• CASH JOHNNY AMERICAN RECORDINGS

The collection includes old songs, new songs, songs written by Cash, and songs written by others. Cash's music has always been marked by great storytelling and honesty, but this recording takes the Man in Black's storytelling and honesty to a whole other level. When you listen to "The Beast in Me," you hear the raw honesty in Cash's voice and you know that he's lived every word of Nick Lowe's lyrics. "Drive On" addresses one of Cash's most passionate topics: the trails and tribulations of Vietnam veterans returning home and the people who don't understand them. "Thirteen" is a dark, brutally exposed portrayal of a life gone wrong, one that has never been on track and never will be. Who else but Cash can convincingly sing the lyric "I pray you don't look at me/I pray I don't look back"?

It took a lot of courage for Cash to do this album. Think about it: Columbia Records had dropped him years before. Now here he was, making a recording not with his band, but with only his voice and his guitar. With one man and one guitar, there's not much you can hide. If the music is true and honest, it'll come through. If it's not, that'll come through too. But the result is true, naked, honest, courageous music. It doesn't get any better than this. Johnny Cash lays it all on the line like no one else ever has...and probably never will.

DISC TIME: 41:52

253 of 274 found the following review helpful:


the best CD I own -- period.  Jun 02, 2000 By Andrew
I listen to every and all kinds of music. Until I went to college, that was true for all genres except country. I liked the western stuff my dad played, but I didn't think it was the same. But I had been playing guitar for several years and I was looking for folk music I could play. Then two things happened. 1) I saw the video for Delia's Gone while flipping through cable channels. I was drawn to it, and then 2) I saw the five star review it got in Rolling stone magazine, so I gambled my 14 bucks, or whatever. My life was changed. In the early 90's, while Kurt Cobain screamed about the world that didn't pick him for kickball in gym class, or Eddie Vedder sang about, well, whatever, Johnny Cash sang about real people who felt guilt and regret, not ironic resentment/jealousy. The voice was like listening to an old testament prophet. His words seem to be more than emotion, they seem to be truth. It's often said that God speaks to us like a still, quiet voice. This IS Johnny Cash' American Recordings. I have cried to this album many times, esp. to Like A Soldier, and The Beast In Me. Accepting one's own contradictions is the key to loving yourself. Johnny's album helped me to do this. It is the most important sound recording I own. Do yourself a favor and buy it.

43 of 45 found the following review helpful:


Return of the Man In Black  Sep 13, 2003 By Michael Weber "fairportfan"
Facing a landing in the balcony staircase in the Roxy Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia, there is (or was, i haven't been there in a while) an almost life-size, autographed poster of the cover of this album, an amazing photo which has always reminded me of one of the less amiable prophets from the Old Testament just before he told some particularly egregious sinners where to head in.

And the "prophet" image is appropriate for Cash; sometimes in the sense of "a prophet without honour in his own country", as Cash has fallen from favour with the country music establishment more than once...

On their CD "Old Dogs", Waylon, Mel Tillis, Jerry Reed and Bobby Bare engaged in a joyful chomp at the hand that doesn't feed older country stars so well any more in a song by Shel Silverstein called "(Nashville is) Rough on the Livin' (But Surely Speaks Well of the Dead)", an indictment of the way in which the country music industry has tended to cast aside the older acts who created it in favour of the Hat of the Day, remembering them only in time for a hypocritical display when they die.

For a while, a few years ago, it looked as if that was going to be the way that Johnny Cash was going -- the majors seemed less and less interested in him, and he pretty much only got airplay on nostalgia-oriented programs.

And then he and Rick Rubin electrified the music world with this album, which cut a swathe across all genres and brought Cash back to the forefront.

This album was incredible when released, and it's still amazing now.

The weakest tracks on it are "Bird on a Wire" and "Man Who Couldn't Cry", which don't really suit Cash's delivery -- and they are Very Good.

"Le the Train Blow the Whistle (When I'm Gone)" and "Down by the Train", both using the classic mataphor of the train as a transition, are both strong meditations on life, death and redemption.

But it's "Drive On" that i find myself coming back to, and it's "Drive On" to which i had the entire lyric memorised without trying within a few days of buying the CD; a song that speaks to me as strongly as Richard Thompson's "Wall of Death", that resonates so strongly with my own memories and emotions.

Cash got himself in trouble with the Country Establishment in the latter 60's/early 70's for daring to suggest that, perhaps, the war in Viet Nam might not be the best idea. But it was Cash (and June Carter Cash), not the Nashville Hawks who were all for the war from the safety of a recording studio, who went to 'Nam on their own dime and lived there in a trailer on an American base and entertained the troops on their way to the front and visited them in thehospital on their way back...

And twenty-five years later, Cash distilled what he saw and heard from those grunts into this one song, with its chilling repetition of the front-line soldier's mantra - "It don't mean nothin'." -- in a song that speaks to the ambivalence that America still feels toward that war and toward those of us (even REMFs like myself) who served in it.

It's The Man In Black still acting as our conscience, still reminding us that there are things that aren't right that we need to fix.

And still looking forward to that day that his faith told him was coming -- that day, maybe far far away, when "things are brighter"...

I hope angel wings come in black, though.

15 of 15 found the following review helpful:


The Man In Black Introduces Himself To A New Generation  Oct 29, 2001 By Christopher Zayne Reeves
Johnny Cash's three albums (so far!) for Rick Rubin's maverick record company deserve a massive tome dedicated to analyzing the significance of the man's achievement at this late a day in his career. Although Johnny Cash has almost always been a restless creative spirit that has continued to produce great work decade after decade, before this 1994 album hit music stores he was thought of as a has-been and irrelevant to a younger generation that had its own new, vital music by the likes of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Beck, REM, etc.

While later albums such as Water From The Wells Of Home as well as his immortal Sun singles & late 60's/early 70's material kept Cash from being completely forgotten, his star had dimmed considerably. Looking back, it is suprising that his American Recordings album wasn't initially derided as desperate. For someone of Johnny Cash's stature to cover Thirteen & rewrite the Blind Willie McTell classic 'Delia' to include a verse about automatic weapons is a very risky venture. Obviously, it paid off far better than anyone had a right to imagine.

The opening track, Delia's Gone, is one of two magnificent recent takes on the chestnut. One year earlier, Bob Dylan (not coincidentally, one of the handful of living artists in Cash's league) made it the defining track on his excellent World Gone Wrong cover album. But where his would not have sounded out of place on a Harry Smith anthology, Johnny Cash's is resolutely of the moment. It's a hard-worn performance, like Dylan's, but it goes one better by also being sidesplittingly funny. Where Dylan uses it to bemoan an impossibly screwed up universe, The Man In Black can't help but laugh at it all. And why not? Even at his most political, or reaffirming his faith & devotion to Christianity, Johnny Cash has always been a remarkably unjudgemental and unflappable soul.

It took several listens for me to come to terms with Cash on Danzig. Not because I couldn't buy it, but because I had to take the extra time to absorb how genius I thought it to be. AR, Unchained & AR III will, in my humble opinion, come to be viewed by later generations as this great, great artists' crowing achievement. Nowhere else in his catalogue does he so perfectly & generously reveal how many boundaries he has crossed with his music and that no matter the song or the writer, if it is good Johnny Cash can bring it home. More than any other country artist, he enjoys popularity among a wide demographic. Young and old. Black and white. Rich and poor. Gay and straight. An important factor in this is how he has, very quitely, built up such an eclectic body of work. A body of work with conscience, conviction, integrity and the humor not to take such things too seriously.

I could go on about the individual performances; all gold. Down There By The Train, Why Me Lord?, The Man Who Couldn't Cry, O Bury Me Not.....all of which deserve their own individual chapters in that aforementioned book. But, if you are reading this, chances are you are a member of the choir. Which is to say,
you love great music. There will never be another Johnny Cash. Just like there will never be another Miles Davis or another Dorothy Parker. Just be glad we were lucky enough to get them the first time around!

12 of 12 found the following review helpful:


Unplugged And Untouchable  Jul 14, 2005 By Erik Rust
Forget the fact that this album revitalized Johnny Cash's career and brought him to the doorsteps of the alternative rock crowd....The only thing one needs to know is that it is an absolute masterwork. Few artists can manage to sound as powerful and immortal as Cash does here, especially considering that every track was recorded sparsely with only the man, his soul-commanding voice, and his guitar. There is a stunning amount of emotional depth that comes from Cash's harsh baritone as it conveys an underlying sense of warmth and hard-earned knowledge. Listening to Johnny Cash is like getting an education from an age-old scholar.

From the gangster folk of "Delia's Gone" to the gospel leanings of "Redemption" to the grinningly sarcastic "The Man Who Couldn't Cry," The Man In Black sheds any doubt that he is anything less than a musical deity. Cash takes many songs penned by the likes of Glenn Danzig, Leonard Cohen, Nick Lowe, and Tom Waits and makes them sound as if they'd been written by him all along. Praise is also due to Rick Rubin for casting Cash in such naked light and keeping this collection unplugged and singular in purpose and integrity. Although the following albums in the American Recordings quadrilogy were notably strong, this one still resonates the strongest. There is simply an untouchable ragged beauty to this disc and it serves as a fitting reminder of how indespensable and luminous Johnny Cash was as a musical artist. AMERICAN RECORDINGS is an essential part of any music collection, country/western or otherwise. The man may be gone now, but we will always have this subtle tour de force to remember him by.

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