Johnny Cash

In January 1968, Johnny Cash walked onto a stage in the dining hall of Folsom State Prison and opened with "Folsom Prison Blues." The inmates roared. The live album he recorded that day revived his career, and a year later he did it again at San Quentin. Cash had never served a prison sentence himself, but he sang about prisoners with such conviction that many people assumed he had, and he spent decades advocating for prison reform.

His chart puts that empathy in an unusually fitting place. He was born at 7:30 a.m. on February 26, 1932, in Kingsland, Arkansas, a day before Elizabeth Taylor, a time rated A by Astro-Databank. His Sun is in Pisces in the twelfth house, with Mercury and Mars in Pisces beside it, and Pisces is also rising. Pisces is the sign of compassion, suffering and identification with the outcast; the twelfth house is traditionally the house of prisons, hospitals and confinement. Astrologers could hardly design a more literal chart for the man who sang for convicts.

He grew up poor on a cotton farm in Dyess, Arkansas, part of a New Deal resettlement colony. When he was twelve, his older brother Jack was killed in a sawmill accident, a loss Cash said haunted him for the rest of his life. After serving in the Air Force as a radio operator in Germany, he recorded for Sun Records in Memphis, where "I Walk the Line" became his first big hit in 1956.

His Moon is in Scorpio in the eighth house, the area of death, crisis and transformation. Scorpio is intense and drawn to darkness, and in the eighth it describes an emotional life lived close to the edge. Cash's songs are full of murder, grief, sin and redemption, and in the 1960s he fought a serious addiction to amphetamines that nearly killed him. He credited June Carter, whom he married in 1968, with helping him survive it.

Venus in Aries sits in his first house, adding a blunt, passionate warmth to the somber persona. His romance with June, who co-wrote "Ring of Fire," one of his signature songs, is one of the great love stories in country music.

He explained his trademark black clothes in the 1971 song "Man in Black": he wore it, he sang, for the poor, the beaten down and the prisoner who "has long paid for his crime." The Pisces identification with the suffering was not an image. It was the point.

In the 1990s he began a late-career revival with the producer Rick Rubin on a series of spare records called American Recordings. His 2002 cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt," and its video, became an elegy for his own life. June died in May 2003, and Cash died four months later. The man in the twelfth-house Pisces chart had spent his life singing for the people locked away, and he never stopped.