Liner Notes

I don't know of my mother was a good guitar player or not. When I was small, she was the only one I'd ever been close to, so there was no one to compare her with.

The guitar had come with us in the back of a moving truck from the hills of southern Arkansas to the flat black delta land of the Mississippi county in the northeast part of the state. It was February 1935 and I was three years old.

The entire family, my parents, two brothers and two sisters spent the first night in the truck under a tarpaulin. A cold rain fell all night, and the last thing I remember before going to sleep was my mother beating time on the old Sears-Robuck guitar, singing "What Would You Give In Exchange For Your Soul."

Earliest memories of our new home in the Delta revolve around my mother and that guitar. My father literally carved our new home out of twenty acres of jungle with the help of one mule, my older brother and the muscles in his arm.

At night, on the front porch, where we always gathered, I could hear the panthers scream in the woods around us, but my mother's guitar and singing was like the harp of King David that we had read about in the bible. It brought a closeness and comfort that couldn't be found in any other way. She sang Vernon Dalhart's "Prisoner's Song", the Carter Family's "Picture on the Wall." and "Wreck of Old 97".

By the time I was four I was singing along with her on the gospel songs. Then one day I heard "Hobo Bill's Last Ride" by Jimmie Rodgers on the battery radio my father had mail ordered from the catalog.

The most amazing thing to me about the songs on the radio was the numbers of them. They just kept coming, one after another, and IO seemed to know them all after hearing them once or twice. Soon I was singing to my mother's accompaniment. "Hobo's Bill's Last Ride" became "my" song, and the neighbors started coming over to hear me sing it.

Turning the radio dial brought me a whole new world that I learned to love far above the world of mud and cotton fields: the Chuck wagon Gang, the Delta Blues Singers, Gene Autry.

The only instrumentation for most off them was one acoustic guitar and my dream from then on was to play the guitar and sing those songs.

Within the hearing distance of all the Memphis radio stations just across the Big River, I turned the radio on day and night feasting on the music, and late at night, if I was lucky, I could stay up and listen to all the great radio stars beaming in from the Mexican border stations.

When I was eleven or twelve, my mother's guitar mysteriously disappeared. I knew better than to ask if it had been sold to buy food and clothing for the family, and for all my young life the guitar wasn't mentioned again.

But I had a friend named Jesse Barnhill who lived three miles further down the road. Jesse had had polio and his right hand and foot were withered, but with his left hand he made the chord as he beat out a perfect rhythm with his tiny right hand. It was an old Gibson flat top, and I thought if I could play the guitar like that, I'd sing on the radio some day.

I was at Jesse's house every afternoon after school and stayed until long after dark, singing along with him, or singing to his playing Hank Snow, Ernest Tubb, Jimmie Rodgers songs. Jesse taught me my first chord on the guitar, but my hands, being too small, I didn't really learn to play them.

The long walk home alone at night was scary. It was pitch dark on the gravel road and if the moon was shining, the shadows were even scarier. The panthers sounded closer and just knew every dark spot on the road was a cottonmouth snake ready to kill me.

But I sang all the way home: songs Jesse and I had been singing, and with the imaginary sound of the Gibson acoustic, I sang through the dark and decided that that kind of music was going to be my magic to take me through all the dark places.

When I heard a Carolina Street Singer named Pink Anderson and a Gospel singer named Sister Rosetta Thorpe, it was confirmed in my mind, that I didn't have to lean to play like Chet Atkins. As a matter of fact, I didn't even have to use a pick, much less a Nick Lucas pick.

The thumb and finger had worked very well for my mother, and for Jesse Barhill, and if I could ever afford a guitar, I'd try top lead with my thumb and occasionally let the fingers crash into the strings to accent the rhythm.

That was the case when I learned what little I learned when I could afford my first guitar at age 18. But with the thumb leading I was to later realize that it would rule out the control I'd need to play melody after using only the thumb.

I bought my first guitar in Germany. It cost twenty marks, so cheap that it didn't even have a brand name, but in my eyes it was a D-45 Martin. I organized an acoustic band, two other acoustic guitars, a mandolin and myself. I called the band "The Barbarians," and we were. Nobody asked us to play anywhere, but we took out instruments to the bars and honky tonks, sat down and played until the places closed, or we were too drunk to continue.

I learned a lot about playing the guitar in those clubs. I broke off big pieces of paste-board coasters and used it as a kind of pick to hold between my thumb and fingers of my doubled up fist to beat out more volume. It worked for the honky tonks.

I often wondered what happened to that guitar and only recently my brother Tommy told me that once when I was on tour in '57 he was wrestling with my nephew and fell on the guitar and destroyed it. Rather than let me see it, it was thrown out with the trash.

Among my favorite guitars was a D-28 Martin which I spray painted black in 1961 and a red J-200 Gibson with my name inlaid in the neck, both of which disappeared. I'm not sure that they were stolen, but I don't remember giving them away.

In my collection of guitars, three of them stand out. One is a D-45 custom Martin made in 1982 and signed by C.F. Martin III and IV. Another is a D 76 #375 of 1976 made in the bicentennial year.

My favorite is the black D-28 I used on this album. Martin gave it to me in 1969 and I was told that it was the first black guitar the company made.

When performing, it doesn't matter the brand, the color or the cost. All that matters is that the guitar and I are one. I have to feel that the sound of the instrument comes out of me with the song, from the inside, from the gut. And it doesn't matter to me that I only know three or for chords. With the left fingers ion the frets, the heel of my right hand hugging the body of the guitar, and letting just my right thumb lead and drive the rhythm, sometimes its magic, and I just believe that when it all comes together it's the right way for me to do it. Like Jesse Barnhill did it. Like Mama did it.

March '94

Info

Personnel

• Rick Rubin - Producer
• Johnny Cash - Guitar, Vocals, Main Performer, Liner Notes
• Jim Scott - Mixing, Mixing Engineer
• David Ferguson - Engineer
• Stephen Marcussen - Mastering
• Christine Cano - Design
• Martyn Atkins - Art Direction, Photography

Recorded:

Charts

Album - Billboard (North America)

Info

AMERICAN RECORDINGS won the 1995 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album.

Johnny Cash is back and better than ever. The legendary Man In Black is now recording for a modern rock label, and is being produced by hard-core rap/rock guru Rick Rubin--and the results are startling. Spare and stripped to the bone, AMERICAN RECORDINGS is Johnny Cash at his artistic zenith.

An original acoustic ballad, the opening "Delia's Gone" is a watershed accomplishment. Wryly capturing the art of the death ballad, it presents a thoroughly textured dramatic piece, both horrifying and humorous. The same can be said for Cash's droll reading of Loudon Wainwright's "The Man Who Could Not Cry." An extremely religious man, Johnny includes several songs dealing with themes of redemption, righteousness and spiritual salvation.

Sandwiched between those two songs is a character-rich, eclectic collection of material by writers like Leonard Cohen, British rocker/ex-son-in-law Nick Lowe, Tom Waits, death-metal god Glenn Danzig, and Cash himself. With his resounding baritone--which is in the best form of his long career--and restricted guitar technique, Cash is the centerpiece, creating a sound that is uniquely American--proud, solitary, nearly broken, yet defiant.

Johnny Cash, alone with a single guitar, is commanding in his dry, unencumbered intensity. AMERICAN RECORDINGS reaffirms his unique musical prowess, and presents his glorious shadowy skills to a new generation.