Track Listing

1. Help Me
2. God's Gonna Cut You Down
3. Like The 309 (the last song Johnny wrote & recorded)
4. If You Could Read My Mind
5. Further On Up the Road
6. The Evening Train
7. I Came To Believe
8. Love's Been Good To Me
9. A Legend In My Time
10. Rose Of My Heart
11. Four Strong Winds
12. I'm Free From The Chain Gang Now

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2750 in Music
• Released on: 2006-07-04
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.com
The ethical questions surrounding this final album in the American Recordings series are as unavoidable as they are, ultimately, peripheral. While the vocal tracks were recorded in the months just prior to Johnny Cash's passing in September 2003, the arrangements weren't undertaken until two years later. And though producer Rick Rubin had become a trusted friend, the Man in Black wasn't around to approve or disapprove, let alone guide, the final sessions. However, if the pure power of these recordings doesn't quiet the skeptics, nothing will. With Heartbreakers Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench and slide guitar session pro Smokey Hormel on board (all three of whom appear on earlier Cash albums), along with guitarists Matt Sweeney and Johnny Polansky, the sound is stately and acoustic, but rarely staid, even as the dynamics of earlier recordings in the series are absent. Instead, the songs have a measured, elegiac intensity, the sound of musicians choosing their notes carefully and making just the right choices.

The songs Cash sings are, unsurprisingly, confessional and reflective: his mortality and his mistakes, his maker and his salvation, and the loss of his wife June and the end of his career may have weighed on his mind, but in these songs he both embodies and transcends his personal history. On "God's Gonna Cut You Down," as the musicians clap and stomp behind him, his voice cuts through the air like that same avenging hand. On the new original "Like the 309"--the last song Cash ever wrote--he cops to being short of breath, and that voice becomes a metaphor for what each of us will one day face. On Gordon Lightfoot's "If You Read My Mind," Rubin flirts with overwhelming the damp bittersweetness of Cash's phrasing in tasteful atmospherics, but the voice is implacable, hitting and finding notes one never expected he'd have the will to find. Likewise, it's hard to believe this is his first recording of Ian Tyson's "Four Strong Winds"; the elemental narrative seems to have been written for him. Two songs, however, Cash has recorded before: the born-again hymn "I Came to Believe" and the final spiritual, "I'm Free from the Chain Gang Now." The latter especially is a definitive testament, as is his version of Bruce Springsteen's "Further On (Up the Road)." "One sunny morning we'll rise, I know / And I'll meet you further on up the road," he sings. If only, John, if only. --Roy Kasten

More Cash

At Folsom Prison	American Recordings	At San Quentin
American IV: The Man Comes Around	The Legend	The Complete Sun Recordings 1955-1958

Interview Magazine - Sound Advice - July 2006
Cash's voice...filled with conviction and fire. He sounds like a man testifying before God at his own funeral.

Entertainment Weekly - A-
Recorded before his death three years ago, Johnny Cash's latest shows he still has the power.

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Customer Reviews

Songs of my heart . . . .
I'm not going to pretend to be musically astute and theoretically compare how this album may have sounded if the Great JRC himself had been around to approve/disapprove the use of cellos in "Help Me."

I'm going to tell you that when I thought "The Man Comes Around" would always be my favorite Cash album, it's only because this one hadn't been made yet. Each and every cut touches my heart . . . comforts me, delights me, gives me courage. (Yeah, even "Like the 309")

So, I'm gonna make this short and sweet. Thank God, thank God and Rick Rubin for One More Cash.

Johnny Cash
CD arrived in excellent condition. If you buy this, be prepared to hear a Johnny Cash we never knew. I could feel the heartache of deceased spouse.

Perfection from the foreboding "Man In Black"
I,m trying to come up with some eloquent,and expressive words to describe my personal feelings,after listening to this "masterpiece", but I simply can't come up with the words. Only to say that the Legend saved the best for last.