Guitarist with Johnny Cash's band
Born: March 4, 1942;
Died: April 9, 2017
BOB Wootton, who has died aged 75, was the guitarist in country music legend Johnny Cash’s band for almost 30 years and went on to become Cash’s stunt double in films and television dramas.
Both jobs were dreams come true for a man who had hero-worshipped Cash since his mother called him in from the porch of the family home in Paris, Arkansas one day in 1956. Wootton was singing and playing guitar on the porch and his mother wanted him to listen to someone who sounded, she said, just like him. It was Cash, singing I Walk the Line.
Wootton had begun playing guitar at the age of 11 and as soon as he heard Cash he began perfecting the “boom chick a boom” picking style that Cash’s original guitarist, Luther Perkins used to accompany the singer. He joined the army straight from school and played in a band with fellow GIs and when he left the military after three years he settled in Oklahoma City. There he formed a band called the Commancheros, playing faithful versions of songs by Cash as well as George Jones and Ernest Tubb.
After a concert in Tulsa in 1966 Wootton got to meet Perkins and had his photo taken with him. He was not to know that just two years later he would step into Perkins’ shoes.
When Cash arrived in Fayetteville for a concert in 1968, Wootton had given the Commancheros the night off and driven two hundred miles from Oklahoma City to see his hero. Shortly beforehand, Luther Perkins had died following a house fire and Carl Perkins, the singer and guitarist who wrote Blue Suede Shoes and was no relation to Luther, was filling in with Cash’s backing group, The Tennessee Three, in the meantime.
A storm prevented The Tennessee Three from flying into Fayetteville and Cash and his wife, June Carter, were about to cancel the concert when Wootton’s girlfriend of the time stepped in. As Carter came onstage to announce the cancellation, Wootton’s partner pointed to him and told Carter that Wootton knew all Cash’s songs and could play guitar exactly like Luther Perkins.
Carter consulted Cash, who told Wootton, “tune my guitar, then they’re going to re-introduce me. We’ll start with The Wreck of the ’97 and then I Still Miss Someone.” So, on a guitar belonging to Carl Perkins, Wootton played, as he told The Herald in 2010, “like I’d been doing it all my life – which I had been, except that, up to that point, Johnny Cash hadn’t been there with me.”
Two days later, Cash called Wootton to an audition with his band. Wootton was a nervous wreck. He had had to borrow a guitar and he was using an amp that was on castors and kept rolling to the front of the stage. He had to try and keep the amp from moving as he played but despite being convinced he had messed up the audition because of this, he was offered the job permanently.
One of Wootton’s earliest gigs with Cash, just a few months after he joined the band, was the February 1969 concert in San Quentin prison that gave Cash one of his best-selling albums and a surprise hit single, A Boy Named Sue – a surprise because, as Wootton related, Cash did not even know the words and it had no tune when he started performing it.
When they had arrived at San Quentin a pile of letters was waiting for Cash. Among them was one from Shel Silverstein, the songwriter who later provided Doctor Hook’s breakthrough hit, Sylvia’s Mother. Cash had read it and laughed but put it away until at a certain point the San Quentin gig began to flag. He needed something to get the audience going again, so Wootton was sent to fetch Silverstein’s letter which included the lyrics to A Boy Named Sue. Cash told the band to set up a beat and without as a much as a run-through he delivered a song that went on to sell millions.
Wootton stayed with Cash until the singer retired from touring in 1996, appearing on albums with him including Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline. He had been forbidden from playing on any recordings not involving Cash and was not included in Cash’s late career triumphs, the American Recordings series.
He and Cash were close – they were brothers in law for a time after Wootton married June Carter’s sister Anita – but once Cash’s touring days were over, Wootton was out of work and took a job driving tour buses for bands including Chicago, Def Leppard, Metallica, and the Smashing Pumpkins. A clean-living, God-fearing man, he was not always enamoured of his passengers’ behaviour but kept his own council.
When Cash died in 2003, Wootton was devastated and despite being hailed as a guitar legend and one of the top 1000 guitarists of all time, he thought he would never play again until an invitation to play on a St Patrick’s Day parade in 2007 brought his enthusiasm for playing music back.
Latterly he toured with his own Tennessee Three – himself, his second wife, Vicky, who sang with June Carter in the Carter Family, and daughter Scarlett – keeping the Cash sound and songbook alive.
He is survived by Vicky, Scarlett and another daughter, Montana.
ROB ADAMS
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