Johnny Cash

Sings the Ballads of the True West Johnny Cash Bonus Tracks edition

Japanese remastered pressing includes 2 bonus tracks (Same as U. S.). Recorded between 1959 & 1965, this album shows Cash combining his source material with romantic Western folklore to achieve a vision that was hard-hitting, familiar, and historically resonant. According to his liner notes, he also "slept under mesquite bushes and in gullies" and "learned to throw a Bowie knife and kill a jack rabbit at forty yards, not for the sport but because he was hungry." Appropriately, the songs are replete with frontier imagery, and the spare arrangements (even the strings are subdued) make plenty of room for Cash's resonant baritone, giving rise to visions of open plains and boot spurs jangling in the dust. Highlights include 'Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairie' and Shel Silverstein's chilling gallows-pole narrative '25 Minutes To Go'. Of the many fine recordings Cash made for Columbia in the '60s, this is one of his most ambitious and most beloved. CBS. 2006.