Johnny Cash and the Rockabillies in Trail

The decade following the construction of Trail’s Cominco Arena in 1949 saw some extraordinary names perform there, including big band leaders Duke Ellington, Lawrence Welk, Lionel Hampton, and Spike Jones. From the rock ‘n’ roll/rockabilly/country world, the arena also hosted Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis — all on the same bill.

The date was May 6, 1957. The show was promoted by Calgary disc jockey D’Arcy Scott, who had worked in Nelson a few years earlier, and emceed by CJAT’s Joe Remesz. Cash brought along the Tennessee Two (Marshall Grant and Luther Perkins), while Carl Perkins (no relation to Luther) had his Blue Suede Shoes band, and Lewis his “pumping piano and Wanda Jackson.” Tickets were $1.50 and $1.75 (the equivalent of $16.23 to $18.93 today). 

Trail Daily Times, May 6, 1957

“Big crowd at show,” read the headline in the Trail Daily Times the next day. Unfortunately, they were talking about the Montrose talent night. Although ads for Cash, Perkins, and Lewis had appeared in the paper, there was nary a word about them afterward. Perhaps the editors felt rock ‘n’ roll was a passing fad, best ignored.

One person in the audience, however, was former city councillor Gord DeRosa. He doesn’t remember much about it, except that Lewis stole the show. “He stood on that piano and rattled up and down it,” DeRosa says. “He was crazy. You had to look at him and laugh, but he was so entertaining. Johnny Cash was more sedate, more sincere.”

Also in attendance was the late Alan Woodhouse. “To be honest, it was two guys I’d never heard of,” he told me in 2006. “But I was with a young lady and she had. We sat in the bleachers, but there were people on the floor in front of a stage.”

The arena was not packed, however. “Not by any standard. I would say they only used half. I think the stage was set kind of at centre line with the back towards the river. I don’t recall there being a who’s who audience. It was really a lot of young people like myself.”

Cash opened the show, followed by Perkins and Jackson, “and then this weirdo got up and started pounding away on the piano. His feet were going and as he bounced up the piano bench went shooting across the stage, landed on the floor of the arena, smashed to bits. He just kept right on boogying.”

Lewis would certainly have done Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On, released two months earlier. However, he didn’t add Great Balls of Fire to his repertoire until the fall. Cash probably sang I Walk the Line, released in 1956 — DeRosa thinks so, anyway.

The late Joe Remesz, recalled in 2007 that “it was a fairly successful concert. I can’t remember the numbers, but it paid the bills.” However, “Johnny Cash, I thought, was under the influence of drugs.”

Remesz had lunch with Cash and the others at the Crown Point Hotel where they stayed, and also interviewed them on CJAT. They talked “about Nashville, country and western music, about Trail, about travelling from town to town for concerts.”

“I didn’t particularly like [Lewis],” Remesz said. “A lot of these celebrities disappointed me in person. But I liked Carl Perkins. He didn’t seem to be on drugs!”

Cash, Lewis, and Perkins comprised $750,000 worth of what would become known as the Million Dollar Quartet, a group that jammed at Sun Records’ studios in December 1956. (The fourth member was Elvis Presley.) The trio also released a live album in 1982, calling themselves The Survivors.

The Cominco Arena in the 1950s. (Greg Nesteroff collection)

Cash, who was almost constantly on the road during his long career, played dozens of gigs in Canada, and did so even before Canadian Saul Holiff became his manager in 1961. Many of those shows were in Ontario, but he also appeared on multiple occasions in the Maritimes, the Prairies, and BC. In fact, he performed in every province, wrote and recorded a song called Girl in Saskatoon, and proposed to June Carter in London, Ont.

Before coming to Trail, Cash had already been to western Canada on a rockabilly tour in November 1956 with Marty Robbins, Johnny Horton, the Tennessee Two, and the Teardrops.

The tour that brought him and the other Sun artists to Trail began on March 24, 1957, in Kansas City, and continued through a dozen states before they crossed the border on April 22. They did four shows in Ontario, then worked their way west at a breakneck pace via Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota – often travelling more than 500 miles from one night’s show to the next.

“It was during this long tour that Jerry Lee discovered Johnny Cash was addicted to pills and Carl Perkins was an alcoholic,” writes Lewis biographer Nick Tosches. Lewis “had honed his stage act to a thing of great majesty and had taken to closing every performance with Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.”

On May 1, they performed in Winnipeg, followed in the next few days by Saskatoon, Calgary, and Camrose, Alta., before heading to Trail. 

Author Julie Chadwick mentions the Trail show in passing in her biography of Cash. She wrote that Perkins often toured with drummer W.S. (Fluke) Holland and gospel singers the Isley Brothers: “The first time they played in Canada they drove up in a brand new 1956 Fleetwood Cadillac for a date in the old mining town of Trail ….”

However, Holland must have been conflating this with another tour, because the Isleys weren’t part of the Trail show, and Trail wasn’t the first Canadian date. But Trail apparently stuck in Holland’s memory because of how difficult it was to get there. As Chadwick quoted him:

It was dirt roads, and not because it was muddy or anything, but because there were deep ruts in the road where people had been driving through and we all had to climb out of the Cadillac because it kept bottoming out. In some places we had to push that car.

That description could have applied to only one route around Trail: the old Santa Rosa Pass, otherwise known as The Hump, between Rossland and Grand Forks. However, if that was the case, the performers would have been coming from the west, rather than the east, which makes little sense. The Cadillac was Perkins’ vehicle and the bands travelled in a convoy rather than taking different routes.

Wanda Jackson, in her autobiography, included an anecdote that may or may not have taken place in Trail. She wrote that “somewhere along the way on that tour we did a Sunday matinee and didn’t have an evening show.” In fact, they don’t seem to have played a Sunday matinee anywhere, but the Trail show was on a Monday, so they may have had a Sunday free in Trail following their Camrose performance on the Saturday before. Jackson saw a “a little church” close to where they were staying and invited the others to go to a service that evening. 

Everybody looked at the floor. I turned to go. As I was walking away I heard a voice behind me. ‘Hold it, Wanda, hold it.’ I turned around. Jerry Lee was getting up from his chair. ‘I’d like to go to church with you,’ he smiled …. The prospect of being alone with Jerry Lee was pretty scary to me, but once we started walking, he was a perfect gentleman. We slipped into the service a little late and sat in the back. We shared a hymnbook and sang those great old songs together that had been part of both our formative years.

In her youth, Jackson had sung in a Baptist church. If the denomination was important to her, there was indeed “a little church” in downtown Trail that fit the bill. Emmanuel Baptist Church, in the 1500 block of Cedar Avenue, was demolished probably in the 1970s, although its stone steps remain.

Looking down Cedar Avenue in Trail, circa 1960s or 1970s. Emmanuel Baptist Church is seen at far left. (Dorse McTaggart photo)

After Trail, the tour was originally supposed to continue the next day to Nelson for a performance at the Civic Centre, but for some reason this show was cancelled. Instead, the next day there were two shows in Cranbrook that were a bust, according to the local Courier:

The promoters … were, to say the least, very disappointed at the attendance figures. Those who attended were treated to a high class performance by artists in the top flight of their profession. Only about 300 fans showed up to the two shows. It is doubtful if shows of this calibre will be seen again in Cranbrook without a guarantee being required by the artists before booking is assured.

As with the Trail show, D’Arcy Scott was the promoter in Cranbrook (as well as Camrose). Taking a loss was a habit for him. When Scott died in 1993, Calgary Herald columnist Brian Brenna wrote that his concerts “frequently lost money, though they featured some of the biggest names in the business … Johnny Cash offered to waive his fee when his concert failed to draw. Frank Sinatra, true to form, refused to fly to Calgary for a scheduled appearance at the Corral when he discovered there were no facilities here for refueling his private jet.” 

(Sinatra’s no-show in Calgary, his airplane arrangements, and his brief stop-over in Castlegar are all the subject of a separate post.) 

Nelson Daily News, May 4, 1957. Nearly identical ads appeared in other towns.

Two shows in Lethbridge weren’t much better. According to the Herald: “A disappointing crowd of 700 persons turned out to attend two shows of the Grande Old Opry held in the Lethbridge Collegiate Institute Wednesday night. The ‘Rocka Billy’ shows featured Johnny Cash, who sang, among others, I Walk the Line …”

Why did these shows draw so poorly? It’s a mystery, although perhaps it had something to do with being promoted as rockabilly, rather than rock ‘n’ roll or country and western. Plus, while Cash was already a star, Lewis was only just becoming known.

Two more shows followed in Lacombe, Alta., and then Edmonton. Photos from the latter concert are the only ones known to exist from the Canadian legs of the tour.  

The next stop was Regina and the Leader Post provided the most detailed account of what actually took place at these shows. Cash presented “nearly a dozen tunes he has made popular,” while “piano-pounder” Lewis was “in a class all by himself.”  

[He] gave the Auditorium piano a trouncing such as it has never had before. Attacking the ivories with an uninhibited ferocity, the mop-headed lad, backed by drums and bass, stirred up excitement with shouting renditions of Blueberry Hill, All Shook Up, Tutti Fruitti, and others in a similar vein. In a surprise change of pace he added a Negro spiritual, My God is Real, to good effect. Carl Perkins, backed by his hard-driving Blue Suede Shoes band, got things off to a foot-stomping start with such items as Bobbing the Blues, I’m Walking, True Love, That’s Right and Blue Suede Shoes. For good measure, he demonstrated his guitar-picking ability with Poor People of Paris.

A show-stopper with looks and personality was Wanda Jackson who offered eight rousing numbers including Money Honey and Hound Dog.

Johnny Cash … gave generously of the songs he has recorded including Hey Porter, I Walk the Line, The Next in Line, Get Rhythm, and There You Go.

The tour concluded with two shows in Billings, Mont.

According to Lewis biographer Tosches, “After more than a month on the road, Jerry Lee returned to Memphis, exhausted and broke. ‘I was gettin’ a hundred dollars a day,’ he later said of that long spring tour of 1957. ‘I left home with $50 in my pocket, an’ when I came back I had about $25. Don’t know how it happened, but it did.’”

Today it seems hard to believe Cash and Lewis played in a place as small as Trail — Alan Woodhouse said people reacted like he was crazy when he told them — but Cash actually returned to the Cominco Arena on July 11, 1988, with his wife and son John.

Again, the Trail Times advertised the show but there was no mention of it afterward, even though this time there was no excuse. But there must still be lots of people around who went. Did Cash remember performing in Trail more than 30 years earlier, and if so, did he acknowledge it from the stage? 

At the time he was coming off gigs in Vancouver and Kelowna. Over the years he also appeared in Victoria, Kamloops, Prince George, Squamish, and Merritt, and was scheduled to play Kimberley on May 14, 1986, but the show was cancelled when a snowstorm trapped him in Calgary.

Camrose musician Stephen Olson was stunned to discover in 2019 that Cash and company had performed in his hometown during the ‘57 tour. He’d never heard of it, even though his uncle worked at the radio station that provided the show’s emcee. 

Olson read biographies of each performer and started putting together a show based on the songs heard on the tour. You can see it below.

Olson has since refined the setlist and added a slideshow of historic photos. He’s booking his one-man Johnny Cash & The Rockabillies: Alberta Tour 1957 for 2025-26, which will hopefully include some of the same towns and venues where the tour originally stopped.

Updated from a story in the 2007 edition of the Trail Journal of Local History. Copies are still for sale at Crockett Books in Trail.

Sources 

• “Johnny Cash show here soon,” Trail Daily Times, April 27, 1957

• “Johnny Cash show poorly attended,” Cranbrook Courier, May 9, 1957

• “700 see shows,” Lethbridge Herald, May 9, 1957

• “Opry show emphasizes rock, roll,” Regina Leader-Post, May 13, 1957

• Cominco Magazine, November 1959, p. 24-25

• Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story, Nick Tosches, 1998, p. 123-24

• I’ve Been Everywhere: A Johnny Cash Chronicle, Peter Lewry, 2001, passim

• The Man Who Carried Cash: Saul Holiff, Johnny Cash, and the Making of an American Icon, Julie Chadwick, 2017, p. 48

• Every Night is Saturday Night, Wanda Jackson with Scott B. Bomar, 2022, p. 122-23

• https://www.setlist.fm/search?page=8&query=johnny+cash&year=1957

• Interviews with Gord DeRosa and Elsie Chernoff, October 2006; Alan Woodhouse, November 2006; and Joe Remesz, January 2007