Last updated: April 18, 2026
- Person: Johnny Cash (1932–2003)
- Year: 1967
- Place: Nickajack Cave, Marion County, Tennessee
- Source: Cash's autobiography, Cash (1997)
In 1967, at the depth of his amphetamine addiction, the country singer Johnny Cash drove from Nashville to Nickajack Cave in Marion County, intending to die there. He later recounted crawling into the cave's darkness, losing his flashlight, and having a religious experience that led him out alive and set him on a path toward recovery. The episode is described in his 1997 autobiography Cash and has since become part of the cultural memory associated with the cave.
The account
Cash's own telling is that he drove to the cave, walked in deep, and turned out his light, intending to never come back out. In the darkness, he later wrote, he felt a sense of peace and of divine presence, an experience he credited with pulling him out of the cave alive and with starting his slow recovery from addiction.
The episode appears in Cash's autobiography and in later biographies. It is a story Cash himself chose to tell, and it has become one of the most-repeated anecdotes in accounts of his life.
Nickajack Cave today
The cave entrance was partially flooded when TVA completed Nickajack Dam in 1967, the same year as Cash's episode. The cave is now gated to protect an endangered gray bat colony, and can be viewed from a TVA observation platform across Nickajack Lake. The cave is also central to the history of the Cherokee Lower Towns of Nickajack and Running Water. Read more about Nickajack & Running Water →