Johnny Cash – Unearthed

So many words spilled, already. All this wrestling with the body of work Johnny Cash left behind, for it is all we have left, and, like the songs of his friend Merle Haggard, it contains multitudes. Indeed, it is possible to see refracted through every discussion of Johnny Cash not simply the greatness of his art, but which facets of his gift are most and least attractive to each auditor.

Producer Rick Rubin — we knew this was coming, have waited patiently, with muted jealousy, for its arrival — has, in honor of the tenth anniversary of American Recordings, let loose of more music from all four American sessions. Plus a fresh, final gospel album, a disc summarizing those first four American releases, and a novella-sized booklet of a last interview by British writer Sylvie Simmons.

And so we begin wrestling with renewed vigor. As much as any figure of the 20th century, Johnny Cash embodied the greatness, the boundless hope, the conscience and frailty of the United States. And he had a voice from God, and he made enduring art.

Too little of what passes for art actually is.

Too much of what we write and think about music revolves around the empty promise of celebrity (and the writer’s proximity to that celebrity) and the unyielding, uninteresting, unfulfilling scorecard of sales figures. Far too much music is adored in the moments before it comes to market for the simple merit that it might sell. And immediately cast aside, should it not. Or should it not sell again. And again.

Too often we write about a moment we happened to witness as if that glimpse were insight, as if our accidental presence and carefully filtered reportage somehow makes the magic of the moment.

Well. Portraits of three artists gaze down upon the alcove in which this computer waits, and when I raise my head away from these words it is the eyes of Johnny Cash I must meet. Charles Peterson took the picture during a recording session for the Twisted Willie tribute album eight summers ago, and I had the great good fortune to be standing about where Mr. Cash’s baleful gaze fell at just that moment.

I have told this story before, and probably too often. But it is mine, and so I shall tell it again. The control room at Bad Animals was filled with every Seattle rock star who could plausibly have business there, including the wraith that already was Layne Staley. Cash caught us in a quick glance as he left the isolation booth to hear playback, and announced, “I don’t believe I’ve met all of you.” He offered a soft hand and said, “Hello, I’m John,” until there were no more hands to be shaken.

For all the pain, his was the presence of a man at peace. Of a holy man, if we can believe in such people, though we well know the flaws.

We all heard his voice come through those studio monitors. We all heard him sing, stumbling over Willie Nelson’s curious cadence, apologizing to the producer. We heard that voice come through the studio monitors. We heard that voice.

Such luck. Such a gift, that voice.

Only when he slumped into a chair to answer a reporter’s few questions did the effort it had cost him to sing reveal itself. And then he was gone, headlining in Portland the next day.

It was surely not among the hundred most important recording sessions of his career, but it was better than any record we owned, any word we could make up to describe the sound of it.

Three years earlier, Rick Rubin and his dog and maybe an engineer had sat in his Los Angeles living room while Johnny Cash picked his guitar and sang whatever song fell into his mind. Pretty much anybody worth knowing would have sacrificed something important — surely not a child, but at least a toe or two — for the privilege of sitting there among them. Hearing that voice.

Some of those songs became the first of Cash’s four American Recordings, and the rest became a durable kind of tickle. An album or two of material, at least, slipped around the bootleg world.

The first three discs of Unearthed, organized thematically — with the subtitles Who’s Gonna Cry, Trouble In Mind and Redemption Songs — pick up tracks that didn’t fit one of the four proper albums, some half-forgotten, some reconsidered. That magnificent voice crumbles into the broken instrument with which he so expertly — so bravely — sang Trent Reznor’s “Hurt”, near the end. Each of the first three discs offer bonus versions of already released songs as well.

Inevitably, in part because Cash was principally interested in singing songs because he felt like it, and in part because Rubin’s perception of Cash and of country music is very much that of an outsider, it is possible to quibble with some of the selections. Why, for example, does anybody who is not named George Jones need to record “He Stopped Loving Her Today”? Why does anybody other than Glen Campbell need to sing “Wichita Lineman” or (excepting John Hartford, who wrote it) “Gentle On My Mind”? And why revisit “Long Black Veil”?

Because he wanted to. Because he takes such delight in the songs. But mostly because he felt like it.

Thing is, he also felt like — or was talked into, and then felt like — singing a brilliant version of Neil Young’s “Pocahontas”, giving Steve Earle’s “The Devil’s Right Hand” a tougher reading than its young author has, dueting with Nick Cave on a delightful “Cindy”.

He moves easily from Stephen Foster to Dolly Parton, from Billy Joe Shaver to Chuck Berry. And through more than a few of his own. But while Cat Stevens and Bob Marley also get a nod each, it seems telling that almost all these songs come from the traditions that Cash drew from…and created.

The fourth disc, My Mother’s Hymn Book, is sung from a book of his mother’s that Cash had held onto, Heavenly Highway Hymns. The songs were recorded in a cabin on Cash’s Hendersonville estate very near to the end of his days. He sings, still, with surpassing power, working expertly around the broken parts (and maybe computers assisted in that, but one hopes not too much) of his voice.

Much of Cash’s latter-day audience will view “Hurt” as his final statement, much like John Wayne’s last movie, The Shootist. They probably miss the point: “Hurt” was a performance, and a brilliant one at that. My Mother’s Hymn Book, of which, the liner notes say, Cash was properly proud, is not nearly so tortured. Nor even broken, not really. These are songs of joy, for that, he believed, was to be his future, whenever it came.

He wore black, and he fought — for his art, for the downtrodden, with his demons — and Johnny Cash cannot have been an easy man. But he also recorded “A Boy Named Sue” and he loved his children, and he prayed to his god. I will always remember that a few instants after Charles Peterson captured him glaring in my general direction, Johnny Cash smiled. A big, easy, room-lighting smile. And then he got back to work.