The poems collected two years ago in Johnny Cash: Forever Words were unsung, in every sense of the word. Gathered from handwritten letters, notebooks, journals, and manuscripts that Cash left behind when he died in 2003, the verses had never been set to music, as far as anyone could tell. Yet turning the pages of that 2016 book, it was impossible not to hear them delivered in Cash’s asphalt-dark voice, sung or spoke-sung, accompanied by his low-slung guitar and the railroad-rhythm drumbeat he favored.
Those lost songs have now become real with this 16-song tribute album, on which Cash family and friends (Rosanne Cash and Carlene Carter; Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson) as well as artists less closely associated with his legacy (Kacey Musgraves, Chris Cornell, John Mellencamp, Elvis Costello) accept the challenge of putting music to his posthumous poetry.
It’s a formidable task: Despite the plainspoken quality of his gruff, gothic delivery, Cash flat-out owned his songs, and the number of good Cash covers in the world is fairly low. (Little Richard, Ray Charles, Dwight Yoakam, Willie Nelson, and Bruce Springsteen are among the standout exceptions.)
The central question of this album is whether the artists assembled can do for Cash what he famously did for Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” and Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” bringing new life to the material beyond the limits of time, self, and place. But they are also charged with the task of supplying song where music never existed—to paraphrase Paul Muldoon, the editor of Cash’s collected poems, to deliver “that missing boom-chicka [that] will allow it to be completely what it most may be.”
Nelson and Kristofferson, Cash’s surviving fellow Highwaymen, lead off the album with “Forever/I Still Miss Someone,” with Nelson’s guitar Trigger wandering through a forlorn melody as Kristofferson intones what is billed as the last poem their friend wrote, anticipating his own death: “You tell me that I must perish/Like the flowers that I cherish.” What unfolds is a kind of Great American Songbook approach to Johnny Cash, traversing the country and western, mountain bluegrass, blues, and Scotch Irish balladeer range of his own work. Musgraves does a misty, harmonizing duet with her husband, Ruston Kelly, working from a letter the singer wrote to wife June Carter Cash, who died four months before him. Elvis Costello’s swoony, string-laden rendition of “I’ll Still Love You” feels like that letter’s postscript, and Carlene Carter’s “June’s Sundown” completes the romantic trio.
Some poems are aptly translated: Dailey & Vincent’s gospel bluegrass sound fits the hymnlike lyrics of “He Bore It All,” including Cash’s prelude verse from the Book of Matthew. (Cash, an ordained minister, recorded an audio version of the Bible in his lifetime, and left behind a study of Job among his papers.) In choosing “The Walking Wounded,” a bitter ballad which Cash wrote in the 1970s, Rosanne Cash gives stark voice to her father’s legacy of singing the music of the forgotten—Native American and rural and working people and those drafted in Vietnam, especially: “We make the steel, we cut the trees...You may not know us, but you’ll see/There are more than you’d believe.” In a video shot around the cottonfields of Cash’s childhood home, she wanders the present-day landscape of Dyess, Arkansas. The song also features her half-brother John Carter Cash, who co-produced the album; it’s only the second time they’ve collaborated.
Most of the songs were recorded in Cash Cabin Studios in Hendersonville, Tennessee. Allison Krauss & Union Station’s bluegrass translation of “The Captain’s Daughter” feels most true to that setting. The central character in “Jellico Coal Man,” by T-Bone Burnett, could be a Cormac McCarthy creation plodding through a Tennessee mining town, in a song that’s at once Biblical, bluesy, and brazenly dirty.
At times, the accumulation of so many voices weighs heavy on this album. There’s little room to breathe in Brad Paisley’s “Gold All Over the Ground.” It makes you yearn for the simplicity of a strong, space-giving voice, like Jamey Johnson’s barrel-chested belt on “Spirit Rider,” or Chris Cornell’s cathartic howl on “You Never Knew My Mind,” where the late grunge singer unleashes the pent-up anguish of a 1967 breakup poem by Cash.
Jazz pianist Robert Glasper delivers one of Forever Words’ most transformative moments with “Goin’, Goin’, Gone,” turning Cash’s drug confessional into a stunning R&B groove built around the refrain “Liquid, capsule, tablet, powder.” (“I was trying to describe the hell of trying to stay alive,” Cash explains in a sampled interview.) It recalls the imagination and generosity of Cash’s own work as a covers artist, suggesting his music and words as an enduring Great American Songbook in their own right, ripe for new interpretations. As he concludes in the last poem he wrote, voiced here by Kristofferson: “The trees that I planted still are young; the songs I sang will still be sung.”
