Johnny Cash - The Best Of (1998)
Classic Country | FLAC image, cue, log, scans | 372 MB (3% recovery)
Label: Universal Music Russia
Cash is a genuine titan of popular music, whose finest work should be as venerated as anything by Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, David Bowie or Brian Wilson, and this collection does as good a job of beginning to explain why as any. The virtue of Cash's music is its simplicity. His brutally reductive take on country, set to his distinctive boom-chicka-boom backbeat, directs all of the listener's attention to his supernaturally world-weary voice (even as a teenager, Cash sounded about a thousand years old). This collection is a judicious mix of covers (Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry", Bob Dylan's "It Ain't Me Babe" among them) and original Cash standards.