Johnny Cash – The Fabulous Johnny Cash/ Ride This Train/ Carryin’ On With Johnny Cash & June Carter

“Hello, I’m Pure Charisma.”

That might as well have been Johnny Cash’s self-introduction from 1959 to ’67, when these new reissues first appeared. One of 1958’s hotter acts, with hits extending from “I Walk The Line” through “Ballad Of A Teenage Queen”, “Ways Of A Woman In Love” and “Guess Things Happen That Way”, the eventual Man In Black jumped from little Sun Records in Memphis to major Columbia in 1958. He seemed to know folk was about to supplant rockabilly and wanted to lead the way.

Generations born into today’s instantly gratified, stardom-diminishing era of ubiquitous video rentals, surfed cable channels and scripted ad-libs cannot imagine the electricity a young Cash could unleash on the real-time world. Somewhere between the frenetic high-schoolishness of Presley’s hipshakes and the demoniac pyromania of Jerry Lee Lewis, it was graver, more somber, but just as overpowering.

Cash hit his stages writhing with artistic explosion and deepening dependence on amphetamine pills. The effect was that of a rural-rooted, God-fearing, epic-sized man going Saturday-night nuts. On these records, today’s listener can follow along as Cash reaches artistic peaks while bottoming out in a personal ring of fire.

The Fabulous Johnny Cash, his first Columbia album, was released in January 1959 and showcased a more diverse artist than had been allowed to emerge on Sun. Although the music sounds less spontaneous than the Sun sides, it is more measured and consistent, and radiates a widening and deepening.

Highlighted by two of Cash’s finest compositions, “I Still Miss Someone” and “Don’t Take Your Guns To Town”, Fabulous features album cuts that are just as impressive: “Run Softly, Blue River”, modeled after an old poem; “Pickin’ Time”, a stunning reflection of cottonfield humility; and “Frankie’s Man, Johnny”, a sexy redo of an oldie that hinted at personal things to come. So did the gospel-tinged “That’s Enough”, “Shepherd Of My Heart” and “Suppertime”.

Fabulous was followed less than half a year later with Hymns By Johnny Cash, the promised release of which was billed as his primary reason for leaving Sun. And just seven months after Hymns came maybe the first “concept” album in country music’s history.

Ride This Train: A Stirring Travelogue Of America In Story And Song is an aural foray across heartland history, in which eight songs are introed and outroed with train-whistles and encased in monologues sometimes more striking than the music. The quality is impossible to sustain, but even the music has its greatness in “Loading Coal” and the stark chain-gang original “Goin’ To Memphis”. The whole thing was markedly grown-up and gutsy for a man who had forged his popularity in teenish rockabilly.

On Orange Blossom Special in 1965, Cash’s personal transformation begins to show — and no more vividly than via a spoken bit of dialogue in the middle of the title song: “I don’t care if I do die do die do die.” He really didn’t seem to. Staying on the road with his marriage disintegrating, he saw his once-robust frame became a wraith.

On Blossom his tongue is thicker, throat drier, delivery jerkier and aura hotter, though less consistent, as his subjects got darker: the funereal “Long Black Veil”, the prison suicide ballad “The Wall”, the exceptional folk anthem “All God’s Children Ain’t Free”, and the Irish lament “Danny Boy”, strikingly opened with another stirring but slightly slurry monologue. A beguiling female backing voice — June Carter’s — graces such cuts as “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and “When It’s Springtime In Alaska”. But the chaff here, never more evident than on his listless “Wildwood Flower”, disappoints, and producer Don Law clearly has trouble holding a cohesive scheme together.

By 1967 and Carryin’ On With Johnny Cash & June Carter, Cash has a duet partner who will save him from self-destruction, but meanwhile they have a high old time. The introductory “Long-Legged Guitar Pickin’ Man”, along with “Jackson” and a few others, pulsate with delicious sensual joy, their cover of “I Got A Woman” sizzling white-hot. When they fail, as in an over-the-top “What’d I Say”, the fault is Cash’s, and when they don’t, the credit is often due to Carter. But as with the other three records, the best moments remain riveting.

The worst of all four records is their bonus tracks. With the exception of an alternate version of “Mama, You’ve Been On My Mind” on Orange Blossome Special, they are of such inferior quality that somewhere the late Don Law has to be shaking a mortified head. The original material, though, is spottily exceptional, despite growing more uneven as the chronology proceeds.

Why few contemporaries tried to cover Cash at the top of his game becomes obvious:

Nobody could.