Johnny Cash – American VI: Ain’t No Grave
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Johnny Cash – American VI: Ain’t No Grave (American)
Imagine a Mount Rushmore dedicated to American music heroes. All right, narrowing it down to four is impossible, isn’t it? Too many greats — Muddy, Bird, Dylan — the damn list is endless, thankfully. But you could sure make a case for Johnny Cash.
The work Cash did in the first 20 years of his career was sufficient to make him a well-deserved Rock and Roll and Country Music Hall of Fame honoree. Then, for about 20 years, let’s face it — he made some spotty records, records whose repertoire was lame, records whose production didn’t serve him well — indifferent records ill-befitting a legend.
Along came Rick Rubin. Between 1994 and his death in 2003, Cash recorded several sessions with Rubin as producer, accompanied by a select, sympathetic crew of musicians that included Benmont Tench and Mike Campbell from Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers and Smoky Hormel, renowned session man and Tom Waits’ accompanist. The five previous recordings in the American series have been celebrated critically, experienced surprising commercial success, and have provided a vital last act in Cash’s story as an artist.
Ain’t No Grave is the sixth (second posthumous) and final release in the American series. Recorded toward the end of Cash’s life, when he knew illness would take him from this world, Ain’t No Grave affirms his belief in the next one. The album accelerates and amplifies Cash’s reflections on mortality, and especially on faith: as anchor, as solace and as redemption from the sins of this world, something to which Cash was no stranger. Had all six records in the series been so focused on such matters, the whole shebang could have been critiqued for its morbidity. Post mortem, the programming is obviously Rubin’s doing. And he could be accused of excessive sentimentality. But I can indulge it. I suspect he had as firm a grasp on Cash’s sentiments gazing into the white light as anyone alive. Besides, he loved the guy. His manipulations are forgiven.
Where earlier records in the American series had a greater concentration of songs by contemporary writers from Beck to Trent Reznor (Cash’s cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” was a revelation), here he sticks closer to home, leaning on material from friends (Kris Kristofferson and Bob Nolan) and Sixties troubadours (Tom Paxton and Ed McCurdy). Cash’s reading of McCurdy’s “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream” (melody courtesy of “Joe Hill”) redeems a worn-out warhorse. The pained authority of Cash’s ravaged baritone making the anti-war hymn all the more testimonial.
The one contribution from a current singer-songwriter, Sheryl Crow’s “Redemption Day,” features a scathing lyric addressing religious hypocrisy that Cash adds a layer of gravitas to, giving it a deeper reading than its author.
On almost all of these songs one is reminded of Cash’s artistic and personal depth and struck by the reality that artists of his magnitude are few and far between. In his last years Cash was sick, finally dying, his voice had lost much of its control and range, but his artistry lost none of its power. To the contrary, it gained authority. He went to his maker (give him the benefit of the doubt whatever your belief), neither gently nor turbulently, but in the words of a song from this collection, with “A Satisfied Mind.”
Reverberating: Assigning a ‘reverberating’ number to Johnny Cash seems pretty lame. Like I’m gonna give a guy who’s just conducted a life-long master class a B+. I don’t think so.
Steve Wilson is the manager of Kief's Downtown Music and a lifelong musician and music writer. His weekly bundle of music reviews, Reverberations, will be appearing in KCFreePress each Tuesday.
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