Johnny Cash – The Fabulous Johnny Cash

Though many sources (including this one) may tell you that the American Recordings albums from Johnny Cash were his best, it’s actually probably not true. The American albums are certainly the most accessible albums by today’s standards, since the only thing most people like about Johnny Cash is his voice (actually apparently the only thing the current generation likes about Johnny Cash is that he’s an old guy that covered Nine Inch Nails, bastards), and the American albums feature that and really only that. Of course, I am not complaining, since they are my favorite set of albums, but there are what I would call 4 distinct times in his career that have to be appreciated to get a clear understanding of how he worked and continues to work (despite having passed on, now THAT’S dedication), and the 2nd of those times are his late 50’s/early 60’s recordings with Columbia Records, of which The Fabulous Johnny Cash is the first.

The story behind this album is that Johnny Cash, along with a few of his compatriots, had been signed to Sun Records (where he got his start) and had been doing pretty well there, but “Folsom Prison Blues”, “I Walk The Line”, and a few other of his everlasting hits had drawn the attention of all the biggest labels, who all came a-courtin’. Cash decided on Columbia because they offered him, on top of more money and artistic freedom and exposure and trinkets and helicopters and pancakes, also gave him the ability to do one thing that Sam Phillips was famously never interested in letting Johnny Cash do: an album of all Gospel music.

So Cash went with it, but kept it from Sam Phillips and even (regretfully, in his own words) lied to him at one point about going to another label when his Sun contract had expired. Eventually he came clean, and a few artists (one amongst them being newcomer Roy Orbison) left Sun to pursue glittery pop star lives elsewhere. However, to fulfill contractual obligation, Johnny Cash had to record X amount of songs for Phillips, and decided to just do a bunch of covers and less thought-through songs, saving the best for his Columbia debut, which, coincidentally, I’m supposed to be talking about right now!

Indeed this is some of Johnny Cash’s best. He had moved into a nicer studio with fancier equipment (including his slightly gauche Gibson acoustic guitar with “Johnny Cash” written in all cursive letters across the fretboard and 2 inexplicable pick guards but anyway), and had more guest musicians at his disposal, but none of that mattered, because all he really ever needed were The Tennessee Three, who all sound in top form on this recording.

First, stone-faced Luther Perkins brings one of his famous 2-note guitar lines to introduce “Run Softly, Blue River”, which is soon replaced by a team of backup singers, who are not necessary but I’m sure it was a killer sound at the time. The lyrics are about as innocuous as you could possibly imagine:

Run softly, blue river, my darling’s asleep
Run softly, blue river, run cool and deep
Oh I thrill to her kisses, and she thrills to mine
Run softly while she sleeps and dreams for a time

Which might be a shock to people who think Johnny Cash only sings about killing people and going to prison and shooting up heroin. A further shock may come when they find out that this is actually a really good song.

Another really good one, though more of an “updated classic” than an original composition, is “Frankie’s Man, Johnny”, and yes “Frankie” is clearly a girl in this song. It’s a fairly clever song about Johnny, a musician, who is playing a show and trying to score with a red-haired lady, which isn’t so cool, but then hijinks ensue and the story has a moral. How many songs nowadays have a line like “Well the moral of this story…”? It’s a pretty great moral, too.

The next song, “That’s All Over”, should not be confused with a Johnny Cash original called “It’s All Over”, so pay ye heed.

“The Troubadour” is a tune by Cindy Walker, who was around about 20 years before Johnny Cash and actually outlived him by about 3 years, and was praised for having a very unpretentious songwriting style. Indeed, this song seems quite honest, and is about being the lonely showman who sings through the broken heart that inspired the hit music he sings. Such a thing is fairly typical amongst songwriter types, you see. The story is a bit more complex than that, however, as the actual subject of the song is present as well, which I have to admit is very clever.

Though, when putting together the career-spanning concept compilation “Love, God, Murder”, Johnny Cash stated that those are the three main elements to his music, he apparently forgot to mention “Trains”. It’s hard to turn around in The Man In Black’s discography without running into some kind of train song. Not only did he like singing about trains, but he rather enjoyed getting his band to sound like a train, and that is certainly evident in “One More Ride”, since he not only has W.S. “Fluke” Holland playing his famous train drum line, but the backup singers are even singing “Buyaa ba ba” which kind of sounds train-like. The song itself is good too, with an interesting melody and words written by Bob Nolan.

The next song, however, is even better. It’s called “That’s Enough” and it was written by a particularly sassy black gospel singer named Dorothy Coates. The words convey an interesting attitude for a gospel song, summarized quite nicely in the last line “I’ve got Jesus, and that’s enough.”, which has a bit of a dual meaning, being that Jesus is enough in life so you don’t need material possessions or the love of people or anything, but the meaning is shifted slightly in that the singer doesn’t have any of those things anyway. The person in the song has Jesus, and that’s enough,  though in Johnny’s case, a really awkward multi-transition key change is icing on the cake.

The latter half of the album actually contains rather a host of hits as well, starting with “I Still Miss Someone”, a song that Cash gives some credit to his father for helping him write (though in what capacity I have no idea). This song has been recorded and re-recorded many, many times, once even as a duet with George Jones. It also happens to be one of my favorite Cash originals, and this is probably the definitive version.

Speaking of Cash originals, another fine one is “Don’t Take Your Guns To Town”, an extremely sparse song instrumentally, but this is good, because it is an excellent story song. I honestly wish Johnny Cash would have done more songs like this, but the sheer variety of tunes he did is more than sufficient, who could ask for more? Oh, he re-wrote the song to perform it on Sesame Street, that’s what you asked for, right?

One thing that I love about Country music, well, OLD Country music (still, a lot of it has spilled over into today’s garbage) is the “obsequious love song”. A good instance of this phenomenon is the song “I’d Rather Die Young”, which was by a team of Country musicians I’ve never heard of:

I’d rather die young than live without you
So don’t ever leave me, whatever you do

I love songs that assume that there’s no solution to relationship problems other than just not leaving each other.

Another great Country song in the bare definition of the term as it was originally intended is the song that defines how impossibly hard it was to live in the Country and make a living in an Agricultural culture. Indeed, Johnny Cash experienced that first-hand, as he grew up on a cotton farm, and in fact the words to “Pickin’ Time” is one of two early songs he wrote about the subject that are entirely true (the other is “Five Feet High And Rising”). It’s just basically about how bad things are, but how good they will be once the cotton blooms and it’s “Pickin’ Time”. Personally, I think it’s a grand metaphor for another kind of pickin’, that of the guitar player, but maybe that’s just me being idealistic.

“Shepherd Of My Heart” is another song written by a woman, Jenny Lou Carson, who was actually the first woman to score a number 1 hit in Country. It’s odd to hear Johnny singing a song that is supposed to be sung by a woman, but even more odd is the fact that it works every single time.

Finally, we have an excellent song that seems to never get any respect, “Suppertime”. I guess the reason it has never been lauded as a spectacular song is because it’s a gospel song that combines love of family and home with the promise of Heaven. Sam Phillips was right in saying that stuff would never sell. Too bad, really, because it is a great song, and is indeed an oddity in and of itself, as it prominently features a “lap steel”, which is one of the most standard instruments in Country music out in Nashville, but Johnny Cash seemed to have avoided it deftly through the years. In fact, the very first song Johnny Cash ever recorded was with a lap steel player who worked at Sears, worked on recording “Wide Open Road” with Johnny Cash for 3 days, and then retired from music forever.

Speaking of retiring forever, we come now to the end of The Fabulous Johnny Cash proper, an album that is indeed fabulous, even if Johnny wouldn’t admit it himself. In fact, he seemed to hate saying the rather proud title, and in a televised concert, actually had Luther Perkins say the title instead. What a guy, that Johnny Cash. What a guy.