Artist: Johnny Cash
Column from web archive December 16, 2008
Step aside, curmudgeon emeritus: It’s Maggie’s choice, for kids’ sake
Among the several things parenting manuals don’t prepare you for is this: Those rock ‘n’ roll hours, that going to bed between 2 and 4 a.m., and rising by lunch? Over, at least until she’s off to college. (Nobody smells weakness like a young child with an urgent agenda. And they’re all urgent.) And this: [...]
Column from web archive November 24, 2008
Cash’s construct comes around
There’s a bonus interview attached to the brand new documentary DVD included the Legacy-edition box of Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison in which his daughter Rosanne confides, or at least tells us, that “I’m just not very interested in participating in the posthumous version of my dad’s career…Enough’s been said. I was gonna say no [...]
Column from web archive October 16, 2008
Death, politics, and other bundles of joy
Cowpunk, Revisited: Anyone who thinks alt-country has suffered from an excess of delicacy and earnestness in the post-O Brother years can take heart: Two new upstarts are currently serving up authentic-ish approximations of classic cowpunk. The New York five-piece O’Death (named for the folk standard popularized most recently by Ralph Stanley, which is a good [...]
Column from web archive October 1, 2008
Cash Remixed, Bruce Remade, Hope Revived, Pretenders Reinvented
Johnny Cash Remixed Not As Terrible As You Might Expect: Johnny Cash Remixed, on which various iconic Cash songs are reworked by a host of unlikely, predominantly British artists, isn’t as bad as it could have been, which is saying a lot. Remixed was executive-produced by John Carter Cash, whose attitude toward the licensing and [...]
Not Fade Away - Reissue Review from Issue #71 Sep-Oct 2007
Johnny Cash – The Outtakes
He was one of America’s top-selling male vocalists in 2006, which could reflect an expanded audience from the success of the Walk The Line biopic and/or the dearth of decent contemporary fare. Bear Family, who extensively explored Cash’s Sun and early Columbia catalogues in the past, recently introduced a new series dedicated strictly to outtakes, [...]
Not Fade Away - Reissue Review from Issue #70 July-August 2007
Johnny Cash – Ultimate Gospel
Reissues and repackagings of Johnny Cash’s recordings have multiplied like the biblical miracle of the loaves and fishes since his death in 2003. His inspirational material gets the anthology treatment on this collection of 24 songs recorded between 1957 and 1981, including three previously unreleased tracks. Gospel was an integral part of Cash’s musical DNA, [...]
Waxed - Record Review from Issue #64 July-Aug 2006
Johnny Cash – American V: A Hundred Highways
Johnny Cash will have been gone three years this September, but not so much that you’d notice. His ghost lingers. Every time you turn around, there he is again…in an album-length goodbye from his daughter Rosanne, in an Oscar-winning major motion picture, in a newly unearthed Personal File of acoustic solo recordings, and in a [...]
Not Fade Away - Reissue Review from Issue #63 May-June 2006
Johnny Cash – Personal File
Today Johnny Cash exists in our imagination largely as the young hellion of the 1950s and ’60s, or the grave and wise voice offered on his final American recordings. These recently unearthed tapes — very simply, Johnny Cash accompanying himself at his home studio on guitar — serve as a timely reminder that he was [...]
Sittin' & Thinkin' - Essay from Issue #54 Nov-Dec 2004
That’ll Be Cash on the Auction Block, Son
Some time in the 1970s, while ensconced in the Hotel Graf Zeppelin in Stuttgart, Germany, Carl Perkins peeled off a couple sheets of hotel stationary and wrote his friend, Johnny Cash. “I’m lacking in ability to say what I feel, so here goes a shot at writing it down,” Perkins wrote. “Thank you, John, for [...]
Miked - Live Reviews from Issue #49 Jan-Feb 2004
Johnny Cash Memorial Tribute – Ryman Auditorium (Nashville, TN)
It hasn’t been remarked on much, but a chorus of voices that had been sidelined or diminished for a good while were uncannily renewed in time to rise for this occasion, for the singing that needed to be done — not just Rosanne’s, a voice that had been literally unavailable to her until recent months, [...]
