Johnny Cash's "One Piece at a Time" - Illegal, Unethical, and Very Inspiring

"Lyrics for: One Piece At A Time (Single Version)"
Yahoo! Music
(Lyrics © SONY/ATV SONGS D/B/A TREE PUBG CO, provided by Gracenote)

"Well, I left Kentucky back in '49
An' went to Detroit workin' an a 'sembly line
The first year they had me puttin' wheels on Cadillacs...."

I like Johnny Cash's music: and "One Piece At A Time" is one of my favorites. Sure, there are very serious legal and ethical issues involved with this method of getting yourself a Cadillac, but I like the basic approach.

The way I see it, "One Piece At A Time" tells the story of some guy who couldn't, possibly, afford a car "that was long and black", but wanted one: bad. Instead of wallowing in self-pity, he came up with a plan. One that involved:

• A big lunch box
• His friend's mobile home
• About 20 years
• And "an A-daptor kit"

The car, when finished, was, well, unique. The innovative pilferer had started building his Caddy in 1949, and finished the job in 1970. Cadillacs had gone through a few changes in those two decades.

One of my favorite verses reflects the practical imagination involved in this project:

"Now the headlights they was another sight
We had two on the left and one on the right
But when we pulled out the switch all three of 'em come on."

Since the whole idea had been to drive a big black Cadillac around town, the car needed tags (gotta follow the law sometimes, you know). Which meant getting a title for the thing. According to "One Piece At A Time", "the title weighed sixty pounds" - and it took the whole court house staff to type it up.

Let's see: sixty pounds of ordinary 20 pound typing paper would be about 6,000 sheets, or a foot-and-a-half-tall stack. That's a lot of paperwork.¹

"...What model is it?

"Well, it's a '49, '50, '51, '52, '53, '54, '55, '56, '57, '58, '59 Autommo-bile
It's a '60, '61, '62, '63, '64, '65, '66, '67, '68, '69, '70 Autommo-bile"

Johnny Cash; Wayne Kemp; an Oklahoma Airman; Bill Patch; and the Lions club of Welch, Oklahoma

Johnny Cash sang Wayne Kemp's "One Piece at a Time" in 1976.

According to Michael Streissguth's book, "Johnny Cash," Wayne Kemp "came up with the song after hearing a tall tale about an Oklahoma airman who stole enough parts from his base to make a helicopter." ("Johnny Cash," Michael Streissguth, from Googgle Books)

I don't know about the Oklahoma airman's helicopter, I'm pretty sure that the Wayne Kemp/Johnny Cash song's car is fictional: but there really is - or was - a three-door Cadillac. According to the Antique Automobile Club (AAC) of America's website, "One Piece at a Time" inspired Bill Patch, of Welch, Oklahoma, to build "a magnificent, 1949-73 Cadillac Coupe Sedan Deville, three-door automobile."

Bill Patch gave the 1949-73 Cadillac to Johnny Cash, who heard that the Welch Lion's club was raising money for an auditorium. Johnny Cash wound up singing for the Welch Lions - twice.


(both car photographs from Antique Automobile Club of America, used without permission)

According to AAC, the car was at the Johnny Cash Museum in Hendersonville, Tennessee. Unhappily, the museum is closed, and the associated lakeside house was sold to Barry Gibb (The Bee Gees one). Then the house burned down. Something to do with restoration work, I understand. $2.3 up in smoke and a lot of history lost. The good news: nobody was hurt. The House of Cash has some pictures of the house, pre-fire. A CMT blog post ("A Year After It Burned, House of Cash Remembered" (April 10, 2008)) has a follow up on the house, and what may be a growing legend.

I'm trying to find out what happened to that car: and will update this post if I find anything.

Genre, Schmanra, 'One Piece at a Time' is a Good Song

I've read that the genre of "One Piece at a Time" is Country, Rockabilly, and (more prudently) [no genre listed]. My opinion is that it's a Johnny Cash song: and a good one.

I suppose that "One Piece at a Time" could be "rockabilly," since Princeton's WordNet says that's "a fusion of black music and country music that was popular in the 1950s; sometimes described as blues with a country beat" and Wiktionary says it's "A genre of music originating from the South (United States) and mixing elements of rock, blues, country, hillbilly boogie and bluegrass music."

Sounds to me like "rockabilly" is a sort of music that sounds country, is upbeat, and whose composer or performer doesn't mind being creative about mixing genres. And, (here's my biases showing) it's easier to say for people who would rather be dead in a ditch than caught enjoying a country song.

"One Piece at a Time" and Amazon.com

For a 32-year-old song, "One Piece at a Time" is doing pretty well, commercially. I checked out Amazon.com today, and found out that I could buy "One Piece at a Time mp3 downloads (one of them a Karaoke adaptation), LP records, and a "One Piece at a Time" T-shirt.

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¹ That's assuming that the courthouse put their records on "letter size" (Canadian/American standard) (8 1/2 by 11 inch) paper. I got the 6,000 sheet / foot-and-a-half tall numbers from 20 years' experience in a small publishing company, a little checking around online, and measurements taken from my own stock.

There's more about standards for paper, at "Paper Sizes and Paper Weight: Metric and US Standards " (Archive Builders) and "International standard paper sizes" (Markus Kuhn, at University of Cambridge, U.K.).