Country music icon Johnny Cash was being treated for pneumonia today at a Tennessee hospital and was reported in serious but stable condition.
The 68-year-old singer was admitted to Nashville's Baptist Hospital yesterday morning for the recurring problem, the hospital said.
In October 1997 he was diagnosed with Shy-Drager syndrome, an illness similar to Parkinson's disease that attacks the nervous system and affects muscle control. But in an interview in 2000 Cash said that was a misdiagnosis and that he was steadily improving, although he did not say what the source of his ill health was.
He has been treated numerous times at hospitals in recent years for pneumonia and has not played on the road since 1997. He has sung at special occasions, however, and recently released a new album, "American III: Solitary Man."
With sales of more than 50 million records during a career spanning five decades, he has won multiple Grammy awards and is the only person to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as well as the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Known as country music's "Man in Black," Cash is credited with being the inspiration for a generation of Nashville upstarts.
His fame comes from a distinctive bass voice with which he sings of coal miners and sharecroppers, assembly line workers and trainmen, families and lovers, convicts, cowboys and Native American Indians.
Reuters