Sandy Kelly: 'There was a loneliness about Johnny Cash'
Sandy Kelly in the recording studio with Johnny Cash. (Image courtesy of Sandy Kelly)
Sandy Kelly’s new memoir, In My Own Words, brims with joy and heartbreak. But one of its most striking passages begins with the County Sligo singer, perhaps best known for her chart-topping 1989 interpretation of Patsy Cline’s Crazy, at home “peeling vegetables for the stew” when the phone rings. It’s Reba Cash – sister of Johnny. Her brother is due on stage at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin in a few hours. “Johnny wants you to get here to sing on tonight’s show – so you better get here!”
Kelly was at her house in the Sligo townland of Carrowgobbadagh – a near three-hour drive from the Olympia. But you don’t say no when Johnny Cash asks you to sing with him. She dropped everything, including the stew, and hastened to Dublin. Backstage at the Olympia, she noticed the stage door open and “in walked Bono and the rest of U2”.
It was 1993, ten years before Cash passed away at the age of 71. Cash and Kelly had become friends after he heard her on the radio while he was touring Ireland in the 1980s. But if delighted to be caught up in his glamorous world – and duet with him on the 1990 ballad 'Woodcarver' – Kelly noted that he cut a solitary figure beneath the Man in Black image. As she writes in her book, “Although he was loved and adored by so many people, there was a loneliness about him”.
“There was the odd time I would look at him when nobody would be around him,” says Kelly, who has also released a new album, Leaving It All Behind. “I’d be waiting to go on stage or sitting on the bus. He’d be just there on his own. It struck me on more than one occasion that he was very lonely. That’s no reflection on his family: they had a huge sense of family and cooking and big dinners, He was a sort of a melancholy person. He would have loved to have been able to walk up the street and be normal, like everyone else. I saw that in him. He liked to go into a shop. One time, we were all on tour in England. We stopped at a service station and they all piled out to get Easter eggs. He was trying to be like everyone else. Johnny Cash stomping around a shop with an armful of Easter eggs will not go unnoticed. I got that sense that he would have liked to be anonymous for a little while.”
In the book, she writes of accompanying Cash to Nashville, the spiritual heartland of country music, and being carried along in his entourage. It was glamorous – certainly for a singer from Sligo. She feels that Cash enjoyed her company because she was a straight-talker. He was surrounded by people who told him what they believed he wanted to hear. Kelly never did that – and he respected her for it.
“There was no romance or nothing like that. It was more like a father figure,” she says. “He would joke around and flirt around in a joking sense. In our business, down the years you would have felt threatened by men. Creepy… there was a lot of that. There was never any of that [with Cash]. He thought I was cheeky. That’s the way I am. If someone asks me something, I’ll tell them. Not in an offensive way. But I like to be honest.”
In My Own Words is an entertaining and often moving read. But then, what a life Kelly has had. She was born into a family of travelling entertainers: Dusky’s Dan’s Travelling Variety Show. They would “roll into your town or village to present you a beautiful and colourful programme for at least the next seven days, or longer if you wanted.”. That was her life until she turned nine, when the Department of Education insisted she attend a school full-time. She was sent to live with her grandmother in Ballintogher, just outside Sligo Town. Her parents’s way of life was coming to an end. Kelly was among the last to have lived it.
“It’s funny when people ask me when I decided to be in show business,” she says. “I was picked out of the cot if they needed a baby for a sketch. When I would walk and talk from age three, I was doing all the Shirley Temple songs. Assisting my uncle the magician. When you were on the show you had to do your bit – no matter what age you were.” But if there was music, there was hardship, too. At one point, the family moved to Wales. They lived in a caravan and were looked down on because of their perceived social status and because they were Irish. Kelly’s mother was also suffering ill health, having had a brain aneurysm in her late 30s.
“I was 14 when we left and went to Wales. It was horrible. My dad was very quiet. I became sort of the mother of the family,” says Kelly. “It was very difficult. If it was now of course she [Kelly’s mother] would have have had tests and would have been sent to hospital. She was never sent to the hospital until it was too late. A lot of things could have been different. You can’t live your life beating yourself up about stuff like that.”
Her mother’s condition went undiagnosed. She was treated by a local quack who supplied her with mysterious “pills” that helped with the pain but did little to alleviate the underlying condition. “He used to come to the caravan. She was in ferocious pain. As we know now, she had a clot in her brain. He was feeding her these pills. She just loved to see him come. It relieved the pain. I don’t know what he was giving her. I know it wasn’t right. Mum was only 39 when she had the haemorrhage and 47 when she died – a young woman.”
The family were also victimised for being Irish. “We were living on the caravan site,” says Kelly. “When the school bus would stop to pick us up, God we were bullied. We weren’t allowed sit down on the bus. We took it all. We didn’t feel in a way that we deserved any better. My memory was that, when I was on the stage as a child, people would look up at me, smile and clap. But if I wasn’t on the stage, going the shop or whatever, they didn’t have the same respect. It was different. They looked down on us.”
Returning to Ireland, she had success singing in show bands and then as a solo artist. However, her breakthrough came relatively late – when her cover of Patsy Cline’s 'Crazy' went to number one in 1989.
“They had to be drag me in to record that. I didn’t want to do that at all. I wanted to do Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt. The record company insisted I do that. And thank God they did. That one song changed my whole life. Incidentally, before I recorded a Patsy Cline song – I had already become friends with Patsy’s husband, daughter and family. When I did get success with Crazy, I was able to chat them and get the essence of the woman. Not through a book but through people who knew and loved her.”
Country stars often have eventful lives. Patsy Cline moved around through childhood and, at one point, helped support her family by plucking chickens. Loretta Lynn married at 15 and had six children before her career took off. Sandy Kelly has also lived and lost– she was still a teenager when her mother passed away, and lost her sister, Barbara, to suicide in 2018.
“Going back to those great songs… Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams. They were just fantastic songs. Nothing complicated about them. Crazy is the most uncomplicated song in the world – it’s so simple. I’ve often heard some of the old time country singers say that country music is the country of the people. People would relate to it: it’s their life story. There’s a simplicity in that.”
- In My Own Words is out now. The album Leaving It All Behind is released by Crashed Music. Sandy Kelly plays the National Concert Hall, Dublin in March 2024
