Southern Singer : Joanne Cash
Yates
The pilot struggled to keep control of the rented six-seater Cherokee airplane as rain, hail, and wind battered the small craft. It was late October 1970 and the plane had unexpectedly veered into the path of a horrible storm.
Darkness closed in. Joanne Cash (later Yates) despaired for her life, though she knew the plane was being flown by an experienced pilot.
"I realized suddenly that I had been enclosed about by the hand of God," she said, recalling the frightening experience. "It was the third time I had been close to death's door." (The two previous times she had accidentally overdosed on drugs.)
As she clutched her seat in the storm-tossed plane, her life sped before her mind in quick review. She remembered all the times she had rejected Jesus Christ. The many times she had held on to the backs of pews in church — just as she was now desperately clinging to the seat in the Cherokee — saying no to God, refusing to walk down the aisle to receive salvation.
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It had seemed as if she had always been searching for Jesus, but never found Him. Or, more accurately, had never been fully willing to let Him find her and take control of her life. Once she had walked forward to the altar of a church, but she was only nine years old at the time and was too young to understand what the preacher's invitation was all about.
And, though Joanne had been brought up in a Christian family of seven children, including her famous brother Johnny, in her teen years she had become convinced God didn't love her.
SALVATION IS . . . .
"I thought I had to be good; I didn't know salvation is believing in the Word of God," Joanne could say years later.
Now, at age thirty-two, her life was about to end, she thought, as the light plane groaned under the raging fury of the storm. She was sure they would all be killed.
Still, though she thought she "would go into eternity any moment and had bypassed His grace," Joanne uttered a silent, sincere prayer: "Have mercy, Lord, and let me live.
"I made all kinds of promises and meant them," Joanne recalled almost seven years later as we talked at the Nashville airport. "I promised God I would give Him all the rest of the days of my life."
About twenty minutes after her prayer, the hail stopped. Soon the little plane was more stable. It passed through the heavy rain and then crossed the line out of the clouds into sunshine.
The next Sunday Joanne went to Evangel Temple in Nashville. She sat in the second row.
God spoke, she says, reminding her what she had promised when her life had been endangered. But fear gripped her. She thought of the time when she was nine
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and went forward and nothing happened. Would it be an anticlimax like that again?
"But I went forward to the altar," Joanne related in her Southern-style drawl, "and I hollered out, 'Jesus, save me! Hurry up! I don't feel it yet.' "
She soon did.
Singer Connie Smith, a member of the church, had been praying for Joanne. Now she was kneeling beside her at the altar. And Jimmy Snow, pastor of the famed Pentecostal church and son of the country-western singer, Hank Snow, led her through to Christ.
"I prayed the sinner's prayer," Joanne said with a smile as we talked, her dark eyes dancing and her black hair tumbling out of a black and blue hat perched perkily on her head. "I asked Jesus into my heart. I believed it, made confession of my sins, and then thanked Him."
In His mercy, Joanne continued, God blessed her and lifted away all of her past, replacing it with a new beginning.
"I literally felt the drugs, sins, depression, and so much feeling of the past lifted off me. It was as if it came from my toes and gradually came upward. It was like black uncovering white. It was like 10,000 light bulbs just beginning to flash on. I felt clean and assured. There was not a doubt in my mind that I was saved. It was like for all the Christmases of my life I had never gotten a single present and now I was getting them all at once. It was beautiful!
"God really proved Himself to me. I had been a skeptic. I had been doubtful, stubborn, and so full of fear. One of the things the Lord did was to deliver all that fear from me. For, you see, you can't have fear and faith, and my heart was full of faith."
THE CASH FAMILY
The Cashes had always been a family of faith, Joanne remembers, but somehow early in her life fear had replaced
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faith in her heart. Only when the storm of her life and a stormy sky buffeting a small plane converged, was she willing to let Jesus Christ become the true captain of her soul.
Joanne, born March 9, 1938, was next to the baby among the seven children born to Ray and Carrie Cash in Dyess, Arkansas. Singer Tommy Cash is the youngest. Jack, the only one not living, was killed in 1944.
Johnny Cash's songs about cotton farming and hard times are not plucked out of his imagination. The Cashes farmed forty acres of cotton. But, though money was not plentiful, "my daddy was such a good provider," Joanne remembers, "that the family was never in serious need."
When Joanne was sixteen, the family moved from the farm into the town of Dyess, where Joanne attended high school. The night she was graduated, she boarded a plane for Nuremberg, Germany, to join the young Army enlisted man she had married in 1955. She was seventeen.
Two years later she returned to the United States. After nine more years the marriage ended in a divorce which left her alone with three children, Charlotte, Jeff, and Rhonda.
She had soon realized the marriage was, to use her words, "wrong and bad — I was a young, inexperienced, unsaved teenager."
Yet, through all of this, Joanne had always thought that the "most wonderful thing anyone could ever be was a Christian. It had been one of my life's ambitions to be a Christian and marry a preacher."
At the same time, Joanne had grown up seeing people all around her getting saved. Somehow, in her desperate search to find Christ, she had been like a person sitting hour after hour in a bus station, seeing everyone else getting on buses and going somewhere while never leaving the waiting room herself.
By the time her marriage had gone sour and she had
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health problems, Joanne was doubly convinced God didn't love her.
ADDICTION
When she developed a serious ear infection, she went to the Army base doctor in Germany. Telling him about her depression, she was assured that some pills would help her feel better.
"They made me feel terrific," she remembers all too well. "I was so naive; I didn't know what I was getting into. I didn't know about drugs."
Next she persuaded the doctor to furnish her with a two-month supply of uppers (dexedrine). All this time, she says, she was still searching for Jesus and for peace. But the pills provided an illusory, temporary — though immediate — sense of peace.
Soon she was addicted.
"Drugs and their abuse literally were created by Satan himself," Joanne believes. "Drugs will send you to hell — where I almost ended up."
The periods of divorce (she felt as if it was the only way out) and drug dependency were rough for Joanne, who feared God without knowing His care and purpose for her.
Feeling that "Jesus had turned His back on me," Joanne faced what she thought was a bleak future. She found a job in 1969 at a car rental counter in the Houston airport.
One day a phone call from her brother Johnny, followed by a letter, changed her direction in life.
"Johnny said point blank, right up front, 'You're on pills. I want you to put your things in a moving van and come home to Nashville and I want to help you 'cause I love you.' "
Joanne didn't argue. "John has always been a big protective brother to love and rescue me," Joanne said in tribute. "He's always willing, always there. If I'm down,
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discouraged, just a look, a pat on the back, an 'It's Ok, Baby,' is all it takes. He's so full of the Spirit of Jesus."
So Joanne came home to her family. John gave her a job at the House of Cash, the two-story white building with columns in Hendersonville that is Johnny's business office.
DOTTIE SNOW: ONE WHO HELPED
There, another Christian was to give Joanne a nudge towards the Lord who finally enfolded her a few months later in Evangel Temple.
Dottie Snow, wife of the church's pastor, was receptionist at the House of Cash. She witnessed, by her life and by her words, to Joanne. But it only made Joanne mad.
"I saw in Dottie everything I had ever wanted to be," Joanne explained. "I saw physical and spiritual beauty, cleanliness, joy, peace, and radiance. But the enemy, Satan, had blinded me for so many, many years that I said, 'That's not fair.' "
One time, when Dottie was witnessing to her, Joanne told her that she was convinced, because of her sins, that God couldn't love her.
"What makes you so special that God can't love you?" Dottie retorted, reminding Joanne how Jesus loved Peter, who denied even knowing the Lord. And Dottie kept inviting Joanne to attend church with her.
Though she knew "it was so very, very real," Joanne kept resisting the invitation — until that storm experience in the Cherokee nearly a year later.
HARRY
Evangel Temple is special to Joanne for another reason. There, she met Harry Yates, who was saved a few months before Joanne. Also divorced, Harry's circumstances were
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similar to Joanne's including having three children.
The friendship between Harry and Joanne blossomed when they went on a church trip to Israel in 1971.
"We literally fell in love in Tel Aviv," beamed Joanne as Harry, who had brought Joanne to our interview at the airport, nodded agreement. "Our romance, based on Christ's love, was good, right, clean, and pure," continued Joanne. "It was right out of a storybook." Three months later the pair was married in Evangel Temple, with all the Cashes looking on.
Harry, who had been Jimmy Snow's associate and principal of the church-related school at Evangel Temple for five years, is also a singer. The Yates Family, as they are called now, includes Harry and Joanne, Joanne's daughter Rhonda, who sings and plays the piano, and Candy Stevin, an older teenager from Mount Pleasant, Michigan. Harry mixes evangelistic sermons and counseling with the Yates Family singing and entertaining tours.
Joanne and Harry returned to Israel four times and have made numerous television appearances. Since their schedules have included more and more shows, they are on the road full time. The Yates sold their Nashville home in the summer of 1977 and moved into their thirty-foot motor home.
AIR-CONDITIONED MIRACLE
"You're sitting in one of our miracles right now," chuckled Joanne.
Indeed, I was sitting in the large swivel chair behind the wheel of the roomy machine, which was parked in the airport parking lot for our interview. I had flown in from New York that afternoon and was due in Louisville that night, so the airport rendezvous was practical and comfortable.
The air conditioner on top of the motor home hummed in the humid, 90-degree heat and I sipped a Pepsi, just
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removed from the motor home refrigerator. I, too, was happy to be sitting in one of God's air-conditioned miracles. How it happened was a story Joanne would come back to in a few minutes.
Right now, Joanne was telling where she turns for spiritual help in times of trouble since she turned her life over to Christ. And problems still come, she said, though they never overcome. Instead, she said with assurance, she and Harry are the overcomers, through the power of God's Word.
SOURCE OF STRENGTH THROUGH TRIALS
A verse Joanne says the Lord gave her when she knelt at the altar of Evangel Temple is: "Fear not, for I am with you. Do not be dismayed. I am your God. I will strengthen you; I will help you; I will uphold you with my victorious right hand" (Isaiah 41:10 LB).
"God's Word was my source of strength then and now," she elaborated. "Jimmy Snow told me that no matter what I went through, I should not fear. He showed me that God's right hand is Jesus. God has brought me through so many trials."
Describing a few of them, Joanne continued, "Trials can be a ladder to heaven. Climbing a ladder of trials and getting victory over them is like putting your treasures in a bank in heaven."
One of Joanne's heartaches has been the unhappy marriage of her daughter Charlotte, who, in July 1977, was twenty and divorced with a year-old baby.
"The thing that can hurt you the most as a parent is when your children are in trouble," declared Joanne, detailing how she and Harry had been helping Charlotte find a job and get readjusted as a single parent.
Saying that she had been in prayer often, Joanne indicated the experience had caused much discouragement and depression.
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When beset with difficulties, Joanne takes her Bible and opens it to one of two favorite passages, either Isaiah 41:10 quoted above or: "And I have given you authority over all the power of the Enemy, and to walk among serpents and scorpions and to crush them. Nothing shall injure you!" (Luke 10:19 LB). These verses are marked, circled, and double circled in her Bible.
Putting her finger on the circled verse, Joanne prays: "You said it, Lord, I'm taking You at Your Word. You promised me that nothing's going to hurt us.
"As I am saying this," she confided to me, "we are going through and out of a financial crisis."
The bills had stacked up, and the Yates wanted to make a clean start without debts when they went on the road full time with their traveling ministry.
For financial sufficiency, as in everything else, Joanne feels God's Word can be trusted: "I lift up God's Word and say, 'You promised to supply all our needs. And we firmly believe that.' God has never failed me, and He never will."
In an apt analogy, Joanne compared God's testing of our trust in Him to the home canning she often watched her mother do.
"When I was a child my mother would screw a lid so tight on a fruit jar when she was sealing it that it would hurt her hand. I feel sometimes when we're going through a trial that we're being squeezed so tight — right to the very, very breaking point — that we feel like we're going to crack open and just explode and give up. But just before we break, God stops squeezing. And we say, 'Wow! Isn't it wonderful to be released!' "
And, according to Joanne, after each trial, the Christian can feel stronger in the Lord and more ready to trust Him the next time.
Ultimately, a believer reaches the point where he can praise God for his trials.
Even when one is downcast and needs to be shown
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some light and encouragement, Joanne feels, he can take his needs before God in prayer. She and Harry often pray and talk to the Lord together, lightening the load and brightening the road, she said.
SHARING THE BURDEN
She also spoke of the uplift that comes from sharing burdens with closest friends. For the Yates, these include their pastor and his wife, Jim and Dottie Snow, brother Johnny Cash and his family, and Joanne's mother and father, who live in Hendersonville. The Yates also cherish the warmth and help available in small prayer groups.
How far a person should go in making specific needs and desires known to God was a question of considerable interest to me as Harry and Joanne and I talked about how they prayed for their motor home.
"It was all of God, not Johnny Cash," insisted Joanne, who, like the famed country superstar, often wears black just because she likes it.
BEING SPECIFIC WITH GOD
"I believe in being specific with God; He's a specific God," she added, noting that she and Harry felt called on the Fourth of July 1976 to go "full time on the road, totally on faith. So we had to be specific."
In the case of the motor home, as in other prayer requests, Joanne wrote on a pad of paper exactly what she wanted God to do. The list, she said, specified that it be an Executive Home, would have a microwave oven, a color TV, an eight-track stereo and cassette system, a refrigerator with an ample freezer, and a green interior.
"Wait a minute," I interrupted. "Even down to the in-
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side color? Do you ask God what color dresses you should get, too?"
"It's important to God what color dress I get," Joanne replied. "If I ask for a blue dress, God will give me a blue dress."
"But what if He gives you another color?" I persisted.
"Well, He might think I look better in another color," Joanne smiled.
I glanced around, noting the green upholstery, microwave oven, and the sound system, just as she had outlined. I had no further questions.
"If I had asked for a 1961 Winnebago, that's exactly what we would have gotten," Joanne continued, picking up the thread of motor home conversation. "But we asked for the best — a new thirty-foot Executive Home. I was asking for the best because I'm the King's kid. A loving heavenly Father will give good gifts, both material and spiritual.
Once she has written out her prayer request, Joanne places the paper on top of her Bible. Then she lays her hands on the list-covered Bible and thanks God for answering the need.
In the case of the motor home, she and Harry "thanked God and believed we had already received it from God," she said. It works, she added, for anything a child of God needs.
Dell Robinson, a Southern California man, sold Harry and Joanne his nearly-new Executive Home at a substantially reduced price. It came, as he had originally ordered it, with the green interior and other specifications Joanne had asked for long before she had seen that particular motor home.
"Ask God for something once, specifically, from your heart" advised Joanne, "and then receive it from God. From that moment on, thank the Lord for it, as if you already have received it."
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SOME SPIRITUAL LESSONS LEARNED
But expect testing between the time you make the prayer and the time the prayer is answered!
"I promise you," she challenged, "that before you get it, the devil will see to it that it seems impossible — it will look hopeless. But keep thanking God for having received it. This is your test of faith. 'Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen' " (Hebrews 11:1 KJV).
Applying what she was preaching to the present, Joanne added that she believed a financial miracle was taking place at the very moment. "We believe and we receive that our bills are totally paid — I receive this as being done," she prayed.
"Take God at His Word," she said, looking up. "That's what it's all about. When we have done what we are humanly able to do in a situation, then God steps in. But He expects us to do all we can, too."
The victorious Christian is apt to have ups and downs, doubts and perplexities, despite the spiritual resources that are available, Joanne believes.
"Some say the believer is all smiles, joyful, and has no problems," she explained. "But we are still human as long as we're in this body. We're still prone to argue, fail, fall on our faces, and make mistakes. We still have a sinful nature.
"Christians who on the outside are so seemingly superspiritual haven't learned their wisdom yet — that sweet, deep wisdom that comes with the settling-down time," Joanne continued.
She said Christians need to learn how to use times of coming down from spiritual highs to let God teach wisdom and love. The times a follower of Christ falls and fails can be learning times, times to grow stronger in faith.
Sometimes, she conceded, she doesn't feel on cloud nine as she did when she went down the aisle in Evangel
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Temple and hollered, "Jesus, save me!" That is all right, though.
"When that happens, you wonder if you're backsliding, and you ask, 'Do I have to put it on?' You're not backsliding; you're coming to the walking period in your life," she commented. "You've been crawling, now it's time to walk. Let God love you and teach you — even spank you if needed, as a good daddy spanks his baby because he loves him.
"I've gotten so many Holy Spirit spankings it's unreal," she laughed.
Joanne took a sip of coffee she had brewed in the plug-in coffee pot that runs off the 110-volt generator in their motor home.
"Yes," she answered to my final question, "Christians do worry. Worry is something humans face, but it never does any good."
Supremely, to Joanne Cash Yates, the Word of God is the place to go for every problem, every worry, whether it's physical, financial, or spiritual.
"You're still in this labor called life," she concluded, "and it's a testing time."
