Somehow, it's hard to imagine that death finally managed to wrap its arms around Johnny Cash.

The Man in Black, who died Friday, Sept. 12 at 71 from complications related to diabetes, just carried himself with that kind of presence.

It all started with that voice.

His sonorous baritone, quavering with a mixture of determination and vulnerability, delivered classic country songs such as "I Walk the Line," "Folsom Prison Blues" and "Cry, Cry, Cry" with cinematic scope.

His powerful personality transcended labels and generations, whether it was introducing Bob Dylan to prime-time TV audiences in the 1960s or interpreting Nine Inch Nails to establish his credibility on MTV.

"Johnny Cash is Johnny Cash, and that's the highest praise you can give a guy," legendary Sun Records founder Sam Phillips, who died earlier this summer, told the Orlando Sentinel last year.

Beyond the music, Cash's combination of an independent mind, strong religious convictions and destructive human shortcomings made him a character with competing spiritual and earthly sides.

"I believe what I say, but that don't necessarily make me right," the singer told Rolling Stone in 2000. "There's nothing hypocritical about it. There is a spiritual side to me that goes real deep, but I confess right up front that I'm the biggest sinner of them all."

Like the faces on Mount Rushmore or Elvis Presley, the gravelly voiced country star is being remembered today as a uniquely American icon.

"He sang about people who were oppressed, poor people, working people, social causes," said Randy Noles, author of "Orange Blossom Boys," a historical book about "The Orange Blossom Special," one of the songs that Cash helped make famous. "He wasn't like any country-western singer I'd ever heard before."

Noles, 48, discovered Cash on the 1960s TV variety show the singer hosted on ABC. He had tuned in to see folksinger Bob Dylan, but was surprised to be mesmerized by Cash instead.

"Dylan was the coolest thing I could imagine, but when I watched the show it turned out it wasn't Bob Dylan that impressed me, it was Cash. The show was so raw and dark and real. It was very stark and he was very stark, like somebody reached through the black-and-white TV set, grabbed me by the collar and said, `You have to watch this.'"

Cash's death comes after the loss of his second wife and soulmate June Carter Cash, who died at 73 on May 15 after a critical illness following heart valve surgery. Those close to the couple say her death was a blow for Cash. It was June who saved her husband's life and career in the late 1960s, when his music was going off the tracks because of drug addiction and irrational outbursts. In a famous incident, he once kicked out the footlights on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry.

She helped him kick amphetamines cold turkey by relentlessly searching the couple's Tennessee home to find the pills and flush them down the toilet. She also introduced him to fundamentalist Christianity.

Cash spoke about his wife at a brief, unannounced concert performance recently near the Carter family home in Hiltons, Va., a show that drew several thousand fans without any publicity.

"This is the first time I've been here without my baby," said Cash. "The pain of a loss like that, it's just indescribable. But this is part of the healing process for me. And I know June is here with us, because she loved this place and she loved all of you."

Even in failing health, Cash continued to find solace in music as he had since childhood.

He was born Feb. 26, 1932, in Kingsland, Ark. His father, Ray, was a sawmill and railway worker who moved the family to Dyess, Ark., to work as part of a federal project to reclaim swampland near the Mississippi River. The family's rugged rural existence would become the fodder for several memorable songs.

Cash sang about a childhood memory in the 1959 hit "Five Feet High and Risin'," as well as "Pickin' Time," "Christmas As I Knew It" and "Cisco Clifton's Filling Station."

The story is that rock `n` roll pioneer Carl Perkins wrote "Daddy Sang Bass" about the Cash family.

By the time he was a teen, he was writing his own songs, inspired by the country music he heard on the radio. While he was in high school, he sang on the Arkansas radio station KLCN.

Later, he moved to Detroit to work briefly in an auto factory before enlisting in the military as a radio operator in Germany during the Korean War.

After the war, Cash was selling washing machines in Memphis, Tenn., when he nervously approached Phillips for an audition at Sun Records.

"You could tell he was a very internal guy," said Phillips last year. "You could tell he was a person who was very earthy in a way, yet highly religious. I don't know if a word from the Bible was spoken, but you could tell he was a person of conviction. He had this feeling about him."

He also had a voice like none that Phillips had ever heard.

"I told him, 'I know one thing, if I don't get something out of you, it will be my fault because that voice is distinctive.'"

Accompanied by the Tennessee Two, guitarist Luther Perkins and upright bassist Marshall Grant, Cash recorded classic songs with Phillips: "Cry, Cry, Cry," "Big River" and "I Walk the Line."

The music melded the episodic stories of traditional country songs with the raucous twang and syncopated beats of rock-a-billy. It was just the beginning of a career that would continually blur boundaries, often to the consternation of country purists.

In the 1960s, Cash was among the few in Nashville to openly embrace a scruffy-looking folksinger named Bob Dylan, inviting him to appear on his weekly TV variety series and singing harmony on "Girl From the North Country" on Dylan's "Nashville Skyline."

He inspired iconoclastic outlaws such as Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson to push the boundaries of the studio gloss that dominated country music until the 1970s.

Two decades later, Cash would play songs by Tom Petty and Nine Inch Nails on a series of critically acclaimed roots albums created in an unlikely alliance with rap producer Rick Rubin.

The video for "Hurt," the Trent Reznor song on Cash's most recent album, garnered airplay on VH1, MTV and CMT. It's a poignant combination of vintage clips, religious symbolism and new footage of the ailing Cash, his face weathered and fingers trembling.

Despite health problems, Cash was working relentlessly on material for a new album at the time of his death.

"I think he still strikes people like he did me when I was 15," said Noles. "This generation sees the same things in him that I did. There's just this totally honest, totally real voice. Trends come and go, but the real stuff holds up. He was definitely the real thing."