Johnny Cash was a man of constant reinvention, but looking back, you wouldn't know it. From the moment he fell into the lucky laps of Sun Records in the mid-'50s, Cash's albums served as canvasses for his revolving door of archetypes: outlaw, repentant sinner, evangelist, activist, poet, collaborator. They bled together from album to album, but they were singular extensions of a complex man. The multitudinous Man in Black.
Take, for example, Cash, the activist poet, who released Bitter Tears in 1964, a spoken-word album lamenting the plight of Native Americans. Or, the next year, when Cash released the ambitious Sings the Ballads of the True West, an echoey double-album that springs between western ballads and more spoken-word recitations. It was not the first gunfighter ballad album, not even close, but it was likely one of the first high-concept country records.
Neither album was particularly well-received (though "25 Minutes To Go" would later appear on At Folsom Prison) and both came during a period of unfettered addiction and turmoil. They're not bad albums, but what they do show is Cash's penchant for conceptual exploration and experimentation–if nothing else he was willing to try something new (and fail).
Consider Cash the collaborator who was in the infamous Million Dollar Quartet, which was a loose Sun Records jam session in 1956 with Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins. The resulting outtakes album is known more for its conversational insight than music. Or the man who recorded two albums in the 1980s with Willie Nelson, Kris Krisofferson and Waylon Jennings as the Highwaymen.
Another collaboration began with June Carter in the mid-60s, who co-wrote one of the songs he's most known for, "Ring Of Fire." Originally a jaunty crooner when it was sung by her sister, Anita Carter, Cash worked with another musical partner in producer Cowboy Jack Clement to add mariachi horns, giving the song a darker tone and its signature sound. Cash also recorded a duet album, Carryin' On with Johnny Cash & June Carter, with her in 1967, which features "Jackson."
His last collaboration was the American Recordings anthology with Rick Rubin, which resulted in five full albums towards the end of his life. During those recordings, Cash switches from solitary recordings to an album where his backing band is Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. Throughout the series he receives musical contributions from Flea, Mick Fleetwood, Lindsey Buckingham, Sheryl Crow, Will Oldham, Marty Stuart, Nick Cave, Fiona Apple, Don Henley and more.
But one of the most important collaborations Cash manifested was the friendship he had with Bob Dylan. Though it only resulted in one song, their mutual admiration created a culture clash in the '60s, where Cash's audience—leaning towards homespun conservatism—met the Bohemian folkie generation, propelling Dylan's "voice of a generation." Their relationship likely began in correspondence, sending letters back and forth before Cash played the Newport Folk Festival in 1964. Somewhere along the line there is the story of Dylan meeting Cash in a hotel, running into the room with Joan Baez, and jumping on the bed yelling, "I met Johnny Cash!" but the details are murky. For his part, Cash explains his recollections in his second autobiography, Cash: The Autobiography.
"I was deeply into folk in the early 1960s, both the authentic songs from various periods and areas of American life and the new ‘folk revival’ songs of the time, so I took note of Bob Dylan as soon as the Bob Dylan album came out in early '62 and listened almost constantly to the Freewheelin' Bob Dylan in '63. I had a portable record player I'd take along on the road, and I'd put on Freewheelin' backstage, then go out and do my show, then listen again as I came off. After awhile at that, I wrote Bob a letter telling him how much of a fan I was. He wrote back almost immediately, saying he'd been following my music since "I Walk the Line," and so we began a correspondence."
When the two sang their "Girl From The North Country" duet on The Johnny Cash Show, it created a singularity, a fracture in the thought that folk and country were different roads. In reality, they were spirits separated long ago, sometime after African-American blues collided with Appalachian folk. After that and for a long while, there was Gene Autry and Jimmie Rodgers on one side, and Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger on the other. But the moment Dylan showed up on The Johnny Cash Show, those ideologies were capable of blurring once again.
Upon hearing of Cash's death in 2003, Dylan wrote about his friend, saying in a letter published in Rolling Stone, "In plain terms, Johnny was and is the North Star; you could guide your ship by him—the greatest of the greats then and now. I first met him in '62 or '63 and saw him a lot in those years. Not so much recently, but in some kind of way he was with me more than people I see every day."
Lastly, let us consider Cash, the man of god, who sandwiched gospel albums between his secular work through most of his career. First with 1969's Hymns, then three years later with Hymns From The Heart, then in 1969 he released The Holy Land and in 1973 a double-album, tied to a film, named The Gospel Road.
Cash wasn't pious, quite the opposite; he was a penitent sinner. And, it's pretty clear the depths of his addictive personality were also tied to undertones of self-loathing.
In 1971, in an interview with The Sunday Times, he said he believed that his marriage to June Carter saved him from himself.
"I was evil, I really was," Cash told journalist Philip Norman, who then reflected, "certainly he was wayward; sometimes compromising his early career. June is quick to point out, however, that he was never a monster; that she did not, by a womanly miracle, reclaim him; he simply, at a certain point, pulled himself together."
Twenty-three years later when the then-elder statesman of country music was releasing his first Rick Rubin collaboration, American Recordings, he had found some clarity and softened on himself, using the album's art as a reference-point in an interview with Rolling Stone.
Cash said, "You know my album cover with the two dogs on it? I've given them names. Their names are Sin and Redemption. Sin is the black one with the white stripe; Redemption is the white one with the black stripe. That's kind of the theme of the album, and I think it says it for me, too. When I was really bad, I was not all bad. When I was really trying to be good, I could never be all good. There would be that black streak going through.”