Johnny Cash

The main merit of Johnny Cash was that he built the first bridge between the musical environment of Nashville (which still dominated the recording industry), that of rock and roll, and that of protest folksingers in the style of Woody Guthrie. His ballads, marked by a marching bass line and the glacial tone with which he told his stories, gave country music an epic character.

Raised in Arkansas, after spending four years in the army, he tried his luck in Memphis: with Perkins, Lewis, and Presley, he formed the quartet of Sun stars at the dawn of rock and roll. Accompanied by guitarist Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant, Cash recorded fluent, cadenced ballads such as Folsom Prison Blues (1956), also known as Understand Your Man, and I Walk The Line (1956).

But Cash found his true vocation in Nashville, where he fused (like many others) country, pop, and rock, excelling with the rockabilly Get Rhythm and the hillbilly Rock Island Line. With His Hot and Blue Guitar (Sun, 1957) is the album of that era, containing those singles and his version of The Wreck Of The Old 97. Fluent, melodic, dramatic, able to wrap his stories in heroic atmospheres, during that period he delivered some intense secular sermons of deep morality, such as Jack Clement�s Ballad Of The Teenage Queen (1958), Guess Things Happen That Way (1958), and Don't Take Your Guns To Town (1959).

After moving to the Los Angeles area, an alcoholic and drug addict, Cash turned into a committed folksinger but failed to win over the hearts of the youth. Albums of ever-decreasing quality followed, such as Fabulous (Columbia, 1958), Hymns (Columbia, 1959), Songs Of Our Soil (Columbia, 1959), Now There Was a Song (Columbia, 1959), and Ride This Train (Columbia, 1960), one of the least bad�a history of the USA through its �train songs��as well as Sound of Johnny Cash (Columbia, 1962), Blood Sweat And Tears (Columbia, 1963), etc. His fortunes were revived by the hits Busted (1963), written by Harlan Howard, and Rings Of Fire (1963), written by June Carter. Cash had moved to Greenwich Village and had tried to become part of the new generation of singer-songwriters (Bob Dylan being the model), but without much success. The albums Ring of Fire (Columbia, 1963), Bitter Tears (Columbia, 1964), Sings The Ballads Of The True West (Columbia, 1965), Ballads of the True West (Columbia, 1965), Everybody Loves a Nut (Columbia, 1966), and Happiness Is You (Columbia, 1966) actually marked a progressive descent into the hell of drug addiction, from which he emerged only in 1967. June Carter cleaned him up, married him, and converted him to religion.

Cash thus became a banal country singer (Long-Legged Guitar Pickin' Man, 1967; Daddy Sang Bass, 1968; A Boy Named Sue, 1969, written by Shel Silverstein and also known as The Man in Black; Sunday Morning Coming Down, 1970; Flesh and Blood, 1970).

It was in California that Johnny Cash, already a country star in Nashville, first performed a concert in a prison (in January 1959 at the infamous state prison of San Quentin), the first one of about 30 prison concerts in 20 years all over the country. Cash moved in 1961 to a town near Santa Barbara where he remained until 1966 but his California period was mainly a period of drug addiction (also causing a fire in a national forest). Nonetheless, he later topped the pop charts with two prison albums recorded in California: At Folsom State Prison (1968) and At San Quentin (1969).

While continuing his religious campaigns with his wife, Cash also achieved a few hits on the country charts, such as A Thing Called Love (1972) and One Piece at a Time (1976), but the albums from that period, such as A Man in Black (Columbia, 1971), A Thing Called Love (1972), and America (1972), had little to boast about.

In 1982 Cash formed the Survivors with Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis. From 1985 to 1995, he recorded albums with Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and Waylon Jennings: Highwayman (Columbia, 1985), Highwayman 2 (Mercury, 1990), and The Road Goes On Forever (Liberty, 1995).

His solo career, which had taken a more serious turn with Water from the Wells of Home (Mercury, 1988) and The Mystery of Life (Mercury, 1991), culminated in the American Recordings (American, 1994) for voice and acoustic guitar only.

The solo acoustic American Recordings (American, 1994) was the first of a trilogy completed by Unchained (1996), with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and American III: Solitary Man (2000), on which his failing health is a major factor. The albums of the trilogy, unfortunately, collect weak material that would be more typical of an album of rarities. American IV (American, 2006), mostly covers, and American V (American, 2006), whose arrangements were devised by producer Jerry Rubin two years after Cash's death, closed the series. The double-CD Personal Files (2006) collects more of the songs that Cash recorded in the months before his death. This quickly became one of the most spectacular business speculations on an artist's death since Jimi Hendrix.

The Essential (Columbia, 2002) is an excellent anthology. Unearthed (Unviersal, 2003) is a 5 cd box-set of, mostly, unreleased material.