Billy Bob Thornton reveals he once recorded a duet with Johnny Cash

Billy Bob Thornton has revealed that he once recorded a duet with Johnny Cash.

The actor shared the anecdote in a new interview with The Guardian, in response to a fan asking him what it was like to meet the ‘I Walk The Line’ singer.

Thornton replied that he never got over being nervous around the late musician “because it was like God walked in the room.”

He continued: “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.”

‘I Still Miss Someone’ was written by Cash and his nephew Roy Cash, Jr. in 1958, and was released as a b-side to ‘Don’t Take Your Guns to Town’ – the lead single from his seminal album ‘The Fabulous Johnny Cash’.

Thornton went on to say: “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.’”

He then added that Cash “wrote a story about that day on four pieces of notebook paper.” “It was partly truth, partly fiction,” he said. “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.’

In other Johnny Cash news, last year a statue of him was unveiled at the US Capitol. Designed and created by artist Kevin Kresse, the statue is made of bronze and stands eight feet tall.

It followed the release of the late music legend’s posthumous album ‘Songwriter’ – an LP of previously unreleased songs – in June.

All tracks on the LP were originally recorded by Cash back in early 1993 at the LSI Studios in Nashville, with many remaining as demos. One of the tracks included was called ‘Spotlight, which was reimagined for the album and saw contributions from The Black Keys‘ Dan Auerbach.

Elsewhere, Paul McCartney recently credited the country icon as the inspiration for him to form Wings.

“We were in bed one night, newly married, when Johnny Cash came on the telly with a new band he’d formed with Carl Perkins, a big hero of mine. There they were, playing with some country musicians I had never heard of, looking like they were having fun,” he recalled.

“I thought: here’s Johnny, he’s back, he’s doing it. So I turned to Linda and said: Do you want to form a band? And she went: ‘Sure.’ That’s how our relationship was. Do you want to go and live on a farm in Scotland? ‘Why not?’”

As for Thornton, in December he revealed that he previously rejected offers to play Green Goblin in 2002’s Spider-Man, along with the main villain in 2005’s Mission Impossible 3.

“I don’t have much interest in those kinds of roles,” Thornton admitted. “With the Green Goblin, I didn’t feel like getting up at 4 a.m. for five or six hours of makeup.”

“And with Mission: Impossible III, I didn’t want to be the guy trying to kill Tom Cruise,” he continued. “If you’re the bad guy in a big movie like that, audiences remember it forever. I prefer to keep things looser and less predictable.”

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