Tag: Johnny Cash

Johnny Cash – Unchained American 9 43097-2 (1996)

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Rather than do another solo acoustic album after smashing success with that approach, Johnny Cash teams up with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as his backing band to deliver something a lot more energetic and loud.  Other guests include Flea, Lindsey Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood.  If American Recordings needed to strip everything away to prove that Cash’s voice was still a force to be reckoned with, then this follow-up is granted the space to demonstrate that it was Nashville keeping Cash down and out for so many years.  It’s like this:  Cash was always an outsider to the country music establishment.  But along the way, he started courting it.  Those were bleak years.  When paired with a rock band, incorporating a few rock songs, and working with a rock producer, Cash can still cook.  Nashville just seems so irrelevant.  This album demonstrates versatility, and refuses to let some kind of formula settle in.  It’s probably the most energetic record he made since Carryin’ On almost thirty years earlier.  The dirty secret though is that this album is much like The Mystery of Life from five years earlier or Rockabilly Blues from more than 15 years earlier just with better production and better songs.  Another interesting comparison would be to Elvis Country (I’m 10,000 Years Old) from Elvis‘ comeback, with 25 years’ difference in perspective on what constituted a “contemporary” sound.  It was fortunate Cash made this record when he did, because health problems would not permit it just a few years later.  Key tracks:  “Spiritual,” “I’ve Been Everywhere,” “Mean-Eyed Cat,” “Memories Are Made of This,” and “Rowboat.”

Johnny Cash – American Recordings American 491797 2 (1994)

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Johnny Cash made one of the biggest comebacks in memory with American Recordings (perhaps only Louis Armstrong‘s surprise 1964 hit “Hello, Dolly!” comes close).  Cash had struggled for the preceding two decades to maintain an interest in recording as well as to find a producer that could do justice to his older voice.  It wasn’t that Cash’s many previous albums were all bad, but they were uneven and often misguided.  They usually tried to take him and fit him into current trends, however awkwardly (think Leonard Cohen‘s unfortunate meeting with producer Phil Spector on Death of a Ladies’ Man).  That was a mistake because it tended to devalue what made Cash so great — that rich baritone voice and his disarming earnestness — by insisting that he could only succeed by transforming himself into something else.  Unlikely enough, though, by the late 1980s Cash was quietly changing all that.  He made a few albums that, while still rather mediocre, had a stately feel that was quite natural for his new coarser and more gravelly voice, which subtly (or unsubtly – “Beans for Breakfast”) had more vibrato than years before.  But he was still dragging along a backing band that should have been put out to pasture long ago.  And the production values on so many of his albums had still lurched between various fads, from countrypolitan to urban cowboy, that haven’t aged well.

Rick Rubin, who rose to fame in the world of hip-hop and later extended his reach to rock and metal, sought out Cash and made him the key signing for his newly-formulated record label American Recordings (formerly Def American).  What Rubin did wasn’t all that surprising.  The popular television specials “MTV Unplugged” had been presenting a variety of rock/pop musicians in low-key acoustic settings with great success.  And other established artists like John Cale (Fragments of a Rainy Season) and Bob Dylan (Good as I Been to You) had found renewed success (at least critically) with solo acoustic recordings in recent years.  Also, Willie Nelson had recently released the collection of stripped down recordings of old tunes (The IRS Tapes: Who’ll Buy My Memories?) to help pay off well-publicized tax debts.  Rubin applied that popular trend to Cash, and it was a perfect fit.  All the dross that cluttered Cash’s albums for so long was immediately stripped away.  Rather than trying to sound like what was popular at the time, he could just sound timeless.  It’s only his voice and an acoustic guitar.  Everything comes through on record very clear and natural.  Cash gets to be Cash without anything to stand in the way.  It helps too that Cash gets to re-record songs he’s done before (like the hauntingly grisly “Delia’s Gone”) with a smattering of other cover songs that seem tailor-made for him.  By keying into the darker side of Cash’s music, this album also appealed to rock audiences that maybe had heard the name Johnny Cash but never bothered with his music before.  While still ignored by much of the country music establishment — which incidentally had not done much of value for decades — this album succeeded in launching Cash into the booming music market of the 1990s, the last time (as of this writing) there was any effort by mainstream media to push music of any substantive quality.  Of course, a big reason that Cash was able to find so much commercial success in this comeback was the marketing effort put forward on his behalf for the first time in a long time.  It was all black & white photography, bold lettering of the name CASH, and a confident, lived-in and knowing ambiance, with a hint of rural underclass danger.  Rubin does deserve credit for looking to Cash when no one else would, and for matching him up with a recording style and marketing package that suited him.  Plenty of songs from these sessions that didn’t make it onto the album ended up on the very good box set Unearthed.

Johnny Cash – Ride This Train Columbia CS 8255 (1960)

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When Cash signed to Columbia, one of his two initial requests was to do a concept album (the other being to do a gospel album).  Ride This Train is a concept album built around stories and songs about American working people of the Nineteenth Century, the places they called home, and their exploits and travails.  The album features spoken narrations by Cash set to sounds of an old coal-powered steam train interspersed among songs with generally spare, acoustic musical accompaniment.  The approach is modeled on the format of old radio shows.  Cash is acting.  Looking back over 50 years later, the closest equivalent would be the radio variety show A Prairie Home Companion, with a lot less emphasis on comedy.  As these kinds of albums go, this one ain’t all bad.  The stories are kind of intriguing and all of the songs are very nice, though Cash may have done a little better with the same basic format on Sings the Ballads of the True West.  Here, he stretches a bit far in trying to portray some sort of authentic aura of the old west, lapsing into the role of amateur archivist or anthropologist. This is far from essential Cash and will be enjoyed most by established fans and listeners interested in something along the lines of musical theater.

Johnny Cash – Songs of Our Soil Columbia CS 8148 (1959)

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Songs of Our Soil was an important album in developing the sound of most of Johnny Cash’s albums of the following decade.  The Fabulous Johnny Cash had mostly continued with the same reverb-laden minimalist country with a rock-inflected beat and emphasis on love songs as on Sings the Songs That Made Him Famous.  But here the guitar is less loud, and things like a piano feature on occasion too.  Backing vocals by The Jordanaires are frequent.  Cash’s voice is a little more distinct and prominent.  Reverb and twang are quietly diminished.  The result is something a little more folk than country sounding, with a sophistication more palatable to pop audiences.  This seemed to arise from a time when Cash’s overt attempts at success had already been made, and having used up those commercial ideas he tended to just kind of go with the flow in more eclectic settings — a bit like small-scale Nashville versions of the great Los Angeles “Wrecking Crew” recordings from the 1960s.  The homegrown character of a guy who managed to maintain a successful music career through the rest of his life on “his” terms still shines through in an effortless kind of way.  It all works pretty well.  Cash does seem just a little stiff in places though, and some listeners don’t seem to care for the backing vocals.  But when in later years he swapped the male backing vocals for female ones from his future wife June Carter and members of The Carter Family, things settled into the form that worked so well on many albums to come.

When it comes to the songs, a lot deal with death, but more importantly they conjure up Americana themes a lot like the view of pre-industrial America later featured in the film Days of Heaven.  Cash avoids too many romance songs and manages to focus on farm and country life without any hint of rural naiveté.  This might be called the first concept album he did, though the concept is pretty mild.  The opener “Drink to Me” is an adaptation of the old English song “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes” (which was based on a 1616 poem by Ben Jonson derived from Greek verses by Philostratus).  On the posthumously-released Personal File Cash revealed that it was the first song he ever performed publicly, for a high school event.  It also was the song the little owlet Owl Jolson didn’t want to sing in the classic 1936 Merrie Melodies cartoon by Tex Avery “I Love to Singa.”  “I Want to Go Home” is also an adaptation, of “The John B. Sails,” which would be performed with greater success by The Beach Boys as “Sloop John B” on Pet Sounds a few years later.

Most listeners will probably want to head to other Cash recordings first, and come back to this if they like his early 60s material to see how he arrived there.  This one is still pretty welcoming, suitable for repeat listens, and really one of the more durable albums of Cash’s whole career.  It isn’t just an offering from the “Johnny Cash” persona.  It comes closer to revealing the guy who created the persona of “Johnny Cash” than anything else to this point, and even much of what came later.

Johnny Cash – Johnny Cash With His Hot and Blue Guitar Sun LP-1220 (1957)

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Johnny Cash was an artist who sort of arrived with all his major talents intact right from the beginning.  His music evolved and changed over time, for sure.  But his velvety bass-baritone voice and endearing brand of time-worn country wisdom are all in full effect on this, his first full-length LP.  Being the early days of the LP format, this material wasn’t strictly recorded for the LP and many of these songs were previously released as singles.  They were recorded between May 1955 and August of 1957.  Cash plays with guitarist Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant, the original Tennessee Two.  It’s a very spare and minimalist sound, which lets Cash’s inimitable voice take the spotlight.  Perkins was a guitarist of pretty limited means.  He really couldn’t play much more than a simple boom-chicka-boom rhythm, without any complex solos to speak of.  He does a lot of the typical country strumming, alternating between low notes and high notes in the style of Maybelle Carter.  But it’s iconic.  Perkins was the perfect guitarist to support Cash.  His playing has a little bit of rock influence, but that just provides a little, subtly energetic, minimally urban counterpoint to Cash’s traditional country leanings.  The other key aspect of the sound of this record is the reverb.  Like much of the music recorded at the legendary Sun Studios in Memphis Tennessee, the reverb drenches the music in seductive, politely dangerous charisma.

The songs here are great.  They include Cash’s first hit, “Cry! Cry! Cry!,” a Hank Williams tune, “(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle,” and a song probably written by Charles Noell about a 1902 train wreck, “The Wreck of the Old ’97.”  “I Walk the Line” was a song Cash liked to say was his best, and it’s hard to argue.  Another of his most famous compositions, “Folsom Prison Blues,” was written after Cash saw the film Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison while in the U.S. Air Force stationed in Germany.  He pretty liberally borrowed the melody and lyrical structure of Gordon Jenkins‘ “Crescent City Blues” (part of “The Second Dream – The Conductor” from Gordon Jenkins’ Seven Dreams (A Musical Fantasy)), and paid Jenkins in the 1970s for what he borrowed.  He also adapted the famous line “I shot a man in Reno/just to watch him die” from Jimmie Rodgers‘ “Blue Yodel (T for Texas)“: “I’m gonna shoot poor Thelma/just to see her jump and fall.”  (Rodgers’ song in turn was a pastiche drawn from numerous sources). But Cash’s song is superior to any of its reference points.  “I Was There When It Happened” is a country gospel number.  Cash wanted to perform gospel music from the beginning, but opportunities were limited to record it in the early days.  It would remain a factor in his music for his entire career.

What made Cash so special is damn hard to put your finger on.  He sang about a lot of the ordinary aspects of life: work, travel, liberty, death, religion.  He did do romance and love songs, but a lot less than many other famous singers.  When he did do them, they weren’t anything like the hyper-sexualized fare that came to dominate rock music.  There was a connection to the “old weird America” that Greil Marcus described with respect to Harry Smith’s iconic Anthology of American Folk Music.  Cash’s songwriting, as well as his song selection, tended to emphasize an “ordinary” individual’s reaction to extreme situations: being confined to prison, natural disasters, threats to making a living, and so on.  He confronted these situations with varied amounts of humor, lament, determination, dignity and enthusiasm.  Yeah, Cash could take these situations and make them fun and funny.  But that’s just the way his music reflected how human being sometimes deal with stress and tragedy, and what they aspire to in the best of times.

Cash only stayed at Sun Records for about three years.  Sun continued to release his recordings for years after he left, in part because Cash left for a bigger label before his Sun contract was finished, forcing him to do a few contract-fulfillment recording sessions after he announced his departure.  Although this album sounds unmistakably of its time, it doesn’t really sound “dated” at all, in the sense of losing its appeal to modern audiences.  This is one of the essential Cash albums.  There is not a bad track on the whole thing.

Johnny Cash – At Folsom Prison (Legacy Edition) Legacy 88697 32742 2 (2008)

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The “Legacy Edition” of Johnny Cash’s iconic At Folsom Prison (1968) presents the two (!) complete concerts used as the basis for the original album together with a documentary on DVD and expanded liner notes.

Michael Streissguth, author of Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison: The Making of a Masterpiece, provided the liner notes and coordinated the documentary.  He does a great job digging up valuable information about Cash, his music, the recording of this album, and the people who made it happen–including the inmates.  Bonus DVDs have become a familiar way for record labels to inflate the cost of an album, but often provide only grainy home-video quality concert footage or what seems like the security tape footage from studio recording sessions.  They are so often not worth it!  But this DVD is an exception.  Not only is there live footage from the shows that were recorded for the album, but there are interviews with former Cash associates, audience members, and surviving family members reflecting on contributions of the deceased.  One inmate interviewed, Millard Dedmon, offers some pretty amazing insights on what it meant to be locked up in prison in 1960s America, and how the inmates welcomed Cash or anybody who took enough interest in them to make an appearance.

Many perhaps assume that the original At Folsom Prison album is the complete concert Johnny Cash played January 13, 1968.  That’s wrong for many reasons.  There were two morning shows that day.  Two were thought needed to ensure that enough suitable takes would be captured.  The recording was a project Cash had wanted to do for a while.  He had played prison concerts a number of times previous, and knew the setting would make for a great recording.  Knowing that a recording was being made, there were rehearsals of course.  During rehearsals, he learned a song by then-current Folsom inmate Glen Sherley, “Greystone Chapel,” passed along on a demo tape.  In the second show, they play that song multiple times.  But surprisingly, almost all of the original album was culled from the first show, with the exception of “I Got Stripes,” “Give My Love to Rose,” and some between-song prison environmental ambiance. Cash of course plays one of his most famous songs: “Folsom Prison Blues,” which actually lifted the melody and lyrical structure of Gordon Jenkins‘ “Crescent City Blues,” with the famous line “I shot a man in Reno/just to watch him die” adapted from Jimmie Rodgers‘ “Blue Yodel (T for Texas),” “I’m gonna shoot poor Thelma/just to see her jump and fall.”

Some of the little “flubs” in the concert recording are actually planned gags, like when June Carter (she married Cash less than two months later) jokes, “I’m talkin’ with my mouth!”  She says the same thing in both shows, and it seems a lot less charming the second time you hear it.  Cash’s question, “Is this water?” and quip about drinking some that had “run off” something is also the same joke he delivered in July of 1964 at the Newport Folk Festival.  He also manages to forget the words to songs at times and generally miss the mark on his vocals.  But that’s more noticeable in the second show.  It’s possible now to wonder, though, whether he planned to do it.

The way the original album came together seems all the more impressive after hearing the “Legacy Edition.”  The original trimmed out the weaker performances and kept a remarkably good flow, more so than either of the original shows.  This expanded edition actually takes away some of the mystique.  Still, “The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer” is nice to have (though it was previously added as a bonus track to reissue editions starting with 1999’s At Folsom Prison).

As an aside, it’s worth noting that prison populations were quite different in the late 1960s than at this writing over four decades later.  Since then, prison populations have soared 600%, and there was a distinctly racist element to the so-called “war on drugs” started by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s that put mostly (poor) black men in prison for reasons other than criminality (read sociologist Loïc Wacquant for more detail).  In other words, the crowd in Folsom that January day in 1968 was mostly more serious criminals, like bank robbers (Glen Sherley), armed robbers, kidnappers and rapists (Millard Dedmon), and probably worse.  Cash still empathized with the audience.  He made efforts to advocate for prison reform.  He had lobbied along with Reagan and Billy Graham to get Glen Sherley paroled, and then took on Sherley into his troupe for a while.  Although strangely some people write Cash off as a typical country redneck, or maybe a typical rural populist, he actually wasn’t much like any of those things.  Although there was somewhat of a sneer whenever mixing art and politics came up, Cash did do so repeatedly.  Most of Cash’s brand of “activism” was just about the notion that everyone deserves a fair shake and should be treated with dignity–even convicts.  That of course put him at odds with the American political establishment built upon a very different foundation, notwithstanding some pretensions to the contrary.  So he couldn’t help but be “political” in bristling with the way things were.  But he also wasn’t just another rural populist, with views that chafed against the situation for ordinary folks in urban centers.  Cash often sang about the industrialized North, and someone writing in the Village Voice years ago hypothesized that Cash was a little more “liberal” than your average country star because he grew up on a New Deal farm in Dyess, Arkansas.  Cash called the town “a socialistic setup” in his first autobiography.  It also may have been relevant to this album’s popular success that it came out in 1968, a pivotal year in history, when progressive and liberal social norms made breakthroughs into wider acceptance.  None of that matters a whole lot to Cash’s own attitudes — though he was, in a sense, positioning himself as the exception to rural ambivalence and hostility to the New Deal.  What did matter was that despite how big a star he became, Cash could always pull off a country-simple charm that stuck with him just about his whole life.  For At Folsom Prison, that charm was paired with a raw energy and palpable sense of connection with the audience that makes this a one-of-a-kind document.

Johnny Cash – The Rambler Columbia KC 34833 (1977)

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Johnny Cash was a pioneer in making “concept” albums.  These included some with between-song narrations or skits.  The very last one he ever made was 1977’s The Rambler.  In some ways, it’s the most interesting of them all, though it is a little rough around the edges.  The basic premise is that Cash plays The Rambler, a sort of “wise old man” character driving across the country.  Along the way he picks up The Fisherman, who is something of a reluctant hitchhiker (the Rambler has to persuade him to come along), and The Cowgirl, who claims to have killed her “old man” and talks about cheating a pinball machine — which only cost a nickel — to play for over two hours.  The dialogue/skits are woven together with songs that pick up on themes and events mentioned in the skits.  What is different about The Rambler from earlier concept albums like Ride This Train and America: A 200-Year Salute in Story and Song is that this one is explicitly theatrical, with Cash acting out a role, not merely speaking as a narrator.  This is also the only concept album Cash made that had a contemporary focus.  All his other concept albums looked back on historical topics or had nostalgic themes.  It is also worth noting that The Rambler is one of the only albums Cash wrote entirely by himself (From Sea to Shining Sea seems to be the only other he wrote all by himself).

The story carried through the album deals with the possibilities of open-ended road trips, passing scenery, romantic interests back home, people’s use for religion, factory work.  For instance, “Wednesday Car” is in the tradition of songs Cash had recorded earlier in the decade like “Oney” and “One Piece at a Time.”  It’s about an auto factory where the only day of the week that workers were in the right frame of mind to do good work was Wednesday, so you hope you have a car made on a Wednesday.  The Rambler says he has one.  It’s a commentary that was somewhat specific to its time.  Anyone who owned or rode in a big 1970s American-made car knew that quality control was notoriously bad and many cars were “lemons” that didn’t work well even when brand new.   A few decades on some listeners might not appreciate the context for the song, though.

The late 1970s were one of the very worst periods of Johnny Cash’s recording career.  Thanks to his TV show that ended in 1971, he was still riding the tail end of his biggest wave of popularity.  He was in demand as a live performer, and his grueling touring schedule didn’t exactly leave a lot of room to spend time on recording.  As a result, the album occasionally feels rushed, and certain songs and dialogues feel like they would have benefited from maybe a few extra takes.  Also, a few dated production effects hold back some songs.  It’s that way with “No Earthly Good,” which would have been better replaced with the superior acoustic demo version posthumously released on Personal File.

While not Cash’s finest moment by any means, The Rambler is one of his best of the late 70s and certainly the most interesting offering of the era.  It fits somewhere in the continuum of uniquely American travelogues, like Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory, Jack Keruac’s On the Road, Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop, and a host of others.  Cash does okay with his foray into the genre.  Even though the album is theatrical and fictional, the format allows him to really run with a lot of themes that have coursed through his work.  The topics seem meaningful to him and his treatments pretty genuine.  The very idea of traveling around the country aimlessly is pretty radical.  It seems to be premised on the idea that people aren’t entirely independent, and are unable to completely control their own destiny, because of ties to “the system”.  But, maybe, traveling long and far enough, some chance will arise to kind of break free and remake your life.  Though it is worth mentioning that the Rambler character also hints at the “tramp” archetype of an unemployed worker in an industrial economy, wandering aimlessly in search of work.  This was something with some historical relevance at the time the album was released, with “outsourcing” trends beginning and well-paid employment in factories coming under sharply increasing assault.

If you come to The Rambler just looking for tunes, you’ll be disappointed.  To be precise, only about 57% of the album is actually made up of songs, proper.  Frankly, none of these songs are that memorable, individually.  Taken as a whole, though, this album is a nice experience.  There aren’t many albums — if any — quite like it.

Johnny Cash – America: A 200-Year Salute in Story and Song Columbia KC 31645 (1972)

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The early 1970s were a turbulent time in America, with the Watergate scandal, the Vietnam war, the biggest economic crisis the Western world had faced in many decades, continued fights to implement integration, women’s liberation, and much more.  Oh, and there was a lot of stuff happening to celebrate the 200-year anniversary of the nation’s independence from England in 1776.  Along comes Johnny Cash, with this album, depicting him on the cover in a military-style jacket on a decrepit farmhouse porch behind a flag, and subtitled “A 200-Year Salute in Story and Song”.  The theme is American history.  It looks pretty heavy-handed on paper.  The thing is, he does a pretty good job with this concept.  He re-records a few tunes he had done before, and performs an assortment of other songs, mostly new ones written himself.  There is a lot of between-song spoken dialog, and even a recitation of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.  Some of these tracks were recorded exclusively for the astronauts on the Apollo 14 space mission (the one where Alan Shepard hit golf balls on the Moon), but ended up here instead.  Like much of Cash’s early 70s output, the songs have a minimalist, folky feel, and there are only a couple of cuts with his trademark boom-chicka-boom rhythm (“Paul Revere,” “These Are My People”).  And while this looks a lot like a very rudimentary recitation of the standard “story of America” taught to little kids in grade school, it ends up being slightly more nuanced than that.  “Big Foot,” about the Wounded Knee Massacre, wasn’t something frequently taught in school history classes — would Cash have dug Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States when it came out years later?  This release predated the Pine Ridge Incident, erupting in response to the anniversary of Wounded Knee, by only a matter of months.  Yet Cash elsewhere celebrates genocidal madmen like Christopher Columbus, so there are still contradictions.  Listeners who want Johnny in good voice, recorded well with a crisp and talented backing band will probably find lots to like here.  Those who focus on lyrics more than the instrumental contributions probably will care a lot less for this one.  In any event, this was one of Cash’s last concepts albums.