CD REVIEW: Johnny Cash — American VI: Ain't No Grave

Nobody has enjoyed a late career renaissance like Johnny Cash. The series of collaborations he made with Slayer producer Rick Rubin reignited critical interest in his work at a time when Cash believed he was destined to become a touring nostalgia act. The first of these, American Recordings is a fantastic album- raw, dark, stark, stripped down to the Man in Black’s baritone voice and primitive guitar playing. Cash had never sounded young, and he’d always been good with death, but I was shocked by the simplicity of the first lines, the frank, naked, blasé expression of brutality:

Delia, O Delia

Delia all my life

If I hadn’t have shot poor Delia

I’d have had her for my wife

Whenever I play American Recordings I find this opening as startling as when I first heard it well over a decade ago. Cash could get close to the darkness without screeching or posing. He was already there. He just started singing in that rumbling baritone and you believed. It’s so powerful that you forget he could also be funny- and indeed, the last track on American Recordings was a joke song, The Man Who Couldn’t Cry.

Later I discovered that Delia was an old song, that Cash was covering himself. The American series always relied less on Cash’s abilities as a songwriter and more on his skills as an interpreter, even if he was reinterpreting an earlier version of Johnny Cash. Some of the songs covered were selected by Cash, others by Rubin. It was easy to tell which was which: Cash’s sensibilities were steeped in the broad country, gospel and folk tradition, while Rubin favored a narrower palate of heavy metal and alt rock. The miraculous thing was that it worked, most of the time. Cash could invest the adolescent self-loathing of Trent Reznor’s Hurt with the same authority and sincerity as an ancient standard like That Lucky Old Sun, a mournful lament for the difficult life of a working man. The songs on these records sat comfortably alongside each other because Cash’s experience, persona and interpretive gift enabled him to uncover the shared themes of God, pain, redemption, love, violence and longing in the unlikeliest bedfellows.

The peak of the Rubin mix n’ match approach was reached on American III: Solitary Man. Cash’s versions of Nick Cave’s The Mercy Seat and Will Oldham’s I See a Darkness are revelatory, as good as if not better than the originals. By the time of American IV however some of the alt-pop covers were starting to sound like novelties. Personal Jesus is a trite rather than inspired song selection while even the much vaunted version of Reznor’s Hurt gains much of its power from the harrowing video. American IV is also marred by some disastrous appearances by celebrity guests. Nick Cave strangles I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry to death on his first verse, and then, as if unsatisfied, repeatedly kicks the corpse in the head before the song ends. Fiona Apple rots like a dead whale on Bridge Over Troubled Water. By far the best track on the album is Cash’s apocalyptic The Man Comes Around, which is as good as anything he ever wrote. When I play that album now I tend to skip the corny covers and concentrate on Cash’s choices.

Anyway, Cash died before Rubin could throw Lady Gaga’s Poker Face at him and as a result the two albums culled from his final recording sessions are much lighter on the reinterpreted heavy metal/gothic pop factor. American V, released posthumously in 2006, was a decidedly stripped down affair. Recorded in the aftermath of June Carter Cash’s death, Cash was himself teetering on the brink of eternity. The album has an intimacy that can be painful, even claustrophobic. It is mournful and sad, and Cash’s once booming voice is reduced at times to a croak, almost a whisper. Unlike its predecessor however, it feels like a whole; and yet it wasn’t, not really- because Rubin had a sequel planned.

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Which brings us to American VI: Ain’t No Grave. I had some anxiety about this record: as somebody who loves Johnny Cash’s music, I wanted it to be more than just good. It needed to cap not only the American series but also Cash’s career, reaching all the way back to his Sun recordings (best experienced in the excellent Bear Family box set. And after a few listens I’m starting to think that- just maybe- Rubin and Cash pulled it off. Although American VI like its predecessor finds Cash in frail voice over subtle, spare arrangements, the tone is different. Cash’s body may have been shattered, and he may have been in mourning for his beloved wife but the tone is calm, almost transcendent. On the title track he sings:

Well there ain’t no grave

Gonna hold my body down

Well there ain’t no grave

Gonna hold my body down

When I hear that trumpet sound

I’m gonna get up out of the ground

The song mixes defiance with a joyful declaration that death is not the end. And it is this bedrock of faith, of an elemental Christianity that liberates Cash from fear and informs the rest of the album. This is the sound of a man at peace with himself, with his life, who is ready to meet his Redeemer. Indeed, he’s so at peace he can take a Sheryl Crow song, Redemption Song and make you forget about her musings on toilet paper and suspect for the first time that she might actually be a talented songwriter. Then he takes Kristofferson’s For the Good Times– basically a song in which a horny goat tries to emotionally blackmail his ex into giving him some pity sex- and turns it into a moving reflection on a long life nearly at its end. The fourth track, 1 Corinthians 15:55 is the last song Cash ever wrote and begins with the lines from scripture:

Oh Death where is thy sting?

Oh grave where is thy victory?

Before Cash continues with a plea to God for shelter, guidance, forgiveness and mercy; but it’s a plea given in the certainty that God is merciful, delivered over a cheerful waltz. Cash knows that if he asks, he shall receive.

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American VI is Cash’s final articulation of his faith, his life’s experience, his long dying. At times it sounds like a ghostly transmission from the beyond. Some critics have complained about the emphasis given to Cash’s frailty and mortality on the last four American records; others have even accused Rubin of exploiting him, as if Cash was the sort of man to allow himself to be thus used. Other critics complain that the gothic darkness of the American series overshadows the richness of his persona, obliterating memories of the speed freak Cash, the rockabilly Cash, the historian Cash, the comedy Cash, the socially conscious Cash.

They are wrong. Forget my crack about Lady Gaga on the way in: Rick Rubin deserves only praise for seeing the potential that still lay untapped in Johnny Cash when everybody else thought he was washed up. Cash was lucky indeed to have found such a great collaborator in his last decade, although he probably didn’t think it was luck. The other, younger Johnny Cash still exists; his records are out there, and are being rediscovered all the time. Nobody else has such a rich discography- thematically at least- for Cash could become a killer, a child, a dispossessed Indian, a randy husband and yet always remain Cash. But it’s the emphasis on mortality that makes the American albums unique and adds to rather than subtracts from that richness. Given strength by his faith, Cash could afford to be honest, even shocking in his expression of weakness. If it makes us uncomfortable then that’s our fault. Cash showed us how it’s done, this business of dying, and he did it in song. Let us all hope that when we get there we can do it with the same dignity, resolve and peace of mind as the Man in Black.