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Johnny Cash's "One Piece at a Time" Cadillac
"One Piece at a Time" is a humorous rockabilly song written by Wayne Kemp and recorded by Johnny Cash in 1976. It would be the last song performed by Cash to reach number one on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart.
The song tells of a man who, in 1949, leaves his home in Kentucky to pursue work at General Motors in Detroit, Michigan. The singer assembles wheels on Cadillacs, watching each one roll by day after day on the assembly line, knowing that he will never be able to afford one. Beginning almost immediately, he and a co-worker decide to steal a Cadillac, using their assembly line jobs to obtain the parts via salami slicing. He takes the small parts home hidden in his large lunchbox; larger parts are smuggled out in his co-worker's mobile home. The process of accumulating all the necessary parts turns out to take over 24 years (the song mentions that the transmission was from 1953 and the engine was from 1973), but once they have what they think is a complete car, they assemble the pieces. The result is an odd-looking Cadillac created from parts of many different models and whose pieces do not fit together very well (for example, it had only one tail fin and three headlights, two on the left and one on the right). The singer's wife is surprised at the outcome but wants a ride. However, the folks at the courthouse were not as pleased – it took the "whole staff" to type up the vehicle title, which ended up weighing 60 pounds. The song ends with a truck driver inquiring about the "psychobilly Cadillac". After saying that "you could say I went down to the factory and picked it up, it's cheaper that way", the reply echoes Leroy Van Dyke's song "The Auctioneer" as the owner lists all the model years (starting with '49 and continuing into the early 70s) that went into making the car.
This car was built by Bill Patch along with the Lions Club of Welch, Oklahoma, to raise funds to build a new civic auditorium. Mr. Cash himself came to the town to perform and thus help the fundraiser. |
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