Back when Johnny Cash first started attracting attention, about 1957, the thing that set his sound apart from the others was not so much his mournful bass voice as the instruments behind him. This was instantly apparent to the earliest Johnny Cash cult, the one I belonged to, the one that smiled knowingly a few years ago when great hordes of people finally picked up on Johnny Cash. Back then, as soon as the word got around that the backing group was called The Tennessee Three, two lads of my acquaintance copiously copied the basic riffs and dubbed themselves The Kentucky Two. The surface features of the sound were easy to copy because they were so fresh and distinctive they hit us squarely between the eyes the bass strings of an acoustic guitar plucked singly, and the electric bass setting up a one-two, dunp-domm dunp-domm rhythm and also providing little clipped electronic spurts, bip-bip-bip. The Tennessee Three did a lot to make the public aware of the electric bass before rock came along. But there was more to it than that, as The Kentucky Two unhappily found out.

Having no drummer, they realized they were flirting with disaster from the start, for it was obvious the drums were basic to the sound behind

Johnny Cash. They tried to find a drummer, but gave up when one applicant after another failed to get it right. Then The Kentucky Two discovered something else, when they listened to their Johnny Cash records more carefully. The instrumentals weren't just dunp-domm and plunk-plunk and bip-bip, there was all that other stuff going on- sophisticated fills with a steel guitar, little baleful sliding notes from a dobro, pre-rock electric lead guitar runs, and some of that hopelessly difficult melodic work with acoustic guitars. Why, it took musicians to imitate these guys-~ fact without much precedent in Country. music. The, Tennessee Three, in~fact, seemed to have the uncanny ability to play in whatever style they chose and still remain in their own distinctive style that largely made Johnny Cash famous.

How Bob Wooten, W. S. Holland and Marshall Grant do this is essentially a mystery to me..l know ~ of other groups that do it, but of many ma jor ones that don't I know for a fact that there were people insanely avid about The Beatles who had to be told that certain new records they heard on the radio were Beatles' records. When the boys took up radically different instruments or vocal technique, their sound changed so much that some of their best friends didn't recognize them (don't expect those friends ever to admit to such sacrilege, but I have seen a few caught flat-footed and heard them blurt out "Who's that?" before the announcer said "The Beatles"). Other bands have managed to superimpose their distinctive flavor on disparate arrangements, as The Tennessee Three do, but not in a way that makes it any easier to define. Anyway, it is a marvel to listen to the Ring Of Fire cut on this disc g~ then to I Walk The Line, to hear the great differences and yet sense-feel?-the undeniable signature that is stamped somewhere out of sight on both arrangements.

So The Kentucky Two never amounted to much, finding as they did that when they got off the dunp-domm and bip-bip stuff and tried to pick out a melody they didn't sound like The Tennessee Three at all. If they'd had me, their run might have lasted a few days longer.

Which sort of explains why I like this record more than I would normally expect me to-I would normally expect me to like it, but not to keep playing the proof disc over and over the way I have been.

The fact is, I'm one of the world's foremost Johnny Cash imitators. The world will never believe it, probably, because the world can't hear my voice from my vantage point-you know how foreign your voice sounds when you hear it on a tape recording. But from where my ears are in relation to where my mouth is, I sound exactly like Johnny Cash-even when he goes down to the area of low C or wherever he goes on those bass notes (the way I hear it, I also do a perfect imitation of the late Nat Cole and a fair one of Georgia Gibbs). There is some circumstantial evidence that other people believe I don't sound exactly like Johnny Cash-that, in fact, I sound more like Georgia Gibbs when I'm doing my Johnny Cash voice. No matter. It sounds like Johnny Cash to me, and here, at last, is the backing I always deserved.

The bubble might have burst had I been able to complete an experiment I started; I was going to sing along with this album's cuts of Folsom Prison Blues and I Walk The Line and get it all on tape and find out, at long last, how I sounded from the outside. Fortunately, I couldn't get the tape recorder mike to work-and while I was fussing with it, I found myself reliving the moment of truth that came to The Kentucky Two, all that rich, clean, economical steel and acoustic guitar work got through to me once again and I eventually forgot about imitating Johnny Cash and sat back to en joy some of the best picking this side of Nashville.

If you fancy yourself a Johnny Cash imitator too (possibly number two in the world), I'd advise you to do as I did and make sure that your own yowling doesn't prevent your hearing any of these sounds. If you insist on singing along with the record, at least have someone lock up your tape recorder.

Either way, you're bound to be struck by how fresh The Tennessee Three style remains today, and astounded if you recall the scene this style descended upon more than a dozen years ago. You'll readily see why Johnny Cash has kept up a close working relationship with Wooten, Holland and Grant all these years. Without them, he just wouldn't be the same.

Great instrumental album with the rich sound of The Tennessee Three. Guess who is playing rhythm guitar on the sessions?.....JRC.