Bee Gee Snaps Up Johnny Cash’s Gaff

Everyone wants a piece of Johnny Cash these days. If people aren’t doing impressions of him in order to try and win Oscars, they’re ghoulishly buying up the house where he lived for 35 years.

Johnny Cash’s old house near Nashville, Tennessee, has been bought for an undisclosed sum by Barry Gibb, the beardy girl-haired one from The Bee Gees, who plans to completely redecorate Cash’s home with gold lame, neon flamingos, mirrorballs of every conceivable size and several galactically large pictures of Barry Gibb.

OK, so that might have been a teeny fib.

Johnny Cash (CDs) has never been so famous as he is now. Despite being
signed to Sun Records at the same time as Elvis Presley, notoriously
singing fearless songs about murder to a group of rabid prisoners and even
at one point having his own TV show, for many people Johnny Cash was just the man
who sung Ring Of Fire - the easiest song ever to hilariously
misinterpret as being about explosive diarrhoea.

Now that he’s dead, though, the legacy of Johnny Cash is starting to
be taken seriously. Mostly this is down to Walk The Line, the Joaquin
Phoenix-starring biopic so controversial that a daughter of Johnny Cash walked out of a single screening five times
in disgust. It’s being said that Joaquin Phoenix is helping to preserve
the memory of Cash by starring in Walk The Line, and by re-tracing
Cash’s footsteps by performing at Folsom Prison.

But there’s only so much preserving that an actor can do - for
serious preservation it’s best to look to high-pitched, platform
shoe-wearing, Barbara Streisand-loving kings of embarrassing white
disco for help. People like Barry Gibb of The Bee Gees.

Barry Gibb and his his wife Linda have bought the Nashville retreat
where Johnny Cash had lived for 35 years for an undisclosed sum,
according to Cash’s lawyer. The house, which has 4.6 acres of land,
went on the market in June with an asking price of $2.9 million, but later dropped to $2.5 million. Barry Gibb claims that he will
preserve the house in honour of the memory of Johnny Cash, saying that
it will:

"always be the spiritual home for the Cashes. My wife, Linda, and I are determined to
preserve it, to honour their memory. We fell in love with it. It’s an
incredible honour for us. We plan to use the home to write songs because of the musical inspiration."

Although he is yet to write any songs at the Cash home, it’s thought that Barry Gibb has a handful of
potential song titles, such as Johnny The Funky Cowboy and I Jived A
Man In Reno Just To Watch Him Boogie.

Read more:

Bee Gee buys Johnny Cash’s house - BBC

[story by Stuart Heritage]