I have to confess that Johnny Cash has never been one of my favourites. I suspect that I was put off by such execrable stuff as ‘A boy named Sue’. However I was forced to think again by the issue of his record ‘Hurt’, not a song I would have associated with him, having previously been recorded by the band ‘Nine Inch Nails’. At the time, I compared it to the songs on the wonderful album by Billie Holliday ‘Lady in Satin’, recorded like ‘Hurt’ at the end of the singer’s life. I’ve now belatedly acquired the album from which Hurt is taken and my previous judgement stands. If anything I am even more impressed.
Both albums share some common characteristics; the voice is gone but that intangible quality that marks a great singer is still present at full strength while the material is not what one would have otherwise expected. In Billie’s case the lush string arrangements are at odds with her normal style and to a degree with the bitter quality of her voice. With Johnny Cash, the songs are an incredibly diverse selection, ranging from the expected like Marty Robbins or Cash himself, through Paul Simon, Sting, Ewan McColl and John Lennon to a song up to now indelibly associated with Vera Lynn!
Despite this the album becomes, in Cash’s hands, something so intensely personal and indeed painful, that it is impossible to listen to it without being profoundly moved. This is a man facing death, knowing it and facing up to it. Despite his obvious faith he takes no pleasure in it – there are no songs about returning to the arms of the Lord here. These are bitter, painful and bleak songs.
' Bridge over Troubled Waters', up to now inextricable from the sometimes sugary vocals of its writer Paul Simon and his partner Art Garfunkel becomes a song of aching melancholy so successfully as to call into question Simon and Garfunkel’s reading of their own song. He does the same thing with ‘Hurt’
Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent
Reznor admitted that he was initially "flattered" but worried that
"the idea (of Cash covering "Hurt") sounded a bit
gimmicky," but when he heard the song and saw the video for the first
time, Reznor said he was deeply moved and found Cash's cover beautiful and
meaningful. He later said in an interview, "I just lost my girlfriend,
because that song isn't mine anymore."
Ewan McColl’s ‘First time ever I saw your face’ is transformed from a romantic love song to one of loss and deep regret. The traditional ‘Danny Boy’ is rendered into a hymn to loss –loss of youth, loss of rootedness in a place. John Lennon’s ‘In my Life’ uses a very similar arrangement to Lennon’s, but Cash’s voice coupled with our (and his) knowledge of his situation give it a depth and poignancy Lennon never achieved.
Perhaps the greatest surprise, and to my mind the weakest song on the album, is ‘We’ll meet again’. Its failing is probably that it comes over as simply too perky and so is slightly incongruous in this setting. Even so the sense of loss that suffuses the album comes through.
Despite that all pervading melancholy however, one parallel theme comes through very strongly – many of these songs are also love songs to one woman, June Carter.
There are places I'll remember
All my life though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends i still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life i've loved them all
But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When i think of love as something new
Though i know i'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know i'll often stop and think about them
In my life i love you more
Though i know i'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know i'll often stop and think about them
In my life i love you more
In my life i love you more
In my Life John Lennon
This album isn’t easy listening but as a portrait of a man unequivocally facing up to the end of his life it is without equal. One of the truly great albums.
