Johnny Cash was an infamous country rock singer from the USA. He became ill in 1997, when he was diagnosed with the degenerative disease Shy-Drager syndrome, (a rare, progressively degenerative disease of the autonomic nervous system.)
This diagnosis however was later altered to autonomic neuropathy associated with diabetes (affecting mostly the internal organs such as the bladder muscles.) Cash’s illness forced him to give up his touring circuit.
He was hospitalized in 1998 with severe pneumonia. He died on 12 September 2003 just three days after being discharged from Baptist Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, following a bout of pancreatitis.
Cash was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1980 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. Two years before his death, in 2001, he received the National Medal of the Arts for artistic excellence.