Johnny Cash Official

Featured were four original songs by Cash, along with eight covers including takes of "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day," "Silent Night," "Blue Christmas," and others. This is a solidly enjoyable entry from Cash, and a must-have for die-hard aficionados of the country icon.

The idea of a live album as a documentary is a naïvely outdated one. For decades, fans have understood that, if one wanted to hear a tip-to-tail, warts-and-all live performance by one of their favorite musicians, a bootleg would be just about the only way, since the "live" albums typically released by most acts were usually cobbled together from multiple performances (and sometimes even across multiple tours).

When Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash passed, they left behind what John Carter Cash, their son and Johnny Cash: Forever Words co-producer, describes as a "monstrous amassment" of things, including a treasure trove of undiscovered material that includes Johnny Cash's handwritten letters, poems and documents, penned across the entirety of his life.

At Folsom Prison is a live album by Johnny Cash, released on Columbia Records in May 1968. After his 1955 song "Folsom Prison Blues", Cash had been interested in recording a performance at a prison. His idea was put on hold until 1967, when personnel changes at Columbia Records put Bob Johnston in charge of producing Cash's material. Cash had recently controlled his drug abuse problems, and was looking to turn his career around after several years of limited commercial success. Backed by June Carter, Carl Perkins and the Tennessee Three, Cash performed two shows at Folsom State Prison in California on January 13, 1968.

The Fabulous Johnny Cash was Cash's first album for Columbia Records and one of his best for the label. Unlike some of his latter-day albums, there wasn't much filler on the record. At the time of its recording, Cash had just been freed from his contract with Sun. Instead of recording these songs for his last Sun sessions, he wound up saving much of his best material for his Columbia album, and that's what makes The Fabulous so consistent.

Man In Black is Johnny Cash’s chart-topping 1971 masterpiece. This politically-infused album produced two top twenty hits, “Man in Black” and “Singin' in Viet Nam Talkin' Blues.” This star-studded affair features Norman Blake, June Carter Cash, Marshall Grant, Billy Graham, W.S. Holland, Farrell Morris, Carl Perkins, Jerry Shook and Bob Wootton. Absolutely essential.

All six of the iconic Johnny Cash American Recordings LP's are now available in their entirety in one box for the first time. Produced by legendary producer Rick Rubin these 6 180gsm LP's are housed in a beautiful 12x12 cloth covered box.
Albums included are: American Recordings (1994), Unchained (1996), American III: Solitary Man (2000), American IV: The Man Comes Around (2002), American V: A Hundred Highways (2006), American IV: Ain't No Grave (2010).

Even if the best and most popular songs on this 1965 album are the ones most likely to show up on greatest-hits compilations ("The Long Black Veil, "Orange Blossom Special," "It Ain't Me Babe"), it certainly rates as one of Cash's finer non-greatest-hits releases. If nothing else, it would have historical importance for the inclusion of three Bob Dylan covers, at a time when Dylan was just starting to get heavily covered by pop musicians (and not often covered by country ones).

Ride This Train was the first explicit Americana concept album that Johnny Cash recorded. As the title implies, the album is about railroads, how they developed, and how they changed the land. Apart from a couple of songs, Ride This Train isn't comprised of traditional folk ballads - they are songs that tell the history of trains and rails, offering an educational lesson. Cash expounds on the songs with brief spoken narratives. Though it is hard to fault Cash's intentions, the songs aren't very good (although "The Shifting Whispering Sands" is a standout) and the history is a bit simplistic and silly. On the whole, Ride This Train sounds as if it were of a piece with the Walt Disney educational features produced at the same time, and like those films, it is more interesting as an historical artifact than a piece of art.

One of Cash's earlier pseudo-concept albums, this doesn't exactly follow a specific theme like farming or hymns of the American land the whole way through. Rather, it's a collection of a dozen songs that generally are on the folkier and more Americana-centered side of Cash's repertoire, though of course such songs have always had a prominent place in his material.