Where was the country legend in the early 90s? After surviving drugs, alcohol and despite a career that now had more downs than ups, Johnny Cash was becoming respectable again. In 1992, when he had just celebrated his sixtieth birthday, he was honored at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Better still, the following year, U2 invited him to sing on Zooropa and Rick Rubin signed him to his American Recordings label. This would be followed by a series of six memorable albums composed of covers. But at the time of the deal with the metal hip-hop producer, the man in black was in the studio in Nashville recording demos that he stopped immediately, excited by the unexpected challenge that was offered to him. Thirty years later, his son John Carter Cash found these tapes from which he kept only his father’s voice and guitar to produce an album of eleven tracks. Reworked with clever arrangements by David Ferguson, the “songwriter’s” former sound engineer, and embellished by coherent featurings like Waylon Jennings or the former members of his group Marty Stuart and Dave Roe, these thrilling songs show to what extent Johnny Cash’s work goes beyond the strict framework of country. It is not from Beyoncé that we will learn that.
