The end of his time with Cash came from a specific incident. Marshall Grant — Cash’s bassist, road manager, and the man who had been part of the organization since the Sun Records years — confronted Sherley about his failures to follow the tour schedule. Sherley responded with threats. By Grant’s account, Sherley told him he loved him like a brother, then described in specific terms what he would like to do to Grant with a butcher knife. Grant took the threat seriously enough to report it to Cash and June Carter Cash.
Cash dismissed Sherley from the organization.
The logic of what had happened is worth considering. Cash had, through his advocacy, helped Sherley get out of prison and helped him build a platform for a musical career. The relationship that followed was a genuine attempt, by Cash’s side, to give a man a different life than the one the prison system had produced. That attempt failed, and the specific way it failed — in threats of violence — was not random. Sherley had spent most of his adult life in institutions where violence was a currency. The outside world offered him success and freedom and a crowd of 17,000 people, and he had no internal framework for navigating it.
After leaving Cash’s organization, Sherley returned to California. He worked a farm, lived in a truck cab, and his substance use — drugs and alcohol — deepened. In May 1978, while under the influence, he shot a man. Rather than face returning to prison, he called his daughter. On May 11, 1978, at his brother’s house in Gonzales, California, he died by suicide. He was 42 years old.