It's a pet peeve of mine that a major artist's work is often reduced to a dozen or so key songs that dictate every compilation, soundtrack appearance and cover version for years. Often, the depth and breadth of an artist's work is completely obliterated by the demand that the same twelve songs be rehashed and revisited. I'm reminded of a late 60's Everly Brothers TV appearance where an amazing performance of "Mama Tried" from their masterpiece LP, Roots, is followed the by the TV host's suggestion that they "play one of their old million sellers we all love so much."
Johnny Cash is certainly a victim of this kind of career reduction. There was a good stretch of time when all you were likely to hear was a greatest hit or something live from Folsom Prison (all admittedly fantastic, but overplayed.) The only other choice was Johnny singing some ridiculous cover of U2 or Beck (give me a break.) Now that the rush of attention following his death and biopic has passed, I've started checking out the hundreds of records Cash released -- perhaps thousands of songs that haven't turned up on hits compilations, weren't performed live at a prison and weren't written by alternative rock stars.
It should come as no surprise that there are extraordinary performances on these records. Most are strictly in the familiar Cash style -- tick tock rhythms, a bit of boom-y reverb on the deep lead vocal, some shimmering background choirs. He spent a good amount of time making concept records, too -- visits to the Holy Land, tributes to various aspects of American history and culture, more gospel.
Quite often these albums feature little monologues -- The Holy Land features Johnny and June narrating their trip to Israel on location (the narration might be better than the songs -- strikingly informal and the sense of being profoundly moved is clear.) From Sea To Shining Sea has Johnny rambling like a country preacher about the beauty of the good ol' U.S.A., but it's laced with a subtle suggestion that the intent is to heal the psychic wounds of the late 1960's -- to reclaim some sense of worth and beauty in a twisted and hurt country. Tributes to railroads, Native Americans and even a collection of comedy songs are somewhat more well known, but all worthy of investigation. "I will tell you, Buster, I ain't a fan of Custer's" is a line from a song worth revisiting ("Custer" from Bitter Tears), with Cash's snide, boastful recitation and its "The general he don't ride well anymore" refrain typical of his ability to inhabit an archetypal character in a mode simultaneously ancient and modern.
Johnny's gifts were no joke -- his ability to turn corny ballads and hillbilly shtick into substance is a marvel. I really don't understand how the melodramatic "She Came From The Mountains", with its recitations and soaring choirs, has been transformed into something so moving -- so laced with homesickness and guilt. It's such a personal song -- a man from the plains takes his wife home from the Rocky Mountains, where she longs for the mountains and eventually disappears -- but it's resonance lies in making real the sense of identity wrapped up in a place, and for the suggestion that we lose something fundamental of ourselves in our transient culture.
The strangest record I've come across so far, and my current favorite, is the soundtrack for a 1970 movie called I Walk The Line. Along with a completely different version of the title track, the album features dry-as-dust songs so elemental as to be more like snapshots than realized songs. "Flesh & Blood", a relatively well known track, is a song of pure desire -- a list of rough and tumble manly accomplishments countered with "Mother Nature's quite a lady, but you're the one I need". Clocking in at just under two minutes (like most of the songs on the album) "'Cause I Love You" is a stern declaration of devotion accompanied only by solo acoustic guitar, while "Hungry" is all taught desperation. Get out of town. Change your face. Every song is wound tight -- almost angry. In "Face Of Despair" the pains of growing old and the land in Autumn ("look out on your September country") are without any comfort or joy. Most striking, perhaps, is "The World's Gonna Fall On You" -- a nearly spoken word recitation of small town paranoia warning "Billy", "Henry" and the "Sheriff" that somebody's always watching and "the world's gonna fall on you" delivered with increasingly manic intensity.
There are a couple of string arrangement instrumentals from the film soundtrack, and the album ends with a country choir singing "Standing On The Promises/Amazing Grace" (in a moment that feels more like a kitten in the wilderness than an experience of redemption), but it's the just-over 15 minutes of original material that makes for a remarkable encapsulation of the power in Johnny Cash's writing and performing -- a handful of songs almost completely absent from the standard repertoire, but more-than-equal to that extraordinary company.
