Which country artist was known as “The Man in Black”?

Johnny Cash had been wearing his all-black outfits for years without bothering to explain himself to anyone. But after spending a weekend talking with students at Vanderbilt University in 1971, he was inspired to finally put his reasoning into a song. He wrote "Man in Black" and kept revising it right up until showtime, then performed it on "The Johnny Cash Show" on ABC using note cards because the lyrics were so fresh. The song revealed that Cash had been wearing black to mourn the poor, the imprisoned, and the soldiers dying in Vietnam while everyone else was driving fancy cars and pretending everything was fine. The network executives were already nervous about Cash's political content, and this protest anthem didn't help matters. His show got cancelled just over a month later as part of the rural purge, when networks dumped country shows to chase urban audiences. The song hit number three on the country charts and turned what fans thought was just a fashion quirk into one of country music's most powerful statements.