Johnny Cash - C/D?

And classic.

Marshall Grant dies at 83; bass player, manager for Johnny Cash

Marshall Grant, who worked as Johnny Cash's road manager and played bass for him for more than two decades, helped create the singer's famous sound.
Marshall Grant, who played standup bass in Johnny Cash's original trio and helped create the legendary singer's distinctive, rhythmic sound in the 1950s, has died. He was 83.

Grant, who remained with Cash as a bass player for more than two decades and later managed the Statler Brothers, died Sunday in a hospital in Jonesboro, Ark., according to a spokesman for Memorial Park Funeral Home and Cemetery in Memphis.

aww geez

Halfway through the Best of the Johnny Cash TV Show DVD set... I remember watching the show in '69-71. There are two performances that are just DEVASTATING -- his debut of "Man in Black" (in front of a collegiate audience) and his cover of Kristofferson's "Sunday Morning Coming Down," which was released as a single and and won awards.

It's also fun to see him sing with Joni and Satchmo, and the anecdote about June seeing Linda Ronstadt not wearing panties in dress rehearsal is a keeper.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBWFJ85n_w0

curious about which johnny cash albums are classic since you see them a lot at the record store... listening to this one at the moment & its dope -

https://images.rapgenius.com/9dfb97d94d88603f4e33da4cc0cc21ed.918x919x1.jpg

(i guess this is more S&D but w/e)

Just watching this on Sky Arts..

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Oj-vCdlSRQQ

Heartbreak Hotel

His cover of if you could read my mind is about as soul crushing as you can get. The sound of a man heartbroken and ready to die

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/05/16/johnny-cash-first-wife-vivian-black/

thought for sure this revive would be about the Belgian Eurovision entry:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbpxcUMtjwY

I just heard about this and look it up - Cash explained in his autobiography that it was an "intentionally atrocious" parody aimed at his label CBS/Columbia (which dropped him two years later).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTP9__vi3d4

*and had to look it up

His MySpace had this series, of the original EPs, I think, that might have been overall titled Cash On Sun, just this whole parallel, para-Elvis, world of Jawn hitting his 50s boom-chick stride, catchy and country and rock and not, deep as the voice (well, pert near), at times.
Johnny Cash Forever Words reached its final peak, mebbe, with tracks added for April 2021 reincarnation. It's new music, via many hands, for his previously unset lyrics and poems, built from characteristic, yet venturesome imagery, moods, turns, twists, with that JC cadence, wherever he may roam. The resulting tracks are plausible vibe-wise, even when briefly brushed by Elvis Costello's chamber strings, and in Robert Glasper's jazz-hiphop-alt.r&b setting, where The Man Hisself comments on what he was trying to convey in these words, about drugs. A double album that zips right by. The Watkins Family offering, feat. Sara Watkins's vocal, is a bit bland, duh, and maybe one or two likewise, but overall, pretty amazing standard.

Also from the Dylan Center, a 1964 letter from Johnny Cash - man, I need to put more effort into my emails, never mind letters.

I think not:

JOHNNY CASH – THE OFFICIAL CONCERT EXPERIENCE brings songs and stories from the “Man in Black” to the stage in a way that audiences haven’t seen or heard before. With video of Johnny from episodes of The Johnny Cash TV Show projected on a screen above the stage, a live band and singers will accompany him in perfect sync. This concert experience will showcase iconic performances from the TV show and highlight the spirit of the legend by revisiting some of his memorable words and anecdotes. Cash will perform some of his biggest hits, including “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Ring of Fire,” and “I Walk the Line,” and share stories of people he met along the way whose causes he championed – the working man from all walks of life. Plus, onstage male and female singers will split vocal duties performing their own takes on Cash hits. The music never stops in this concert event!

Weeded out some more CD's for Housing Works this weekend. I remember blind buying a budget reissue of Water From the Wells of Home because it was highly recommended by the 1992 edition of The Rolling Stone Album Guide, which gave it FIVE stars and called it a "must-have" and "a towering effort." Even when it was downgraded to four-stars for the 2004 edition, they kept the same text. I don't know what they were smoking, because I haven't touched it in god knows how long and it's nowhere near the same league as his Columbia or American albums. Starts off pleasantly with two nice tracks (the first of which is a remake of an old hit, but it has Rosanne Cash and the Everly Brothers), but it soon wears thin. A lot of guest stars give in the feeling of hanging out with visitors and friends, but they don't leave much of an impression, and it arguably gets worse and worse until the final two abysmal tracks.

The penultimate one has Paul McCartney, and I have a bootleg from the Get Back sessions where he and Ringo are raving about Folsom Prison, particularly the way Cash had the prisoners close to a frenzy. Paul even mimics Cash singing some of the more graphic lines from that album (either from "Folsom Prison Blues" or "Cocaine Blues"). So about 20 years later, he finally gets a chance to record with him and it's this fake reggae song McCartney wrote specifically for Cash while luxuriating in his Jamaican getaway. (Johnny and Tom T. Hall actually modified it, deciding it worked better as a straight country song, but I don't think it was ever a good idea to write a reggae song for Johnny Cash.)

Correction, it was written at Cash's place when they were both vacationing in Jamaica, but I don't think it was necessarily for Cash. Paul's demo has him singing it in a fake Jamaican accent...there's no way, he'd send that to Cash, thinking "you should sing it like this!"

Looking back at my Nashville Scene ballot comments:

(Johnny Cash's MySpace had this series, of the original EPs, I think, that might have been overall titled Cash On Sun, just this whole parallel, para-Elvis, world of Jawn hitting his 50s boom-chick stride, catchy and country and rock and not, deep as the voice (well, pert near), at times.)

*Johnny Cash Forever Words(Various Artists) reached its final peak, mebbe, with tracks added for April 2021 reincarnation. It's new music, via many hands, for his previously unset lyrics and poems, built from characteristic, yet venturesome imagery, moods, turns, twists, with that JC cadence, wherever he may roam. The resulting tracks are plausible vibe-wise, even when briefly brushed by Elvis Costello's chamber strings, and in Robert Glasper's jazz-hiphop-alt.r&b setting, where The Man Hisself comments on what he was trying to convey in these words, about drugs. A double album that zips right by. The Watkins Family offering, feat. Sara Watkins's vocal, is a bit bland, duh, and maybe one or two likewise, but overall, pretty amazing standard.

from ballot comments on Dylan's Travellin' Thru:

aven't done any comparative listening, but these takes work on their own, all earthy and fluid and good-humored, yet no screwing around, incl. with the point of the lyric. Just not too much formalism.
Ditto the even more freewheeling sessions with Cash, but they're finding grooves, establishing an in-person, in-the-moment rapport after years of listening to each other's records over and over (Escott says that Cash's early advocacy may have kept the not-terribly-well-selling Bobby on Columbia)
They get several tracks pretty much nailed down vocally (Carl Perkins and Cash's other instrumental regulars of that era are always on point); further evidence that they were thinking in terms of an album, exploring the possibilities. (But I never could see Mr. D. co-billing himself for long with anyone of that huge stature[ for one example, JC's voice is almost you-are-there overwhelming at times, incl. In genial talk]: the Hawks/Band were hirelings as much as collaborators, and the thing with the Dead might well be most notable, on the positive side, for an insight he claimed re how to realign his own performing style, according to Chronicles.)

The inner warpage of some continuing citizens on K. Waldon's EP (see below) is reminding me of several on Johnny Cash's recent Easy Rider: Best of the Mercury Recordings, incl. some that might be The Man In (or near) The Diner, getting head set for another visit from the New York Times---not all of the material is equally good, but it's all done his way and pulled me right through)(incl. some speedy remakes of Sun-era classics)

xgau:

The Legend [Columbia/Legacy, 2005]
Cash recorded almost as much as Elvis and has been reissued more than God, but this quadruple will satisfy most of us, in part because we can think of things we miss--"Next in Line"! "Come In Stranger"! "Singin' in Viet Nam Talking Blues"! "The Mystery of Life"! We all have our own Johnny Cash, that's one of his strengths, which means we learn a little something from other people's, as in the previously unreleased Billy Joe Shaver duet "You Can't Beat Jesus Christ." The box omits the stark Rick Rubin stuff of his old age, which made him a "legend" if anything did. But when I test-drove the confusingly titled single-disc The Legend of Johnny Cash, topped off with a few renowned Rubin songs, the sudden dropoff reinforced my reservations about his late-life need to let his charisma stand in for his voice. A

American VI: Ain't No Grave [American, 2010]
One of those nearness-of-death albums, a category that for me includes not only Warren Zevon's The Wind and John Hurt's Last Sessions, but also Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind and Neil Young's Prairie Wind. Definitely both the grimmest and the most hopeful, which taken together means maybe the best. The big difference is that it's more direct than any of them, keyed to Cash's rewrite of I Corinthians 15:55: "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory." Fortified by his Christian faith, he lends a cracked gravity to souvenirs of cornball sentiment ranging in tone from Ed McCurdy's political "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream" to Queen Lili'uokalani's escapist "Aloha Oe," which close an album that also includes the traditional title song, a Sheryl Crow number about redemption, "Cool Water," and the tenderest "For the Good Times" I've ever heard. Never mind sex under the stars--John will settle for a sickbed cuddle. As Queen Lili'uokalani put it, it'll be a solace "until we meet again." A

Out Among the Stars [Columbia/Legacy, 2014]
The main reason you marvel that material this good was left in the can for 30 years is how many country albums settle for less. But the main reason the material itself astonishes is that Cash is so on his game in what was historically a fallow, coming-down-again biographical moment. In one novelty he gets it on with a chivalrously unnamed Minnie Pearl; in another, he puts a hundred bucks down on a Cadillac and drives it off a cliff on his last date with his ex-wife. Two love songs achieve high seriousness without whispering mawk. And Cash gets so much more out of Adam Mitchell's death-by-cop title song than Merle Haggard or Hazel Dickens. His natural gravity helps. But n.b., Rick Rubin: so does his possession of his bottomless pit of a voice. B+