Billy Bob Thornton Once Recorded a Duet With Johnny Cash
Somewhere out there is a recording of Billy Bob Thornton and Johnny Cash playing Cash’s 1958 song “I Still Miss Someone” together. In a new interview with The Guardian, Thornton revealed that he collaborated with Cash on the tune, but it has never been released.
The actor answered a series of fan questions for the U.K. newspaper, including the query “You’ve met Johnny Cash. What was that like?”
“I never got over being nervous around Johnny Cash because it was like God walked in the room,” Thornton recalled. “I stayed at his house a couple of times and I did not want to get caught in my drawers looking in his refrigerator. So I just stayed in my room all night long. But he was very kind to me. We did a duet together of one of his songs, ‘I Still Miss Someone,’ that I’ve never put out.”
He continued, “Cash said to me, ‘What’s your idea, son?’ And I said, ‘Well, I thought we’d do the first verse and bridge and then you could do your recitation.’ This was at a point where Johnny was in a little more ill health. And I said, ‘Then you do the recitation and then we’ll come back and do the last verse and bridge.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, that sounds good to me.’ And then he said, ‘I might even have an idea or two myself. After all I wrote the fucking thing.’ And I was like, ‘Yes, sir, sorry.’”
Thornton added that Cash “wrote a story about that day on four pieces of notebook paper.” “It was partly truth, partly fiction,” the actor explained. “And on the last page are three autographs by him: ‘John R Cash,’ ‘Johnny Cash,’ ‘John Cash.’ And I said, ‘John, why did you write three autographs on that paper?’ He says, ‘Son, if you ever get broke, cut those into three pieces and you’ll be all right.’
Elsewhere in the interview, Thornton shared a memories of seeing the Beatles when he was eight years old and becoming a roadie at age 18. “I was a skinny little 64 kg creep with long hair down to my waist, lifting stuff that I couldn’t really lift,” he remembered of working for bands. “It wasn’t as glamorous as you might think, but I loved every minute of it because all I wanted to do was be in that world.”
Thornton, who currently stars on Paramount+ series Landman, added that he still enjoys both music and acting. “I went to LA to play music, accidentally got into acting,” he said. “I’m still not sure how it happened. I always say that my success as an actor was out of ignorance, because I didn’t know how to be anything other than natural, and I think they liked that. I loved both of them. It’s all one vision, all out of the same brain. I couldn’t choose one over the other. I’d like to do both, as long as they’ll let me.”
Thornton’s last solo album, Beautiful Door, arrived in 2007 and he has since released music as part of rock band the Boxmasters. The band dropped LP Love & Hate in Desperate Places in August and toured extensively around North America last fall.
In 2014, Thornton told Rolling Stone he was happy to pay his dues in music if it meant being taken seriously.
“I was playing in bands since the time I was a kid,” he said. “If somehow, in 1981, when I started as an actor in LA, if I had fallen on my ass doing that, and then somehow got a record deal, I’d be putting up with the same thing in the opposite direction. If you want to talk about paying my dues, it’s all I ever did. I wasn’t in theater. I was only in music.”
