The WS Holland Interview

We'd get to the studio and John would say, "we're going to do song, something like this." He'd have his guitar and he'd stand there for a second and play some of the tune. Then we'd play it and we'd just cut it. We didn't know what we was going to do. We didn't know how we was going to start it, we didn't know how we was going to end it. Our band (Johnny Cash) had no idea the song "Boy Named Sue" existed. We found out later that Shel Silverstein sent John this poem. If you listen to the record at San Quentin you'll here paper crinkling that John takes out of his pocket, we didn't know what it was. He just started saying it (BNS), we didn't have monitors back then and we couldn't hear cause the audience was so loud. We didn't know what he was doing, I couldn't hear him. Carl Perkins who was with us then, he could hear John's voice out of the microphone. He kicked off his guitar and I started playing something cause I could keep time with his guitar playing. We recorded a "Boy Named Sue." We're back in the studio later listening to everything, trying to get a good enough mix to release. It never did get to be good, but we released it anyway. It turned out to be one of the biggest records Johnny Cash ever made. Nobody knew it was going to happen, nobody could hear it, that's the way almost everything we did happened back then.