Kerry Marx Exclusive JCI Interview 2026

Kerry Marx interview with Jeff Emond.

What are some of the albums or artists that really inspired you to pursue a music education and then a music career?

The musicians that inspired me were guitar players and bass players. I picked up a guitar first when I was 13 or 14, I guess. Every band had guitar players but nobody had a bass player. Nobody wanted to play bass so I started playing bass at first, just out of necessity, played bass until I was about 21. Then my bass got stolen and I couldn't afford a new one and I had a guitar so I became a guitar player, although that's where I probably would have ended up anyway. In the beginning [my inspiration] was the Beatles and then all the ones that followed. Led Zeppelin and Cream and Jimi Hendrix and Steppenwolf and all those kinds of bands, but at the same time I got into Wes Montgomery, the Allman Brothers, BB King. Still a huge fan of all of them.

Do you have a favorite guitar?

Yeah, my favorite guitar is an early ‘50s Gibson ES175. It’s just a great guitar. But I have other favorites, I lean toward Paul Reed Smiths for most, Tom Andersons for Strat and Telly style. I have a lot of different acoustics, different brands, but I've had a deal with Taylor for 35 years. I've got quite a few Taylors.

What guitar did you favor when you were playing lead guitar with Johnny Cash?

At first I played a Glaser Tele that I bought from a friend of mine, Rusty Russell. Joe Glaser is a luthier here in town, it was a custom telecaster. I still own it. It’s in a Johnny Cash museum in Randers, Denmark. I go over there and play every year. I don't take a guitar with me, when I show up they give me my guitar and I play it while I'm there and then I give it back to them and it goes back to the museum. But I did play that guitar at first, and then Fender gave me a Telecaster and I played that one for a while, and then Fender also gave me a Stratocaster that had lace sensor pickups. I don't know why, but I played it at some point. So a Strat and a couple of Teles. Then I probably had a Taylor acoustic that I would play on “Tennessee Flat-Top Box.”

How did you come to fill the lead guitar role in Johnny Cash’s band in 1989? Did you know Johnny Cash beforehand? Did he seek you out for an audition?

No, I didn’t know him and he didn’t know me. John’s publicist was Hugh Waddell and Hugh had been Jerry Reed’s publicist, or had some role in the Jerry Reed organization, which is the group that I moved to Nashville to play with. So Hugh called me in 1989 and said that John had just let the whole band go and he needed a guitar player. I actually turned it down because I had just gotten off the road a couple of years before and I was really trying to stay in town and play recording sessions. I didn’t want to compromise that by going out on the road because in those days you were either a session guy or you were a road guy. If you had a road gig, your session work would diminish. So I said, “No.” And Hugh said, “Well, why don’t you just come out and meet John and then you can decide.” So that’s what I did. I went out and spent a couple of hours with John one afternoon and I left with a job. He was such a great guy, I decided to do it.

In those days John was carrying horns and two guitars. He had a big band and what he told me when he hired me was that people were complaining and he just got tired of it. So he just let them all go. Started over with a four-piece band. He kept “Fluke,” the drummer. He fired everybody and hired W.S. [Holland] back. He hired “Bunky” Keels as the new piano player in the band. The bass player was Roy Husky, Jr. when I started. So me, Roy Husky Jr., “Bunky” Keels, and before long it became Steve Logan on bass and Earl Poole Ball on keys.

One of the famous live concerts that you're a part of was released on CD as The Great Lost Performance from 1990 in Asbury Park. Unfortunately, the full concert wasn't included on CD, but you had a guitar solo playing “Under the Double Eagle” that was a regular part of the live show at the time. I believe it was the first time Cash had a guitarist doing a solo song. How did that come about?

You know Earl did a solo song [on piano] also. I think pretty early on John said, “Hey, what’s a guitar song you could do?” John was glad to let June and the Carter sisters take over for a while. They did the section in the middle of the show. He was happy to take breaks. So I think it was just a way to give him a break.

You were there for Cash’s last Mercury album, The Mystery of Life. Did John or producer Jack Clement give any specific direction in the studio?

No, I don't remember any real direction. John was pretty happy with everything we did. He let people do what they wanted. I can't remember him nitpicking anything. I played the whole record. They overdubbed Marty [Stuart] and they overdubbed other things. Me and “Fluke” and Earl and Steve Logan did the basic tracks. I’ll tell you a cool thing about that record. I ended up working for Cowboy [Jack Clement] quite a bit until he died, this may have been my first experience there. But [this record] was one of the only times working with Jack when we didn’t use headphones. We set up in the same room and we had Hot Spots, which are little speakers on mic stands, maybe ten inches long and four or five inches deep and four or five inches tall. We each had those little monitors to hear the vocals, but we just sat in a room and played together so we heard each others’ instruments. For instance, if I wanted to hear more drums I just moved my chair closer to the drummer. Everything was live, everything we did we all had to get at once, because everything bled all over everything else. That was a pretty unusual experience for me.

That probably adds to the authenticity of the record.

Yeah. In the old days they were all done that way, you know. Everybody was in the room together. So it’s not necessarily unusual, but by 1990 it was highly unusual.

Jack Clement and Cash each had a famous sense of humor. Do you recall any antics from those sessions?

Not really. They were pretty serious. We didn't screw around a lot. I would say their antics were probably much earlier. Those guys had been working together, at that point, for 20 or 30 years, so I think all those antics came in earlier. By 1990 they were a little more subdued and serious.

Do you have any stories about life on the road, touring with the band?

Dave Roe was one of the first people I met when I moved to Nashville. I flew in to audition for Jerry Reed and got the job and stayed. Dave Roe was already the bass player in the band. I literally met Dave within 30 minutes of landing in Nashville, so Dave and I had been friends for 10 years. Dave's first two weeks with John were my last two weeks, and Dave wasn't an upright bass player, he was solely an electric bass player. He literally bought an upright bass and learned how to play it to do that job, and so he was struggling a bit, because it's not easy to go from electric bass to upright bass, especially the whole slapping thing. Now ultimately that became Dave's trademark. Dave made his career on that style, but I was there at the very beginning when he was first learning how to do it, and he wasn't that good at it, but John was a pretty understanding guy and a very patient guy. One night, after about a week, we were getting ready to go to the show and we were in the lobby. And John and June came walking through and Dave—who was kind of an eager guy—said, “Hey, John. I think I’m getting the bass pretty well!” And John didn’t even look. He just said, “Keep practicing, son.” [Laughs]. That was very Johnny Cash.

John was a quick wit. We had Helen Carter’s son David Jones with us for a while. David was a really great guitar player, but he was a little bit of a wild card. And one night we did “Get Rhythm” and he played a solo but turned on the distortion pedal and played it like a rock solo. After the show, we’re sitting in the dressing room, me and Dave Roe and probably “Fluke” and John. And David Jones came to the dressing room and said, “Hey, John. Man, I’m sorry about that Jimi Hendrix solo I played out there tonight.” And John said, “Don’t flatter yourself, son.” [Laughs]. So John could be a smart ass. He was a great guy.

You were at Cash’s 1992 induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, on stage with Cash when he played “Big River” and the whole ensemble played Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”

What an incredible night. I met and hung out with Keith Richards, played with Edgar Winter, The Edge, Santana, and Robbie Robertson and so on. And of course the Paul Shaffer guys, who I've played with 3 or 4 times now. It was amazing. I went to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland maybe four or five years ago. I talked to them about getting footage from the show. There’s a YouTube link to “Big River” and it's so bad, I can’t believe how bad it is. The reason is, the band didn’t know what we were going to do. So I’m trying to play it and call out changes to these guys as we were playing it. They had no idea. It’s in E and then there’s an F# chord and they missed that about every time.

At least you were there to help correct the house band as much as possible.

If you see the video, you can see me trying to play and tell them what to do at the same time. It was hard but it was a big night. There was a jam at the end. I guess John must have been the last one to get inducted because I was still up there, so I kept playing. And after a couple of songs a stage manager came out and said, “Hey, man, Jimmy Page wants to play and we’re out of amplifiers, do you mind if he uses yours?” And I said, “Yeah, I think that’s fine.” So I gave up so Jimmy Page could join.

Any June Carter stories?

This isn't a June Carter story, but it involves her and the look on her face. We were in England somewhere, and after the show I'm standing out back, just standing around, and here comes June and her sisters headed for the bus. And some guy sees them, and he's wearing a black hat, I mean he's dressed completely in black, you know, a Johnny Cash superfan. This guy comes up to June, and he's so beside himself because he's talking to June Carter. He said, “June Carter! God damn! God bless!” And June just looked at him like, what?!

Do you remember anything about the 1991 Country Christmas album?

Yeah, we did that record at Germantown Studio. I remember we did “Figgy Pudding” with the Carter sisters, but I don't remember much about that record.

What do you recall about the 1993 sessions that Mike Daniel produced. They were overdubbed and became the recent Songwriter album. I've heard some interesting stories about how some of those songs came to be, with Cash between record labels.

You know, as I remember it, they were just songs that John had and he just wanted to demo them. I don't remember there being any real plan for anything initially. He just had a notebook full of songs and wanted to get them recorded. That's my memory of it. I don't remember there being any goal other than getting some songs down on tape that he had written a while back. That’s my memory now. I don't know if that's right or not. They could have had a plan and didn't tell the band what the plan was. But I think they were just demos. They were probably pretty rough. We didn’t spend any time trying to get anything pristine, we were basically just trying to knock them out and get them on tape. They weren’t well-finished recordings.

But having said that, I kind of hate that I didn’t make the record [2024’s Songwriter album]. I think they stripped everything off except for John’s voice and redid everything. And that’s a bit of a drag. I wish I could have made it. That happens a lot. So I guess it’s not unusual, but it’s disappointing that I didn’t get to make the [new] record.

You rejoined Johnny Cash again about 10 years later in 2002 and worked on some songs from American VI: The Man Comes Around. Songs like “Desperado” and “Tear Stained Letter.”

It wasn't really rejoining. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, the Bob Dylan Memorial Concert, and the David Letterman show that I did with him. . . I had already left the band. John would call me at times to do things. But as his health got worse, he would just go over to the cabin to record. So there were quite a few times that I’d get called to go out to the cabin and play. Like The Man Comes Around. A lot of those things I have listened to, I can’t find my part, it’s all fairly indescript because Rick Rubin took all those recordings and stripped off most of it and redid them. I know Dave Roe and a couple of people have told me they were disappointed that they didn’t make the record, even though they had done the recording with John. That was common practice for those records, though.

I don't remember dates, but I probably went out there and did sessions with John six, eight, ten times. And some of that stuff probably made it to the album and some didn't. Once again we were just demoing songs that he wanted to get down that he had written.

You mentioned the Letterman show. That’s where you did a rare, phenomenal performance of “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

[On Letterman] you rehearse in the afternoon, then you would do the show in the evening. The way they did it was great. By the way, it was so cold in that studio. I’ve never played indoors anywhere as cold as it was there. But I was so jealous of the way they work because we went in and rehearsed and they would record it, and then we’d all go in the control room and listen to it and go, “Well, let’s change this. Let’s do this because that isn’t right.” We rehearsed it and recorded it and listened back a couple of times, and then in the evening we were so well-rehearsed that it came off really well.

You also did another incredible song, “For You,” with John and Laura Weber White [at the time Laura Cash], before Dave Matthews dubbed his voice.

By that time John was in ill health and he was in Jamaica and he couldn't travel. It was more efficient for us to go down there and record with him. So Laura and I and David Ferguson, “Ferg,” flew down and “Ferg” brought all the recording equipment. I brought a guitar. Laura brought her fiddle and mandolin. We set up in the living room and recorded. It was great. It was such a cool experience to fly to Jamaica and hang out at that house.

Were there any other songs cut that day?

Just the one.

Any other memories of Johnny Cash that we didn’t touch upon that you want to share? How did you part ways?

Coming out of the ‘80s, everything about music was about perfection and everything lining up and even though we didn't have a grid, we were still still recording with tape, but our whole goal musically was to be technically perfect about everything. But by playing with John, I actually learned that music is more about the feeling that it emotes from people and the feeling you put into it rather than how perfect it is. So that was a really big lesson for me, that I hope I've carried through the rest of my career.

The other thing I'll say is I quit John mainly because I was wanting to get my session career going, and it just felt like it was time to leave. I didn't leave because I was dissatisfied with anything. I actually didn't want to leave but it was somewhat of a financial decision and it was time for me to stay in town. I loved John. I loved playing the job. I love the music. I loved “Fluke,” “Fluke” was great. The crew, the way we traveled, it was really a great gig. It was just time for me to move on.

For a while now you've been a regular at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville and became a music director. What would you like to share about your involvement there?

When I started doing TV in 1996, it kind of took me off my session trajectory, which was a bit of a disappointment, but at the same time it has worked out well. It’s a lot of work playing and being Music Director. But it's still great fun. The music directing part is a huge challenge and when stuff comes off I'm proud. It’s gotten better all along. The band has gotten better and are easily the best band in Nashville. The Opry is a great place to work, easily the best gig in town.

Could you elaborate on what the music director does for a big program?

I basically get with the artist's representative a few days before the performance, get the songs, find out what musicians they're bringing, if any, if the key is right, if the tempo is right, if the arrangement is right. I have somebody that writes great charts and I get the songs to them. I decide who's going to play, and what. I run the rehearsals and make sure that everything gets realized the way the artist wants it and then we go play. Then I always follow up with the reps and make sure that everything was OK.

So part of your job is to make sure the “Big River” problem at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame doesn’t happen to other artists.

That's exactly right. We do everything we can to make sure that it comes off, and 99.9% of the time it does. A lot of this stuff is hard and the Opry Band pulls it off wonderfully.

We're going to go far afield now. Younger fans may know your work with Lynda Carter (of Wonder Woman fame) on the video game soundtrack for Fallout 4. You even co-wrote some songs with her and helped arrange the music.

I'm not really a songwriter, so I had a part in writing but John Jarvis and Lynda were the primary songwriters on all those things. [Those songs] were kind of our babies and then Kyle Lehning produced it, so he had a lot to do with it too. They're on iTunes. Do you know the backstory of the songs? Lynda was a character [in the video game], I think Magnolia was her name. Lynda’s husband was the CEO of ZeniMax, Robert Altman. Bethesda Software was his company. So it was an easy sell for us to create the soundtrack, we had been playing together for years by then.

You've performed a bit with Johnny's grandson Thomas Gabriel, and the late Dave Roe, as part of Tennessee 4 band.

We go to Denmark every year. We did two weeks in Denmark last year, the most we've done. We'll do more next year than we did this year. It’s grown and it's gotten better. We've got three dates in South Carolina in July and I think we're doing something here in Nashville in October. We don't work much but it is a really cool thing. Have you heard Thomas? He sounds just like John. Well, not just like him but really close. He’s great.

I have seen YouTube videos. It’s awesome and makes a difference when former band members like you and Dave Roe, and family like Thomas, perform the songs. It adds authenticity.

Honestly, it's great for me because it's easy and I know those songs, the guitar parts on the Johnny Cash songs. [Laughs] The guitar parts, generally they're not hard. Luther [Perkins] wasn't a great guitar player. He invented a great style, but he wasn't technically a great guitar player, and Bob [Wootton] was better than Luther, but he wasn't technically great either, so the solos are easy and fun. A lot of other stuff I do is really technically challenging, so it’s a nice change. Like I was saying before, it doesn't matter if it's technically correct or not, it’s about the feeling.

But John also worked with legendary guitar players like Carl Perkins, and fans can tell he had a great guitar player on hand when you were with him and he trusted you to have a solo in the show.

Well, thank you. John was a good friend and he was really supportive and I do think he liked my playing.

Finally, I like to close interviews with a book question. What is your favorite book?

The Dark Tower series by Stephen King. I think there's 8 books, I can't remember exactly. I think it took me a year and a half to get through all of it. They’re each close to 1,000 pages long. The story just keeps developing and as I read I thought, “Man, how could this ever end? What kind of ending could he come up with?” When I read the last page, I couldn’t believe how perfect it was. It’s so Stephen King. It couldn’t end any other way. I’m more into fiction than non-fiction. The Stand and Insomnia and It are also great books. And the Talisman. I’m a huge Stephen King fan.