Obituary: Marshall Grant/ Bass player with Johnny Cash
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In this 2007 photo, Marshall Grant poses with a copy of his book, "I Was There When It Happened: My Life with Johnny Cash," in Hernando, Miss.
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Marshall Grant, a bass player who, as an original member of Johnny Cash's band, the Tennessee Two, helped create the group's pulsing "boom-chicka-boom" sound, died Sunday in Jonesboro, Ark. He was 83.
His death was confirmed by the Memorial Park Funeral Home and Cemetery in Memphis, Tenn. Mr. Grant, who lived in Hernando, Miss., was in Jonesboro for the Johnny Cash Festival, an event to raise money to restore Cash's childhood home in Dyess, Ark.
Mr. Grant, who played acoustic and electric bass with Cash from 1954 to 1980 and was the road manager for the group, provided the thumping foundation on "Folsom Prison Blues," "I Walk the Line," "Ring of Fire," "The Man in Black" and many other songs and on the live albums that Cash recorded at Folsom prison and San Quentin.
Luther Perkins, the other original member of the Tennessee Two, played lead guitar and created the scratchy rhythm pattern overlaying Mr. Grant's bass lines. With the addition of the drummer W.S. Holland in 1960, Cash's backup became the Tennessee Three.
The group's signature sound came into being overnight -- literally -- as Mr. Grant recounted on a number of occasions. Shortly after he switched from rhythm guitar to bass, which he did not know how to play, he and his fellow musicians began experimenting with the group's new configuration.
"We finally got it tuned, and then we stuck adhesive tape all over the neck with the notes on it, and then we started playing little rhythm patterns," he said on being inducted into the Musicians' Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Tenn., with Perkins in 2007. "The only thing that we could do was what the world now knows as the boom-chicka-boom-chicka-boom sound that we established that first night."
Marshall Grant was born on May 5, 1928, near Bryson City, N.C. He moved to Memphis in 1947 and worked as a mechanic at several auto dealerships At Automobile Sales Co., a Plymouth dealership, he began playing guitar with two fellow employees, Perkins and A.W. Kernodle, known as Red.
Cash was introduced to the group by his older brother, Roy, the service manager at the dealership, after returning from military service in the Air Force.
First Published August 10, 2011 12:00 am
