"One Piece at a Time" is a country novelty song written by Wayne Kemp and recorded by Johnny Cash in 1976. It was the last song performed by Cash to reach number one on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart. "One Piece at a Time" was credited to Johnny Cash & The Tennessee Three.
Chart performance
Build A Cadillac Video
The song's story
The singer leaves his home in Kentucky in 1949 to pursue work at General Motors in Detroit, Michigan. He 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 of his own.
Beginning almost immediately, he and a co-worker decide to "steal" a Cadillac by way of 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 motor home.
The process of accumulating all the necessary parts turns out to take over 24 years (at the end of the song, when he is asked about the year of the car, the singer's answer starts with 1949 and ends at 1973 as the song fades out), but once they have what they think is a complete car, they attempt to assemble the pieces. The result is an odd-looking Cadillac created from parts of many different models (the song mentions that the transmission was from 1953 and the engine was from 1973) and what 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, though all three headlights worked when activated).
The singer's wife is surprised at the outcome but wants a ride in it, anyway. Townspeople began laughing at the singer's unique car as he takes it to have it registered. 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 CB radio conversation between the singer and a truck driver inquiring about the "psychobilly Cadillac", in which the singer replies, "you could say I went to the factory and picked it up; it's cheaper that way".
The song is in a moderate tempo in the key of F major, with a main chord pattern of F-B?-C7-F. The verses are spoken-word.
In popular culture
- Bruce Fitzpatrick, owner of Abernathy Auto Parts and Hilltop Auto Salvage in Nashville, Tennessee, was asked by the promoters of the song to build the vehicle for international promotion. Fitzpatrick had all the models of Cadillacs mentioned in the song when it was released and built a car using the song as a model. The result was presented to Cash in April 1976. It was parked outside The House of Cash in Hendersonville, Tennessee, until someone could find a place to store it. After The House of Cash Museum closed, Bruce Fitzpatrick retrieved the '49-'70 Cadillac with a wrecker and brought it back to Abernathy Auto Parts and Hilltop Auto Salvage in Nashville, Tennessee, and crushed it.
- The song was covered by Chicago rock band Tub Ring for the 2001 Johnny Cash tribute album, Cash from Chaos.
- The car from the "One Piece at a Time" video is at the Historic Auto Attractions museum in Roscoe, Illinois. This is a different car than the one made by Bruce Fitzpatrick.
- An attempt at building a vehicle "one piece at a time" was completed successfully over a five-year period by a Chinese motorcycle assembly line worker in Chongqing.
- This is the first recorded usage of the term "psychobilly". Aided by its later usage by The Cramps and Reverend Horton Heat, the term came to be identified with a genre of music (one that existed since the 1960s, see the Legendary Stardust Cowboy and Hasil Adkins, for instance) crossing rockabilly with punk rock.
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