The other smash, which peaked in early 1971, was the folksy love song, Flesh And Blood. As Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and others turned heads and ears with a vigorous sound that signaled the onset of Nashville's so-called Outlaw Movement, Mr. Cash made a series of middle-of-the-road albums that seldom rated mention alongside '50s and '60s triumphs. Though not at his artistic peak, Mr. Cash was still Nashville's greatest superstar, an auditorium-packing concert draw, a sure-bet Country Music Hall of Famer (he would become the youngest-ever inductee in 1980). 1976's One Piece At A Time was a welcome return to a stripped-down sound reminiscent of Mr. Cash's 1950s work. The song became Mr. Cash's final No. 1 country hit as a solo artist. After that, the only time Mr. Cash's voice appeared on a top-charting country radio single was in 1985, as a member of supergroup The Highwaymen, with Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson. Columbia Records released Mr. Cash from his contract in 1986, creating an uproar among Cash devotees such as young gun Dwight Yoakam. Mr. Cash later secured a deal with Mercury/Polygram and recorded some excellent material (Beans For Breakfast, Last of the Drifters and a version of Guy Clark's Let Him Roll), but with the dawn of the 1990s, he was considering an exodus from recording. ''Saying goodbye to that game and just working the road, playing with my friends and family for people who really wanted to hear us, seemed very much like the thing to do,'' he wrote in Cash. In 1992, Mr. Cash was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an honor that reminded many of his spare rockabilly work on Sun Records with independent-minded producer Sam Phillips. A year later, another independent-minded maverick long-haired Rick Rubin, a man known for his work with rap and hard rock acts would sign Mr. Cash to a record deal with American Recordings, setting into motion an unparalleled rise back to contemporary viability. Rubin, who had previously produced the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy, recorded Cash unadorned, strumming an acoustic guitar with his thumb and singing. Even before the world at large was able to hear the solo/acoustic album called American Recordings, Mr. Cash's credibility was rising. In April 1994, American Recordings was released. Response was nearly universally positive, with Time magazine's review proclaiming: ''He has reasserted himself as one of the greats of popular music.'' Mr. Cash also was pleased, saying, ''I think I'm more proud of it than anything I've ever done in my life. This is me. Whatever I've got to offer as an artist, it's here.'' While American Recordings did not sell in astounding numbers, it did reawaken an interest in Mr. Cash's music and expand his audience. American Recordings made it to No. 23 on the country charts, making it the highest-charting of Mr. Cash's solo albums in a decade and a half. Mr. Cash was honored Dec. 8, as President Clinton and others applauded him upon receiving a Kennedy Center award. Vice President Al Gore had recommended Mr. Cash, assessing that Mr. Cash's music examined ''the entire range of existence, failure and recovery, entrapment and escape, weakness and strength, loss and redemption, life and death.'' Less than a year after the Kennedy Center Honors, Mr. Cash leaned over during a concert in Flint, Mich., and nearly fell. He told the audience he was suffering from Parkinson's disease, at first drawing a laugh from a crowd that thought he was joking. ''It ain't funny,'' he said, according to a review in The Flint Journal. ''It's all right. I refuse to give it some ground in my life.'' Parkinson's, which causes slowed movement, rigidity and tremors, forced Mr. Cash to cancel concerts and book promotions (At the time, the Cash memoir had just been released) through the end of 1997. By Nov. 5, the Parkinson's diagnosis had been slightly altered. Manager Lou Robin announced that Baptist Hospital tests revealed Mr. Cash had a Parkinson's-related illness called Shy-Drager syndrome. While at Baptist that month, he became gravely ill with double pneumonia. But, once again, Mr. Cash proved himself a survivor. The Grammy Awards of February 1998 found Mr. Cash once again victorious. Despite country radio's refusal to play material from Unchained, the album won a Grammy for best country album. Through much of 1999 and 2000, Mr. Cash was quietly compiling material for a third Rubin-produced album, this one to be titled American III: Solitary Man. In that October 2000 interview, Mr. Cash said that his health was improving and that the diagnosis of Shy-Drager had been erroneous. ''My doctor told me in November that if I'd had it, I'd be dead by now,'' he said. ''She said, 'You're getting better, so you don't have Shy Drager's. And you don't have Parkinson's.'' Instead, doctors told Mr. Cash he had autonomic neuropathy, a group of symptoms signaling a disorder of the nervous system. American III was released Oct. 22, 2000. ''Graying at the edges, its tremor more pronounced, his voice is sober, honest, defiant,'' read a review from British music magazine MOJO. The Solitary Man track from American III earned Mr. Cash his 10th Grammy Award, this one for best male country vocal performance, on Feb. 21, 2001. That day, Mr. Cash was released from the hospital after another bout with pneumonia. Trips to the hospital, usually for pneumonia or bronchitis, were becoming fairly routine. While others noted Mr. Cash's 70th birthday in 2002 by singing his old songs (two tribute albums were released that year), the Man in Black chose to forge ahead with new recordings. He went back to work with Rubin, preparing for the album that would become American IV: The Man Comes Around. While the American albums were filled with worthwhile material, one thing Mr. Cash had not done in a long time was to pen a song that stood on equal footing with classic such as Big River or Flesh and Blood. He rectified this situation with his new album's title song, as listeners would find upon the album's Nov. 5, 2002, release. ''I worked harder and longer on that song than on anything I've ever written,'' Mr. Cash told The Tennessean. Though the title song's frightening, apocalyptic vision was a highlight of American IV: The Man Comes Around, it was a cover version of rocker Trent Reznor's Hurt that spurred the album to a place among the top five country albums on the Billboard chart. Mr. Cash said he recorded Hurt because it was ''the best anti-drug song I'd ever heard.'' ''The needle tears a hole,'' wrote Reznor. ''The old familiar sting/ Tried to kill it all away/ But I remember everything.'' As video channels put Hurt into rotation, American IV became the most popular of Mr. Cash's four Rubin-produced albums, selling more than 200,000 copies. His new version of Sun recording Give My Love to Rose won a Grammy the 11th of his career for best male country vocal performance. On May 15, 2003, Mr. Cash was faced with the loss of his wife of 35 years, June Carter Cash. But in the weeks following the funeral, Mr. Cash returned to recording and addressed concerns about his health with stubborn wit, saying, ''I plan to outlive all my children. I'm not going anywhere.'' In June, Mr. Cash appeared in Maces Springs, Va., at the venue known as the Carter Family Fold. He was hoarse and weak, but he sang several songs and spoke to the crowd: ''I don't know hardly what to say tonight about being up here without her. The pain is so severe there is no way of describing it.'' In recent weeks, Mr. Cash had been working on recordings for an upcoming album. Mr. Cash is survived by by son, John Carter Cash; daughters Rosanne Cash, Kathleen Cash, Cindy Cash and Tara Cash; and numerous stepchildren, grandchildren and other relatives __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com