Johnny Cash has been one of my musical influences since I was a wee lad, basically because my dad was a big fan of Johnny Cash and the first albums I was exposed to were Johnny Cash recordings. My favorite was Live at San Quentin and I would listen to that album over and over. As a smartass teenager, my friends and I would goof on the fact that Johnny played the song San Quentin two times in a row on that album and how much it would suck if a band like Kiss would play a song like Beth two times in a row at a concert. With his TV show and old hits, Johhny Cash was a big star in the 1970s.
However by the time American Recordings came out in 1994, Johnny’s career was pretty much tapped out. Of course he could’ve always just played the casino circuit, singing his hits and Cashing in on the nostalgia but a bearded rap producer named Ric Rubin would have none of that. Rubin convinced Johnny to just play songs in his living room, accompanied by nothing but his own acoustic guitar. The result was not only stunning but resurrected Johnny’s career and brought a whole new legion of fans to his music.
On the surface, American Recordings was surprising more for its sparseness and “folky” tenor than for its subject matter. It was Johnny Cash stripped down to the bare necessities: that clear, deep voice and an acoustic guitar. Peeking underneath that surface, however, brought about another image – that of a man acknowledging his own mortality; worried about sins both past and present with the understanding that those sins have called into question his standing in the afterlife. Songs like Delia’s Gone, The Beast in Me, 13, and Down There by the Train tell the tale of a man who has grievously sinned. Cash is not proud of these sins – he doesn’t boast or shrug them off. Instead there is the sad recognition that sin is the price man pays for its humanity.
American Recordings kicked of a certain format that we would see throughout the American Recordings sessions. A few originals, one or two old standards, and a couple of offbeat covers that Johnny makes his own. The latter in American Recordings is a cover of the Danzig song 13. In the end the album is about sin and redemption. Johnny is telling us that we are all sinners but that there is a way out, we can seek redemption. Cash ends the album with The Man Who Wouldn’t Cry, a song that addresses the need for humility as it describes a hard-scrabbled man who lives a life of unsentimentalized failures and only finally through his tears is able to enter into heaven and gain all he lost on earth. Johnny would mine these fields even deeper in his next American Recordings Albums.
One can listen to American Recordings and dwell on the themes of sin and redemption or one can just listen to Johnny sing a bunch of old timey songs in a way that only Johnny Cash could do. It’s why these albums are so popular and why, when Johnny Cash dies nearly 10 years later, hipsters and old folks alike lament his passing and his preacher-like image graces the cover of Time Magazine.
great write-up. i was definitely one of the new fans ushered into cash by american recordings, and i'm a better man for it.
wonderful, wonderful album. i saw the "delia's gone"* video, and that perked up my ears, but it didn't take right away. once i expanded into the rest of the album, i wondered what took me so long. this album got heavy airplay in the 18-19 year range when i moved into my first apartment, hence, i can't really listen to it much anymore.
* i don't know if anyone remembers it, but back in about `94, `95, there used to be this show on 29 on saturday nights i believe. one of the local radio stations had a video hour, or something of the like, and it was awesome. it exposed a young joe to names like ween, liz phair, and it was where i saw the "delia's gone" video. i wish i could remember who put that out, but i'd like to thank them
Outstanding review of a truly great album. My best friend's mother worked at a local radio station in the mid 90's. She brought home this album and a Cash t-shirt bearing the cover image of Johnny. We didn't know anything about him except Ring of Fire but this album opened our eyes to all that he had to offer.
Even more importantly, this and subsequent American releases were my introduction to the likes of Tom Waits, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, David Allen Coe, Leonard Cohen, Jeff Lynne, Roberta Flack...the list goes on. When I first heard his redition of Hurt on American IV, I'm not ashamed to say that I cried. It’s still one of my all-time favorite songs.
Hell, sometimes I still get choked up when I hear "Hurt".
Not to mention that the video for Hurt is perhaps the best of all time, IMHO.
Has any country/rock/pop artist had a more amazing run of late career renaissance? Dylan starting with Time Out of Mind... Tony Bennett, maybe. They are the Thomes of music. Though Thome never put out a string of forgettable albums.
add Roy Orbison and John Lee Hooker to that late career renaissance list.
Good calls. And I just listened to the new Glen Campbell album, his last (he has Alzheimer's). Very powerful. Highly recommended.
that dude could pick it pretty good back in the day.
I'm curious to hear that. Apparently he two covers two Paul Westerberg songs and one by Guided by Voices.
I'm going to put in a plug for Merle Haggard's last three albums, but particularly I Am What I Am, again here. It's not quite American Recordings-level work, but it's Merle's best period of work since the 1970s.
I've said plenty about this record here in the past, so I won't belabor the point anymore, other than to say this is the first album in an absolute treasure of recorded music. Few artists have a period this good at any stage in their career, much less as a wildly successful late career renaissance.
I meant to comment on this last week, but I guess I didn't.
I remember hearing "Delia's Gone" on Letterman:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKjpsL27Ius
(I remember Dave ironically commenting something like "From your new Christmas album?" or something like that, due to the violence, but it's not there in the clip, so maybe I imagined that.)
I really didn't know much about Cash or any other country music (it wasn't my dad's genre, and "country" at that time was pop with steel guitars). But my friend's dad got the CD, and I listened to this track a few times.
A few years later, probably Fall 1998, I found the cassette at Cheapo Tapes (Snelling) for $3.95.* I drove back and forth from St. Kate's where EAR (then EAP) studied, and Augsburg a lot, and that cassette was played about 75% of the time in that teal escort wagon for a while. Then I found Unchained on cassette as well and went back and forth between the two. I waited until American IV was released to buy American III because I wanted it as a cassette as well. They must have stopped making tapes around that time, although the clerk at the Electric Fetus - another place I'd drive frequently with the escort wagon - told me that it was possible it would come out on cassette.* But this one and the next one were the last two albums which I really experienced as "tapes" with "songs" and not as a "CD" with "tracks".
*The same day I found A Guy Called Gerald's Automanikk
**As an aside - I must have been a bitter clinger, because I've got Orbvs Terrarvm (one song is a slightly different mix than the CD! I can't remember which!), Pre-Millennium Tension, Maxinquaye, Protection, Post, Dubnobasswithmyheadman, Screamadelica, and plenty of others on Cassette. (I was big on what was coming out of the UK trip-hop and "electronica" scenes at the time.)
Anyways, I really loved this one. I think my favorite song was the final - "The Man Who Wouldn't Cry". It was one of those albums that I had memorized front to back.
For the rest of the Rick Rubin albums, he included one or two covers of songs I was familiar with ("Rowboat", "Rusty Cage", "Personal Jesus", "Hurt", "Solitary Man", "One") which might have made me seek the album out for novelty's sake, but every song on this album was completely new to me.
We had "I've Been Everywhere" (from Unchained) played at our wedding dance. Which I drove to. From Augsburg. In that teal Escort Wagon. I don't remember what was in the tape deck, but there's a good chance it was this album.