Johnny Cash and the custom Cadillac
Johnny Cash at the wheel of the official promotional "One Piece at a Time Cadillac" built in 1976 by Bruce Fitzpatrick (standing) of Abernathy Auto Parts and Hilltop Auto Salvage in Nashville, Tennessee. Fitzpatrick used parts from 1949 to early '70s models.
Keith Martin, author of Strange but True Tales of Car Collecting, shares a fun story about a car built for a song…literally!
In 1976 Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer, and the sleeper hit Rocky was the year's highest-grossing film. Barry Manilow had the longest-running number-one song, but Johnny Cash's "One Piece at a Time" was number one on Billboard's Hot Country Singles chart. It was Cash's last song to reach number one.
Dubbed a "rockabilly novelty song," "One Piece at a Time" was written by Wayne Kemp. In his book Johnny Cash, biographer Michael Streissguth says that Kemp came up with the idea for the song after hearing about an Oklahoma airman who stole enough parts from his base to make a helicopter.
The song tells of a man who, in 1949, leaves his home in Kentucky to go work at a general motors assembly plant in Detroit. The singer puts wheels on Cadillacs, watching them roll by every day. Sometime he cries, because he knows he will never be able to afford one.
But then he devises a plan "that should be the envy of any man." He'll sneak a Cadillac out, one piece at a time, in his lunchbox. Getting caught would mean getting fired, but he figures he'd have it all by the time he retired. So in his large lunchbox, he manages to smuggle out a fuel pump, gears, shocks, nuts and bolts.
For the bigger stuff, he uses his buddy's motor home.
That plan worked fine over many years until it came time to assemble the pilfered Cadillac. The transmission was a '53, and the motor turned out to be a '73.
And when he and his buddy tried to put in the bolts, the holes were gone. So they drilled it out so that they would fit and "with a little bit of help from an A-daptor kit, they got that engine running just like a song."
The headlight was another sight. They had two on the left and one on the right. But when they pulled out the switch, all three of them went on. According to the song, "the back end looked kind of funny too." But they continued to assemble the Cadillac, and when they got through, they noticed that they had only one tail fin.
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It was about that time that the singer's wife came out to look the car over. "She had her doubts," says the song, "but she opened the door and said, 'Honey, take me for a spin.'"
So they drove to town to get tags for the Cadillac, and as they headed down the main drag, they could "hear everybody laughing for blocks around." But at the courthouse they didn't laugh because to type it up, it took the whole staff. "And when they got through, the title weighed 60 pounds."
Then the chorus describes putting the vehicle together one piece at a time. The songs ends with a truck driver inquiring about the "Psychobilly Cadillac," to which Cash replies, "negatory on the cost of this mow-chine. You might say I went right to the factory and picked it up. It's cheaper that way."
When an actual Cadillac was needed to promote the song, Johnny Cash's producer contacted Bruce Fitzpatrick, owner of Abernathy Auto Parts and Hilltop Auto Salvage in Nashville, Tennessee.
"Johnny's producer phoned me in April of 1976 and said he thought "One Piece at a Time" was going to be a hit and could we come up with a car to use in publicity shots," Fitzpatrick recalled. "He knew I had a lot of Cadillacs."
"So using parts from 1949 to the early seventies, I had my guys build it. It took them about eight to ten days," Fitzpatrick said. "And when it was done, we drove the car to the House of Cash [Johnny Cash's now-defunct museum] in Hendersonville, Tennessee, to deliver it to Johnny. A photographer was there and he took a few photos."
House of Cash, the once public museum on nearly three acres of land complete with a train depot, closed because of financial difficulties in 1985. "After it closed," Fitzpatrick recalls, "we retrieved the '49-'70 Cadillac with our wrecker and brought it back here and crushed it. Today it's probably a Nissan or something.
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"People from all over the world call me about the patchwork Cadillac," Fitzpatrick says, "but it wasn't that big of a deal when we built it. Nashville wasn't even that big then. We built the car for fun. I never got paid for it."
