Johnny Cash is dead, and now that the body is no longer with us, all that's left is the public myth: the larger-than-life love affair with his wife, June Carter Cash; the thundering voice, which will resound now only from speakers; the unshakeable moral authority that derived from his hard childhood, hard living, populist outlook, and eventually his old age; the neurodegeneration that made it impossible for him to play guitar on his last records; the inspiring determination to write and record even in his frail final days. And most of all, that black wardrobe, which he once told us symbolized, among so may other things, "the poor and the beaten down/ Living in the hopeless hungry side of town." Cash may be dead, but his ghost haunts us publicly.
Perhaps more than any other album in the Rick Rubin-produced series, Cash's final work, American Recordings V: A Hundred Highways, tries to balance the man and the myth, addressing his life and career with a humor and a gravity that are unmistakably human and unmistakably Cash. Despite the fact that all but two of its tracks are covers, these dozen songs address his marriage to June, his determined Christianity, and his impending death with candor and insight. His covers of Gordon Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind" and Hugh Moffatt's "Rose of My Heart" tenderly sum up the Cashs' loyalty more eloquently than any movie ever could, and "On the 309", the last song he wrote, is filled with wit and vigor. Cash also cracks jokes about his legacy on Don Gibson's "A Legend in My Own Time", finding it little more than meaningless as he prepares to meet his Maker. "If they gave gold statuettes for tears and regret," he sings, "I'd be a legend in my own time."
The album is also notable for what's missing. There are no abstractly religious songs like "The Man Comes Around" or "Redemption", nor any poorly chosen covers like "Rusty Cage" or "The Mercy Seat". A Hundred Highways may be the most consistent entry in the series, although perhaps not the most exciting or even the most enduring. But after the middling Solitary Man and The Man Comes Around, both of which failed to capture the vitality that made American Recordings and Unchained so engaging, A Hundred Highways sounds surprisingly good-- a final uptick in the series' downward trajectory. It's a satisfying and often moving final chapter to Cash's life and career, one that rejects self-pity and remorse in favor of hopefulness and even celebration.
Rubin does insert some distracting production elements, like the ominous marching percussion that overwhelms Cash's vocals on "God's Gonna Cut You Down", but for the most part A Hundred Highways is bare-- just Cash and an acoustic guitar-- which makes it a nice complement to Personal File, a collection of recordings released earlier this year. The quality of Cash's singing fluctuates from song to song; he sounds positively youthful on Springsteen's "Further on up the Road" and sadly ravaged on "Four Strong Winds".
But he makes better use of the wrinkles in his voice here than on The Man Comes Around, on which the quaver lent unearned gravity to several tracks. On the opening prayer, "Help Me", he exhaustedly exhales the word "please" in the chorus, letting us know what's at stake in these songs and in his life. Nothing else on this album-- or likely on any other release this year-- so effortlessly and evocatively suggests the helplessness of old age, the comfort of mortal resignation, or the finality of death than Cash's delivery of that simple word.
