NEW YORK, NY.- Tommy Cash, country singer and younger brother of Johnny Cash, died Friday. He was 84.
His death was announced in a post on social media Saturday by the Johnny Cash Museum. No cause was given.
His death was almost 21 years to the day of Johnny Cashs death Sept. 12, 2003.
While his career never approached the heights of his older brothers, Tommy Cash drew inspiration from him and made his own name in country music. He performed or collaborated with Johnny Cash and other artists while making music, including hit country music singles.
I probably would have never learned to play the guitar if it wasnt for him, Tommy Cash said, according to a biography in the Central Arkansas Library Systems Encyclopedia of Arkansas.
He played in a band in high school and, like his older brother, enlisted in the military after high school, serving in Germany. In 1958, he worked as a disc jockey on Stickbuddy Jamboree, a country music radio show on the Armed Forces Network.
Tommy Cash continued working in music after his military service. He played with Hank Williams Jr. and signed his first music deal in 1965. In 1968 he released his first single, The Sounds of Goodbye.
It wasnt until 1969 that he released his first hit single, Six White Horses, which he dedicated to John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. The song reached No. 4 on Billboards Hot Country Songs in 1970 and was later covered by Waylon Jennings.
The younger Cash landed two more Top 10 hits the following year with his singles Rise and Shine and One Song Away. In 1990, he collaborated with his brother, Johnny, on the song Guess Things Happen That Way.
He performed around the world throughout his career, carrying on the Cash legacy long after his brother, Johnny Cash, passed, Bill Miller, founder and CEO of the Johnny Cash Museum, said in a statement.
The Wrap reported that Tommy Cash also worked as a licensed real estate broker and helped sell Johnny and June Carter Cashs home after their deaths.
Tommy Cash was born April 5, 1940, in Dyess, Arkansas. He was the youngest of seven siblings and younger brother of Johnny Cash, the iconic Man in Black whose gravelly bass-baritone voice was the bedrock of American country music.
A list of survivors was not immediately available.
The Cash brothers had a tense relationship in the 1960s, when Johnny Cash was addicted to drugs and sometimes became violent, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. Tommy Cash set up offices in 1964 in Nashville, Tennessee, but he quit because his brother would wreck the offices when no one was there, the encyclopedia said. A few years later, Johnny Cash struck his brother in the face at a Memphis airport when he was on drugs.
Much later, at Austin City Limits, where the Cash brothers performed That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine together in 1987, Johnny Cash introduced Tommy Cash to the audience by describing the brotherly love they shared.
Weve been down the road together, Tommy and I, he said. Had a lot the same problems, shared a lot of the same joys, a lot of the same sorrows, as brothers do. Brothers dont get along sometimes, but brothers make up, because brothers love each other.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.