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This 1994 album won the Grammy Award for Contemporary Folk recording, and so I freely admit that my choice might have something to do with my affection for authentic folk music and my usual avoidance of country music. The album was responsible for Cash's final reemergence as a major figure in contemporary American music and if you do not know the story the key parts are that Cash signed with Rick Rubin's American Recordings. Rubin had produced Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys but topped himself by having Carter record mostly his own songs accompanied only by himself on a guitar. For those of us familiar with the recordings of America's troubadour Woody Guthrie or the early New York City recordings of Bob Dylan, this approach makes perfect sense. This is Johnny Cash stripped down to the essentials and they are pretty impressive.
This is proven with the opening track, "Delia's Gone," which is probably the best known track from the album since it was a music video that introduced Cash on MTV to the alternative-grunge generation. There are several choice covers on which Cash ruins the songs for their creators by making them their own, such as Nick Lowe's "The Beast in Me," Kris Kristofferson's "Why Me Lord?", Leonard Cohen's "Bird on a Wire," and Tom Waits' "Down There by the Train." But the original songs are the real gems here, including "Redemption" and "Like a Soldier." The two live tracks recorded at L.A.'s Viper Room seem unnecessary, but that is how a lot of people first heard Cash sing, so it is hard to question it as unappropriate. Besides, Cash does his own liner notes. If you have never heard "American Recordings," the first of four solid albums Cash recorded with Rubin, then this is as good as time as any. As the Man in Black could have told you himself, better late than never.
'Delia's Gone' is a fitting successor of 'Folsom Prison Blues', giving even the most irredeemable criminal a voice; 'The Beast in Me', 'Why Me Lord' and 'Redemption' speak of Cash's own struggles with his demons and his eventual salvation; 'Drive On' and 'Let The Train Blow The Whistle' burn with Cash's macho swagger;'The Man Who Couldn't Cry' is just plain hilarious.
A unique musical experience transcending genre, this is the artist unadorned as genius. Like Cash himself, this is elegantly simple, bleakly compelling, and untimately inspirational and transfiguring. The perfect intoduction to the greatest figure in modern music, who though greatly missed, still exerts a powerful presence.
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