Cash’s monologue allows him to just sing “Man in Black,” pausing for flashback sketches with Kazurinsky showing how the squeaky-voiced young Cash came by his signature baritone, dramatic dimple and self-mythologizing. Still, his many songs here indicate the protective strategy SNL traditionally deploys for non-comics. Cash had hosted a musical-comedy variety series, The Johnny Cash Show, a decade earlier and had been acting professionally alongside his singing career since the late '50s. The others fawn over their illustrious guest, while Murphy, unsmiling, prepares to carry the show, a function he performed for four straight years.įor Cash, the Ebersol SNL was likely familiar turf. Gathered with Cash and the cast to kick off the show here, Murphy stares down the camera from his position at Cash’s hip.
The live applause greeting each cast member’s name explodes for Murphy at easily double the volume of anyone else. Being hired on as a little-utilized featured player under Doumanian, the brash and charismatic young Murphy quickly seized the spotlight and the audience’s adulation. Cash’s show is typically Piscopo-heavy, even if most people’s eyes were already locked on 21-year-old Murphy. Piscopo, a broad and exuberant impressionist, was initially the perfect vehicle for Ebersol’s vision of Saturday Night Live.
There were only two cast members spared from the Doumanian roster: Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy. The cast greeting Cash in an awkward scrum after his musical monologue was a workmanlike group - with one sparkling exception. Ebersol succeeded, his four years at the helm of a show he (at least in part) helped create staving off threats of cancellation and proving a stable, if never particularly exciting, bridge to Michaels’ eventual 1985 return. After the infamous debacle of the truncated sixth season, when former Talent Coordinator Jean Doumanian assembled a wobbly team to try to replace the entire departing original cast, writers and series creator Lorne Michaels, NBC exec Ebersol stepped in to right what was a visibly sinking ship. And while Elton John was the musical guest on the night, Cash essentially pulled double duty, belting out renditions of “I Walk the Line,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Ring of Fire,” “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” and, fittingly, “Man in Black,” which functioned as Cash’s monologue. The youngest inductee to the Country Music Hall of Fame a few years earlier, the 50-year-old Cash accepted an invite from then- Saturday Night Liveproducer Dick Ebersol to host the show.
By 1982, country music legend Johnny Cash had nothing much left to prove.
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