The Automobile Sales Company

The Automobile Sales Company stood at 309 Union Avenue, on the stretch of Union that Memphis called Automobile Row, and the first members of Johnny Cash's band met there. Marshall Grant, who had settled in Memphis in 1947, took a job there as a mechanic. Luther Perkins worked beside him, specializing in electrical systems and radios. When business was slow the two played gospel on guitars, and a co-worker, steel player Red Kernodle, sometimes joined them. Another man at the dealership, Roy Cash, heard them and promised an introduction to his guitar-mad younger brother, who was finishing his hitch in the Air Force. That introduction came in 1954. Neither Grant nor Perkins was much of a virtuoso, and that turned out to matter. They had both been playing rhythm guitar, so Grant moved to a bass he hardly knew how to tune and Perkins took an electric guitar and played the plainest lead he could manage. The boom-chicka rhythm that came out of those limits carried Cash into Sun Studio, a few blocks east along Union, and for years after. Grant remembered playing guitars in the grease pit when no cars needed him. The name Tennessee Two came later, at Sun. Grant outlived the others and died at 83 as the last survivor of the group. A building at 309 Union, by then a restaurant supply house, came down in December 2019 when the blocks along that part of Union were cleared for a redevelopment.