Music Review : The Legend of Johnny Cash (2005)

This album comes out riding the storm of popularity built up from Walk the Line, Hollywood’s biopic on the life of Johnny Cash. Alongside the soundtrack to the film, this album is a tip-of-the-iceberg retrospective of Johnny Cash’s 40+ year career, putting 21 of his biggest hits together on one disc, spanning from his earliest songs like Cry,Cry,Cry and Folsom Prison Blues, to 2003’s surprisingly meaningful cover of Nine Inch Nail’s Hurt which went on to garner awards and accolades even after Cash’s death.
As much as this album is probably a horrible gloss-over of Cash’s career for true fans of his music, this is honestly a great place for me to start. I knew even before I purchased this album that I wasn’t a huge Cash fan. I certainly appreciate his music, but it didn’t speak to me in a terribly meaningful way. However, as typically happens with the golden screen, the minute a certain music is highlighted and detailed by means of film, my interest piques as I get to see inside the life of the music.
In this case, it was fun watching Walk the Line and seeing the very beginnings of Rock and Roll as Cash toured the nation with the likes of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis.
To further stimulate my imagination, having T Bone Burnett (the mind behind O Brother, Where Art Thou?)as the musical supervisor on this film didn’t hurt either.
So having my appetite whetted for the uncompromising and unchanging flavor of Johnny Cash, this compendium was just what I was looking for. All of the original recordings from his earliest days back in the 50’s, plus all of his hits produced since 1990’s by Rick Rubin, including Cash’s cover of Soundgarden’s Rusty Cage and Nine Inch Nail’s Hurt.

I give this album high marks for giving a cream of the crop taste of Johnny Cash’s music, fully aware that there is probably a great deal of music from Cash that you don’t get a taste of on this album.

T.