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## Columbia and the Long Slide
The move to Columbia brought broader commercial reach and bigger promotional resources. It also brought a new creative context: Columbia’s country division was oriented toward Nashville’s mainstream, toward the smooth, orchestrated sound that had come to dominate commercial country in the late 1950s and early 1960s, often called the Nashville Sound. Cash was not naturally suited to it.
He had his biggest commercial period in the early 1960s. “Ring of Fire,” written by June Carter and Merle Kilgore and recorded in 1963, became his best-selling single — a song with mariachi horns and a melody that burned into the memory on first hearing. He was a major figure on the country charts. He had a television profile, newspaper coverage, and a touring schedule that kept him on the road continuously.
The touring schedule was where the trouble started.
The life of a touring musician in the early 1960s, before the music industry developed the infrastructure that now surrounds major artists, was physically brutal. Long drives between shows, irregular sleep, irregular meals, the adrenaline spike of performance followed by the flatness of the road. Cash began using amphetamines — uppers, speed, pills — to maintain the energy the schedule demanded. Many musicians of that era used similar stimulants for the same reasons; Cash was not unusual in this, only in the degree to which the habit took hold.
By the mid-1960s he was taking twenty to thirty amphetamine pills at a time, three or four times a day. To slow down, he would take approximately twenty tranquilizers. The specific figures come from later biographical accounts and contemporaneous observations. The effect of this pharmacological regime was not, obviously, sustainable. His health deteriorated. His behavior became erratic. His voice, which had always been his most reliable instrument, became unreliable.