How Nashville's new Johnny Cash kit came to be (2024)

Everybody who grew up in Nashville, Tennessee in the ‘70s, ‘80s or ‘90s has a Johnny Cash story. Here’s mine.

In 2001, I was a 21-year-old college dropout and bartender working at a Mexican restaurant on West End, not far from the city’s center. Back then, Nashville was a sleepy, kind of forlorn place, far from the trendy, fashionable locale it has become. It was the kind of place where this stupid little Mexican restaurant, the type you’d usually see in a suburban strip mall, was one of the city’s most popular eateries.

Early one summer evening, Johnny Cash walked in, alongside his daughter Rosanne. The air went out of the place. To say Cash was Tennessee royalty would be a drastic understatement. He was held aloft alongside Dolly, Elvis, Chet Atkins and the rest.

I did not engage Johnny Cash in any extended conversation. Truth be told, I was terrified. The man had an aura about him, even just sitting there. I took his order, I brought him his food, and I brought out the check. He tipped generously on a small bill. Eighteen months later, he died.

The Nashville of the ‘80s and ‘90s was one where interactions like these were pretty normal. I grew up just down the block from Crystal Gayle, and would sometimes see her and her sister — the late, great, Loretta Lynn — out for a walk. In high school, I’d burn the midnight oil on my modem playing Doom deathmatches with Waylon Jennings’ kid. I remember my one visit to his house pretty well —there was a “General Lee,” the iconic hero car from the Dukes of Hazzard, right there in the driveway.

All these years later, Nashville has changed quite a bit. But the city’s adoration of Cash remains. In earlier years, he was celebrated as an outlaw, an anti-establishment figure, a musician who succeeded in Music City not by embracing its polished, denim-and-diamonds image but by shirking it. Today, Cash’s presence in Nashville feels much more corporate —his likeness and name are plastered all over billboards in town and his face appears on murals that have become the backdrop for a million Instagram influencers. He is omnipresent.

Now, Cash’s likeness —his signature, even —are featured on a soccer jersey. Major League Soccer’s Nashville SC, the city’s latest popular newcomers, have turned to Cash’s legacy as inspiration for their latest away kit, an all-black, understated get-up they’re dubbing the “Man in Black” kit.

The moniker is a nod to Cash’s stage name, given to him for obvious enough reasons. But it could just as easily be a nod to Adidas and MLS’ design process, one that’s produced a tidal wave of bland, unimaginative kits in recent years — often plain black or white looks that have left many fans wanting.

This year, Nashville seems to have harnessed that blandness for the better.

If you’re willing to do a little light trespassing, you can see what’s left of Johnny Cash’s once-magnificent home on the banks of Old Hickory Lake in Hendersonville, Tennessee.

Situated some 15 miles northeast of downtown Nashville, the whole compound used to be remote, but it too has felt the creep of Nashville’s ever-accelerating gentrification. The drive there used to be done on country roads; now it’s done on fresh pavement, through an endless sea of cookie-cutter subdivisions and strip malls.

Once you arrive, just hop the fence and you can see what remains. The breathtaking, mid-century mansion that sat there for decades burned down in 2007. You can still see the home’s foundation, and even the old fireplace, the one Cash sat in front of while filming the music video for “Hurt,” the Nine Inch Nails cover that introduced him to an entirely new generation of fans. The garage and swimming pool still exist, though it doesn’t look like anybody will be using the waterslide any time soon.

Walk far enough down the driveway and you’ll see a name carved into the once-wet pavement: John Carter Cash.

Carter Cash is Johnny’s only son. Like his father, he’s an accomplished singer and songwriter, though his career never reached the dizzying heights of his dad’s. He spent some 15 years playing guitar in Johnny and June Carter Cash’s stage show; as a producer, he has lent his talents to a slew of big-name acts and he worked alongside Rick Rubin to produce his father’s final two albums.

These days, John Carter Cash still works on the Cash compound in Hendersonville, in a quaint log cabin at the edge of the property.

Johnny Cash was an avid outdoorsman and in the late ‘70s, he lopped off 40 acres of land, threw up a chain link fence and filled the area with a collection of exotic animals — bison, wild boars, antelopes and the like. He built a beautiful, rustic log cabin in the middle of all of this, a place where he could be left alone to write songs, reflect and just generally enjoy his solitude.

Today, his son welcomes us to the cabin to chat about his family’s partnership with Nashville SC. The cabin has become a music studio, its rooms filled with recording equipment, guitars and keyboards. The mantle over the fireplace bears some famous names: Elvis Costello, Bono and others scrawled their marks into the wood when they visited.

John Carter Cash is among the people who manage his father’s legacy and it was him who signed off on the collaboration with NSC.

“I’ve been watching Nashville grow for a while (as a city),” he says. “I’ve always been excited about professional sports in Nashville. I grew up with my children playing soccer and so I got the word, I heard about the team coming to town. Not long after that we first heard from (Nashville SC) about possibly doing a tie-in with my father’s image and his signature, and the possibility of the jersey and what not.”

Let’s get one thing out of the way, though. Johnny Cash was not a huge fan of soccer, or any sport, for that matter. Carter Cash remembers having to throw a football with his father for a Boy Scouts assignment. After his dad fumbled the ball on his first catch, he turned to his son and said, plainly, “Just give me the paper, I’ll sign it.”

Cash lived during a time where soccer barely ever crossed the radar of the average American. His primary exposure to the sport came in Landsberg, West Germany in the early ‘50s. Cash was serving in the U.S. military during the Cold War as a morse code operator.

“I remember him saying, ‘You know, I got out and kicked that soccer ball one time with the guys back in the Air Force,’” says Carter Cash, who asked his father whether he was any good at the game.

“Oh I didn’t play,” he replied. “I just kicked the ball one time and walked off the field.”

The seeds for the “Man in Black” kit were planted two years ago, before Nashville SC had even played a competitive MLS match. Prior to their inaugural regular season game, Nashville’s supporters unfurled the club’s first-ever tifo, based on what’s probably the most iconic image of Cash around —him snarling onstage at San Quentin Prison in 1969, middle finger extended directly toward the camera. Not long afterwards, the club began communicating with the Cash estate about a potential collaboration.

The kit is simple, befitting its name. The top is a black Adidas template (Major League Soccer and Adidas’ design process for all of its jerseys leaves little room for imagination). Clubs are typically allowed to customize two areas of a jersey — stuff like the “jock tag,” or neck tape, or the overall design on the front of the shirt. Nashville picked its two areas: the rear of the shirt bears Cash’s signature, while a tag on the hem bears an image of Cash at Folsom Prison.

It’s simple, but it works when paired with black shorts and black socks. The club worked with its sponsors on a couple of muted colors (the team is calling them “iron metallic” and “dark graphite”) for the ad logos on the kit, which keeps things as close to all-black as possible.

Hany Mukthtar, the club’s prolific forward and the 2022 MLS MVP, says he likes it. He wears black boots, which lets him adhere to the most basic of fashion advice: “I like it when my boots match my shirt,” says Mukhtar, currently in the room for a photo op. He’s holding an acoustic guitar. He knows a few chords, he says, but he declines a request to play them.

Mukhtar is in a way indicative of Cash’s reach. Born in Berlin to a German mother and a Sudanese father, even he was exposed to Cash’s music at an early age.

“My mother was a big fan,” he says. “Johnny Cash is a legend in Nashville.”

Commonly perceived as an outlaw of sorts, Cash was anything but anti-commercial during his lifetime. He regularly licensed out his name and likeness. For years his family ran a museum in downtown Hendersonville, with June Carter Cash operating an antique store next door. It’s the sort of attitude that landed Cash in the greatest Taco Bell commercial ever made or made “I’ve Been Everywhere” the perfect ad jingle for a chain of hotels. Cash was a pitchman for big gas, for the auto industry and for finance. Hell, he was the pitchman for the model railroading industry.

He did have his limits, though. His family refused to let “Ring of Fire” be used in an ad for Preparation H, the hemorrhoid medication.

Major League Soccer felt more attractive.

“(My dad) was not afraid to go and (license) his name and his business throughout his life,” says Carter Cash. “We’ve stayed true to many of his creeds that he had, as far as where we’ll allow the use of his name and likeness. If anything seems morally incorrect based on what his morals were, we don’t go that way. We don’t put his name and his face on every single thing — we’re very careful about where his likeness goes, as far as any of that.”

Cash is not an obvious fit for an MLS jersey. But he’s not the first music icon to have inspired an MLS kit, either —the Seattle Sounders debuted a jersey last year inspired by Jimi Hendrix. MLS, by and large, endorses progressive causes, and its consumers and fans generally seem to skew to the left. The country music of the ‘50s and ‘60s, when Cash rose to prominence, was not perceived as being the anthem of America’s radical youth. Much of that music was steeped in talk of God, patriotism, guns and rural life.

Cash, though, was not the average country singer. Though some of the touchstones of his music feel familiar — his faith was a central tenant throughout his career —the tone of his music often feels far removed from what his peers were discussing at the time. Cash is remembered for his iconic performances at a pair of prisons (San Quentin and Folsom),but he played dozens of them. His music often spoke of the downtrodden, the forgotten.

When Cash was invited to the White House in 1972, then-president Richard Nixon asked the performer to sing a couple of cover songs: Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” and Guy Drake’s “Welfare Cadillac.” The former of those songs is an attack on anti-war protesters, while the latter speaks of the underprivileged trying to cheat the system. Instead, Cash launched into a pair of his own tunes.

“My dad sang ‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes,’ to make people look at responsibility towards those who have been forgotten,” says Carter Cash. “And he sang ‘What is Truth’ to make people look at themselves and also to appreciate the youth for who they were. My Dad, just the fact that he stood up for what he believes in was admirable. Anyone who says ‘your father would’ve supported this thing or that’ —well, not necessarily. He supported people as people. He was slow to judge and quick to forget.”

Cash capped off his White House performance with, what else, “Man in Black,” his explanation of why he only ever seemed to wear one color on stage. In it, Cash said he does so to remind people of the less fortunate, to remind the general public that things aren’t quite so rosy.

“I’d love to wear a rainbow every day,” he sang, “And tell the world that everything’s okay. But I’ll try to carry off a little darkness on my back — ‘Til things are brighter, I’m the man in black.”

And here’s where Cash becomes a more obvious fit for Nashville SC, an MLS team in a city that’s never really been the soccer capital of the United States. His complexity, the fact that his views were so often hard to pin down, is a design feature here, not a flaw. The club has latched onto a figure who connects with the entire city. He connects with ‘old Nashville,’ the conservative, Bible-thumping segment of Music City who know every word to “One Piece at a Time” or “A Boy Named Sue,” with ‘new Nashville’ — the alt-country wannabes and hipsters who came to the city to crib a bit of its authenticity for their own gain — and everybody in between. Go to a Nashville SC game and you’ll see segments of all of those groups in the stands. It’s kind of brilliant.

“My father would’ve been eager to make (those newcomers) part of the existing fold,” says Carter Cash. “Nashville is one of these places, and my dad was part of this, where people don’t come here to change it as much as people come here to be a part of something. And that spirit is still here. Dad was excited about new and different things. As the city grows, I think my father would’ve open-mindedly grown with it.”

(Photos: Nashville SC)