He turned the key expecting to find a few old photographs. Instead Jonathan Holiff opened a storage locker in British Columbia and stepped into the lost years of Johnny Cash. Eight months after his father Saul died by suicide at eighty Jonathan received the key from his mother. The small metal object unlocked decades of history that Saul Holiff had never shared with his sons.
“I wanted to know if my father had kept anything about me”
Jonathan later recalled. The locker held far more than family memorabilia. It contained letters contracts telephone recordings gold records and roughly sixty hours of audio diaries. Johnny Cash was everywhere inside. Saul Holiff had managed Cash from 1961 to 1973 through the singer’s narcotics arrests cancelled engagements and transformation from country star to American institution. He placed June Carter in the touring show pushed Cash toward larger stages and worked through the peak years that produced the Folsom and San Quentin albums “A Boy Named Sue” and The Johnny Cash Show. The job followed Saul home. Jonathan grew up resenting Cash for receiving the attention his father withheld from his own family. The son and father became estranged for two decades. When Saul died no note arrived and no final conversation took place. Jonathan entered the locker partly to see if his father had kept a place for him. What he discovered was a parallel record of country music history.
“Saul had preserved hundreds of letters recorded business calls and spoken privately into a reel to reel machine”
about the thirteen years he spent managing the unpredictable star. His papers documented the labor beneath Cash’s public mythology damaged tours repaired contracts negotiated prison appearances developed and crises handled far from the audience’s view. Jonathan spent more than six years turning the material into the documentary My Father and the Man in Black. The project restored Saul to Cash’s history but it also allowed a son to meet his father after direct conversation was no longer possible. The collection now resides at the University of Victoria where more than 5000 items from the partnership are available for research. Jonathan had opened the locker hoping to find evidence of his childhood among the things Saul considered worth keeping. He found a country legend in the boxes and his father’s voice on the tapes.