Johnny Cash Wrote a Letter Telling a Magazine to ‘Shut Up’ About Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan became a breakout star after the release of his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and Johnny Cash was an early fan. He even wrote a letter to Dylan to tell him how much he liked the album. After Dylan had been working as a musician for several years, a magazine criticized his music. Cash wrote in to defend him.

Johnny Cash was an early fan of Bob Dylan

When Cash first heard The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, he integrated it into his performance ritual. 

“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.”

Cash liked the album so much that he wrote him a fan letter.

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

He wrote a magazine a letter in defense of the younger musician

Though Dylan was a rising star in the 1960s, he wasn’t immune from criticism. 

“There wasn’t much music media in the early Sixties, and Sing Out! was the magazine covering all things folk in character,” Dylan explained, per Rolling Stone. “The editors had published a letter chastising me for the direction my music was going.”

Cash and Dylan had not met at this point, but the more established singer wrote the magazine in defense of Dylan. Dylan shared how meaningful this was to him. 

“Johnny wrote the magazine back an open letter telling the editors to shut up and let me sing, that I knew what I was doing,” Dylan said. “This was before I had ever met him, and the letter meant the world to me. I’ve kept the magazine to this day.”

Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan eventually met in person

After Cash’s first letter, he and Dylan began a brief correspondence.

“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.”

They stopped exchanging letters back and forth after they met in person at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. Cash said they were overjoyed to meet one another.

“We quit after we actually met each other, when I went to play the Newport Folk Festival in July of 1964,” he wrote. “I don’t have many memories of that event, but I do remember June 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.”