Johnny Cash-American V A Hundred Highways-CD-FLAC-2006-FORSAKEN

Description :

Artist : Johnny Cash
Album : American V: A Hundred Highways
Label : American
Genre : Folk
Source : CD
Street Date : 2006-07-04
Quality : 752 kbps 44.1kHz 2 channels
Encoder : FLAC 1.2.1
Size : 241.91 MB
Time : 42:46 min
Url : http:www.johnnycash.com
1. Help Me 2:51
2. God’s Gonna Cut You Down 2:38
3. Like the 309 4:35
4. If You Could Read My Mind 4:30
5. Further on Up the Road 3:24
6. On the Evening Train 4:17
7. I Came to Believe 3:44
8. Love’s Been Good to Me 3:18
9. A Legend in My Time 2:37
10. Rose of My Heart 3:18
11. Four Strong Winds 4:34
12. I’m Free from the Chain Gang Now 3:00
American V: A Hundred Highways is the long-awaited album of
Johnny Cash’s final recordings the basic tracks for which (i.e
Cash’s vocals) were recorded in 2002-2003 with overdubs added by
producer Rick Rubin after his death on September 12 2003 at age
71. Between 1994 and 2002 Cash and Rubin had succeeded in
fashioning a third act for the veteran country singer’s career
following his acclaimed 1950s work for Sun Records and his
popular recordings for Columbia in the 1960s and ’70s. In the
’80s Cash’s star had faded but Rubin reinvented him as a hip
country-folk-rock elder at 62 with American Recordings (1994)
his first new studio album to reach the pop charts in 18 years
Unchained (1996) and American III: Solitary Man (2000) continued
the comeback at least as far as the critics were concerned
though none of the albums was actually a big seller. But American
IV: The Man Comes Around (2002) propelled by Cash’s cover of
Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt and a powerful video stayed in the pop
charts longer than any Cash album since 1969s Johnny Cash at San
Quentin. By 2002 however Cash was in failing health homebound
and in a wheelchair and he suffered a personal blow when his
wife June Carter Cash died on May 15 2003. The American
series which posited Cash as an aged sage and the repository for
a bottomless American songbook had already shown a predilection
for gloom in the name of gravity; it’s no surprise that the fifth
and final volume would be even more concerned with as three
earlier Cash compilations had put it God Love and Murder. The
ailing septuagenarian certainly sounds like he’s near the end of
his life but that said he doesn’t sound bad. Cash was never a
great singer in a technical sense: he hadn’t much range his
pitch often wobbled and his lack of breath control sometimes
found him grasping for sound at the end of lines. But he was a
great singer in the sense of projecting a persona through his
voice; his emotional range which went from a Sinatra-like
swagger to an almost embarrassingly intimate vulnerability was
as wide as the spread of notes he could hit confidently was
narrow. Such a singer doesn’t really lose that much with age; in
fact he gains even more interpretive depth. Listening to this
album one can’t get around the knowledge that it is a posthumous
collection made in Cash’s last days but even without that
context it would have much the same impact

The album begins with two religious songs Larry Gatlin’s Help
Me a plea to God and the traditional God’s Gonna Cut You
Down which in a sense answers that plea. The finality of
death thus established Cash launches into what is billed as the
last song he ever wrote Like the 309 which is about a train
taking his casket away. The same image is used later in the cover
of Hank Williams’ On the Evening Train in which a man and his
child put the coffin of a wife and mother on another train. Cash
sings these songs in a restrained manner and even has a sense of
humor in Like the 309 in which he complains about his asthma:
It should be awhileBefore I see Doctor DeathSo it would sure
be niceIf I could get my breath. In between the two train songs
come songs that may not have been about death when their authors
wrote them but sure sound like they are here. As written Gordon
Lightfoot’s If You Could Read My Mind seems to concern a
romantic breakup expressed in literary and cinematic terms but
in Cash’s voice lines like You know that ghost is me and But
stories always end become inescapably elegiac. Bruce
Springsteen’s Further On (Up the Road) is even easier to
interpret as a call to the hereafter with lines like Got on my
dead man’s suit and my smilin’ skull ringMy lucky graveyard
boots and song to sing. These two songs make a pair with the
album’s two closing songs. Ian Tyson’s Four Strong Winds is
like the Lightfoot selection a folk standard by a Canadian
songwriter also nominally about romantic dissolution although
here the singer who is bound for moving on doesn’t seem likely
to come back. And the closing song I’m Free from the Chain Gang
Now may have lyrics implying that the unjustly imprisoned
narrator has been set free but in Cash’s voice it sounds like
he’s been executed instead and is singing from beyond the grave
The four songs in between On the Evening Train and Four Strong
Winds dealing with faith and love (the former expressed in a
previously recorded 1984 Cash copyright I Came to Believe)
are weaker than what surrounds them but they serve to complete
the picture. And it’s worth noting that Cash at death’s door
still outsings croaking Rod McKuen on the songwriter’s
ever-cloying Love’s Been Good to Me. Cash may never have heard
Rubin’s overdubs but they are restrained and tasteful never
doing anything more than to support the singer and the song. If
the entire series of American recordings makes for a fitting
finale to a great career American V: A Hundred Highways is a
more than respectable coda
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Johnny Cash-American VI Aint No Grave-CD-FLAC-2010-FORSAKEN

Description :

Artist : Johnny Cash
Album : American VI: Ain’t No Grave
Label : American
Genre : Folk
Source : CD
Street Date : 2010-02-23
Quality : 759 kbps 44.1kHz 2 channels
Encoder : FLAC 1.2.1
Size : 185.13 MB
Time : 32:18 min
Url : http:www.johnnycash.com
1. Ain’t No Grave 2:53
2. Redemption Day 4:22
3. For the Good Times 3:21
4. I Corinthians 15:55 3:37
5. Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound 3:26
6. Satisfied Mind 2:48
7. I Don’t Hurt Anymore 2:45
8. Cool Water 2:53
9. Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream 3:14
10. Aloha Oe 2:59

Released for the occasion of Johnny Cash’s 78th birthday
American VI: Ain’t No Grave is the final installment in the
collaboration between Cash and Rick Rubin that began with 1994 s
American Recordings. These ten songs were cut during the same
sessions for American V: A Hundred Highways. Guitarists Mike
Campbell Matt Sweeney Smokey Hormel and Benmont Tench on
keyboards were present as were other musicians. June Carter Cash
died during routine surgery during these sessions. Cash though
grief stricken and with full knowledge that he too was dying due
to complications from Parkinson s disease worked as often as his
health would allow. He died three months after these songs were
recorded. Ain’t No Grave is an elegiac and deeply spiritual
album a formal goodbye without regret from a man and an artist
of almost mythic stature. The song selection is rooted in the
Americana folk country and gospel traditions. There is an
excellent reading of Tom Paxton’s Wonder Where I m Bound that
doesn t feel as lost as the original but more a statement after
reflecting on a life fully lived. Likewise his version of Sheryl
Crow’s Redemption Day sums up Cash s own long commitment to
social justice and the need for individual accountability; its
statement of hope is underscored here not as a dream but as a
conviction. Kris Kristofferson’s For the Good Times begins with
the words: Don t look so sad I know it s overBut life goes
onAnd this ole world will keep on turning. It offers a portrait
of the dignity and grace Cash performed with all his life. I
Corinthian s 15:55 is his last self-penned song a sweet
country-gospel melody that echoes far beyond the margins of
contemporary music to an earlier time and looks at the future
with unshakable faith. The title track is a country-gospel-blues
by Brother Claude Ely — it s a fierce showdown with the Reaper
with the singer winning it hands down. There are excellent covers
of Bob Nolan’s Cool Water a song Cash often sang live that
expresses empathy for the downtrodden and Satisfied Mind
written by Jack Rhodes and Red Hayes played on a lone acoustic
guitar which dispenses the truth of earthly life into
two-minutes-and-forty-eight seconds. Ed McCurdy’s Last Night I
Had the Strangest Dream is a true anti-war song that serves as a
testimonial. The album s final cut is Queen Liliuokalani’s
traditional Hawaiian ballad Aloha Oe one of the sweetest most
affectionate leaving songs ever written. And Cash s version? It s
devastatingly beautiful; to the point of tears. If there were any
justice Ain’t No Grave would be the last album released under
Cash s name. It is not only a compelling contribution to his
legacy but an offering that closes the historic American
Recordings series with the same stamp of quality that began it
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