Unearthed
Johnny Cash
American/Lost Highway
Johnny Cash made four albums with producer Rick Rubin in the last decade of his life, but they hardly reflect Cash's output during the period. For the duo's first collaboration, 1994's "American Recordings," Cash committed more than 100 songs to tape, and subsequent albums were drawn from equally prodigious amounts of raw material. Rubin says that Cash worked constantly, less concerned with assembling releases than with satisfying his musical curiosity.
The five-disc "Unearthed" gathers some outtakes from those acclaimed Grammy-winning releases. It's a trove of living-room demos and studio experiments that didn't quite pan out, long-lost frontier songs Cash recalled on a whim, and rock-era compositions the country legend loved but, until his late-innings resurgence, didn't dare sing. Apart from a disc that surveys the "best" of his American output, the vast majority of the tracks - 64 out of 79 - have never been released before.
Yet "Unearthed" isn't the usual opportunistic posthumous odds and ends. Its breadth and beauty reinforces the impression created by the official releases that Cash was one of the most devastating interpreters of American popular song ever, a man who infused all he touched with an essential bit of himself, a shred of humanity or humility that most singers are unable (or unwilling) to share.
That's evident on nearly everything here: on a stark, solo "Long Black Veil" and the easygoing soft-shoe "Trouble in Mind," on an unreleased duet with Fiona Apple (Cat Stevens' "Father and Son") and a stunning trip through Bob Marley's "Redemption Song" with Joe Strummer.
While most of the American releases were reserved, if not somber, "Unearthed" shows that Cash could still rip it up. His deftly synchronized "The Running Kind," with Tom Petty, is a fit of restless energy, while Carl Perkins' jump "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby" and a collaboration with Perkins on Chuck Berry's "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man," recapture the devil-may-care attitude that animated so many Sun sessions.
The set's masterpiece is "My Mother's Hymn Book," an entire disc of solo acoustic performances that are among the last things Cash recorded before he died of complications from diabetes in September. On "I'll Fly Away," "I Shall Not Be Moved," and others he first heard his mother, Carrie, sing when he was young, Cash turns oft-shouted songs of resolute joy inward in ways that make clear he is struggling to address questions of his own mortality.
Part of the disc's poignancy comes from knowing that Cash was in declining health, but part of it is his utter absence of affectation: You sense Cash is singing the songs because he draws strength from them, and it's the faith that eludes words that he so graciously shares.
©2003, The Philadelphia Inquirer.
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