Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash Were so Excited to Meet Each Other That They Started Jumping on the Bed ‘Like Kids’

Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash exchanged fan letters in the early 1960s. They bonded over music and collaborated on one of Dylan’s songs. They had a mutual respect for each other and approached their first in-person meeting with excitement. Cash recalled that they became so caught up in the moment that they began jumping on the bed.

Johnny Cash wrote Bob Dylan a fan letter

Cash rose to success several years before Dylan. Still, he became such a fan of Dylan’s music that he listened before every show.

“I had a portable record player that I’d take along on the road,” Cash wrote in Cash: The Autobiography. “And I’d put on [The] Freewheelin’ [Bob Dylan] backstage, then go out and do my show, then listen again as soon as I came off.”

Eventually, Cash wrote Dylan a fan letter to express how much he liked the album.

“After a while at that, I wrote Bob a letter telling him how much of a fan I was,” he explained. “He wrote back almost immediately, saying he’d been following my music since ‘I Walk the Line,’ and so we began a correspondence.”

They were so excited that they started jumping on the bed

Cash and Dylan exchanged letters back and forth for a brief period of time. They stopped once they met in person. 

“Mostly it was about music: what we ourselves were doing, what other people were doing, what I knew about so-and-so and he didn’t and vice versa,” Cash wrote. “He asked me about country people; I asked him about the circles he moved in. I still have all his letters, locked up in my vault. It wasn’t a long correspondence. We quit after we actually met each other, when I went to play the Newport Folk Festival in July of 1964.”

Cash said that he and Dylan were so excited to meet that they started jumping up and down.

“I don’t have many memories of that event, but I do remember June [Carter Cash] and me and Bob and Joan Baez in my hotel room, so happy to meet each other that we were jumping on the bed like kids,” Cash wrote.

Cash said that Dylan’s album always remained one of his favorites.

“Thinking about The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, I have to say it’s still one of my all-time favorite albums,” he wrote. “If I had to answer that old but still interesting question, ‘What music would you want with you if you were stranded on a desert island?’ (assuming your cell phone didn’t make it through the surf but your solar-powered CD player did), I’d say that Freewheelin’ would have to be on the list.”

Bob Dylan wrote a touching tribute about Johnny Cash

After Cash’s death in 2003, Dylan offered a rare and lengthy public statement about his friend. 

“Truly he is what the land and country is all about, the heart and soul of it personified and what it means to be here; and he said it all in plain English,” Dylan wrote, per Rolling Stone. “I think we can have recollections of him, but we can’t define him any more than we can define a fountain of truth, light and beauty. If we want to know what it means to be mortal, we need look no further than the Man in Black.”

He said that people would not forget Cash after his death.

“Blessed with a profound imagination, he used the gift to express all the various lost causes of the human soul,” he wrote. “This is a miraculous and humbling thing. Listen to him, and he always brings you to your senses. He rises high above all, and he’ll never die or be forgotten, even by persons not born yet — especially those persons — and that is forever.”