Cash News 2002

News From House of Cash

John on Larry King Rescheduled

November 17, 2002

LARRY KING RESCHEDULED. The new air date for Johnny's interview on Larry King Live is: December 6 at 8:00 PM and 11:00 PM CST.

11/17/02

Folks,

Some of you have asked why the board has been rather quiet over the past month. Been a really hectic time at work...to say the least. I have switch my e mail address to Bigriver1955@aol.com. I will tweak the board to make sure it reflects it. Hope to hear from ya.

Mike

Ps. I think the new CD is one of John's best ever!

11/15/02

The interview Johnny Cash did with Larry King will air on CNN "Larry King Live" on Friday Dec.6th at 8pm, 11pm, 2am, & 5am central standard time.

Chet Flippo of CMT

11/14/2002

(NASHVILLE SKYLINE is a column by CMT/CMT.com Editorial Director Chet Flippo.)

Johnny Cash has always been the closest thing country music has had to a true holy man of the honky-tonks. He sinned -- boy, how he sinned -- and then he testified about it, as no one else could. And who could forget his very convincing portrayal of a psychopath in the 1961 movie thriller Door-to-Door Maniac (also known as Five Minutes to Live)? He went on to become a musical conscience of America, as well as a deeply spiritual writer and artist.

His spiritual bent continues in his new album with his explorations into the loftier aspects of the music. His new CD American IV: The Man Comes Around touches on some eternal truths and some bedrock verities of country music. Cash's brushes with death in his bouts with pneumonia in recent years have obviously sparked some spiritual introspection. But throughout his long and eventful career, Cash has kept one eye cast heavenward.

He wrote an overlooked book titled Man in White, which was a fictional account of the life of Paul the apostle. His 1969 album The Holy Land was mainly a musical tour of the Holy Land, with narratives by Cash. He also made the 1973 movie Gospel Road, a musical anthology of Jesus' life.

The first few times that I saw Johnny Cash perform on stage were not at a honky-tonk or even in a concert hall but at big revivals being held by evangelist Billy Graham. And Cash was as charismatic or even more so onstage than was the great preacher Graham. He got the faithful to their feet and shook them to their very foundation. Cash has always trod a very straight-and-narrow moral path in his recordings, too, from the time he left Memphis' Sun Records when Sun founder (and Elvis discoverer) Sam Phillips wouldn't let Cash cut a gospel album. He left for Nashville and Columbia Records. Which ultimately rewarded him for a long and fruitful partnership by dropping him from the label, as the first of the Nashville titans (Willie, Waylon, Dolly and others would follow) to be exorcised by the Nashville major record labels in its youth movement. Cash turned the other cheek. He went his own way and eventually signed with American Records, a label with a young and hip image and audience. Despite age and infirmities, Cash realigned himself for a new and younger audience. Or, more accurately, his music and his image drew that audience to him.

Now with his fourth American CD, The Man Comes Around, Cash continues with his evolving musical muse. I don't want to imply that the album has an air of finality about it -- but Cash seems to be preparing his farewells. Consider some of the songs: a gorgeously sad but expressive version of the tragic "Danny Boy," the spit-in-the face of death song "Sam Hall," the openly spiritual "Personal Jesus," Simon & Garfunkel's emotional "Bridge Over Troubled Water" and Hank Williams' great elegy of loneliness and despair, "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry."

His voice is ravaged by time, but he has never sounded more like the eloquent voice of the ages. The last time I saw him perform in public, at the Americana Music Awards in Nashville in September, he was again the bigger-than-life Voice of America as he recited the words to his eloquent "Ragged Old Flag." But he also displayed his oft-disguised but very lively and sly sense of humor as he joked with his life partner June Carter Cash. He shows that sense of humor again here to great advantage with such songs as "Tear Stained Letter" and "Sam Hall."

The most riveting song on the album is the title track. Cash has said he worked longer and harder on writing "The Man Comes Around" than any other song he's ever done. And the work shows. The song came about from a dream he had, in which Queen Elizabeth II said to him in Buckingham Palace, "Johnny Cash! You're like a thorn tree in a whirlwind." He recognized the words as being Biblical and found them in the Book of Job. From there, he began adding references from the Book of Revelation until the song became a saga of apocalypse.

The song "We'll Meet Again" closes the album. Cash says he chose it because of its pivotal role in the movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The song plays while Slim Pickens is riding an H-bomb from a bomber down to its target on the ground. That's Cash's sense of humor as well as his sense of irony at work. His lasting message seems to me to be: do the best you can while you're here, but -- don't take yourself too damned seriously.

Sep-22 2:59 pm

Rural Scott County, in southwestern Virginia, is not a place you normally expect to find a Reunion of Royalty. But Saturday night (Sep 21) exactly such a summit occurred. Janette Carter and Joe Carter--the remaining children of A.P. and Sara Carter--and June Carter, Maybelle Carter's sole living child, together with June's husband, the great Johnny Cash, came together one more time at Janette's Carter Family Fold, where old-time music is celebrated every Saturday night.

Janette introduced her cousin's husband to a thunderous ovation from the crowd, which consisted mostly of family and friends from the surrounding Poor Valley and its environs. John sang Folsom Prison Blues, I Still Miss Someone, Big River and--a special treat--an unprecedented live performance of Springsteen's Highway Patrolman ("Nothing is better than blood on blood" goes the song, and family was certainly being celebrated that night.) Then he introduced his wife, who was born and grew up less than a mile from the Fold. She was back home, and the crowd--some of whom still remember her and her sisters as little folk--opened its arms again. She and John sang Ring of Fire, which of course she wrote, Jackson, and Sinking on the Lonesome Sea, a very old and obscure Carter Family song which she has recorded for an upcoming new album. Then, Janette and her brother Joe joined the Cashes on Daddy Sang Bass, Carl Perkins' song about family which includes as its refrain Will the Circle Be Unbroken, the ultimate Carter song, before they launched into that song as the finale.

The Cashes had been in "the Valley" for the past week while June recorded tracks for a new album, being produced by son John Carter Cash. They live in June's childhood home--the Ezra and Maybelle Carter House is on the National Historic Trust list--which June now owns. Health permitting, they often appear at the Fold when visiting to support Janette Carter, who made a promise to her dying father in 1960 that she would keep his music alive. Now, as she advances in age and has been in poor health, the Fold has become harder and harder to maintain--but she says it has never been a burden.

John will be leaving for Jamaica to spend the next six months there, so there will likely be no other appearances prior to the release of his new album. But there will be some high-profile interviews, including one with the New Yorker and another with the L.A. Times' Robert Hilburn, who has been writing about John for more than 30 years--he was at San Quentin, for instance.

Also to look for: an Emmylou Harris retrospective being done by Brian Ahern (who also produced John's albums Silver and Johnny 99), which will include a duet with Emmylou and John on Old Rugged Cross, which was recorded in 1980 during her Roses in the Snow sessions but left buried in the vault until now.

Mark

Sept. 13, 2002

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - The notion that something has gone wrong with country music got heavyweight support this weekend from Johnny Cash and Emmylou Harris.

Both were honored Friday night at the Americana Awards Show, and each made it clear they feel more at home on the margins of the industry - where they feel its real heart is.

The Americana Music Association's first awards show promoted a rawer, less flashy version of country than the music of Shania Twain and other mainstream Nashville stars.

``There might not be millions and millions of people out there who understand it, but there are people out there who hunger for something more,'' Harris said as she accepted a lifetime achievement award.

The highlight of the night was a rare appearance by the 70-year-old Cash, who has had health setbacks in recent years including diabetes and bouts of pneumonia and bronchitis.

He was honored with the Spirit of Americana Free Speech Award, for ``shining a light on issues that otherwise go unseen.''

Cash recited a patriotic poem, ``That Ragged Old Flag,'' and performed with his wife, June Carter Cash. At first frail, he seemed to gain strength from performing again.

``Thank you very much, folks,'' Cash said during one of three long standing ovations.

Sep-10 7:32 pm

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's new CD, "Will The Circle Be Unbroken III," will be released October 1, 2002. Among the 28 tracks on the album is a new song featuring "Johnny Cash, who penned "Tears In The Holston River," a moving tribute to Maybelle and Sara Carter of The Carter Family, especially for the project."

The album also has "Diamonds In The Rough," featuring June Carter Cash and Earl Scruggs.

Track Listings Disc: 1

1. Take Me In Your Lifeboat (feat. Del McCoury, Ronnie McCoury & Robbie McCoury)

2. Milk Cow Blues (feat. Doc Watson, Richard Watson & Josh Graves)

3. I Find Jesus

4. Hold Whatcha Got (feat. Jimmy Martin)

5. Mama's Opry (feat. Iris DeMent)

6. Diamonds In The Rough (feat. June Carter Cash & Earl Scruggs)

7. Lonesome River (feat. Sam Bush)

8. Some Dark Holler (feat. Dwight Yoakam)

9. The Lowlands (feat. Jaime Hanna & Jonathan McEuen)

10. Love, Please Come Home (feat. Del McCoury, Ronnie McCoury & Robbie McCoury)

11. Goodnight Irene (feat. Willie Nelson & Tom Petty)

12. I Know What I Means To Be Lonesome (feat. The Nashville Bluegrass Band)

13. I'll Be Faithful To You (feat. Emmylou Harris)

14. Tears In The Holston River (feat. Johnny Cash)

Disc: 2

1. Fishin' Blues (feat. Taj Mahal & Vassar Clements)

2. Save It, Save It (feat. Jimmy Martin)

3. Wheels (feat. Dwight Yoakam)

4. Roll In My Sweet Baby's Arms (feat. Willie Nelson)

5. Oh Cumberland (feat. Matraca Berg & Emmylou Harris)

6. I Am A Pilgrim (feat. Doc Watson & Richard Watson)

7. Sallie Ann (feat. Earl Scruggs)

8. Catfish John (feat. Alison Krauss)

9. Roll The Stone Away

10. All Prayed Up (feat. Vince Gill)

11. Return To Dismal Swamp II (feat. Jerry Douglas, Glen Duncan, Ronnie McCoury & Tony Rice)

12. There Is A Time (feat. Rodney Dillard & Ricky Skaggs)

13. Will The Circle Be Unbroken (Glory, Glory) (feat. Taj Mahal, Alison Krauss & Doc Watson)

14. Farther Along 1:30 (feat. Randy Scruggs)

http://www.nittygritty.com/circle3.htm

August 27, 2002

Johnny Cash left a Nashville hospital Tueday after an overnight stay. Cash's manager Lou Robin says the singer of hits like "I Walk the Line" suffered an allergic reaction.

He says it was either medicine or something Cash ate. The 70-year-old singer has been hospitalized several times in recent years for pneumonia and bronchitis.

Cash is a member of the country music and rock and roll halls of fame.

Aug 27, 2002

.c The Associated Press

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - Johnny Cash was hospitalized Monday after suffering an allergic reaction to either food or medicine, his manager said.

Lou Robin said the 70-year-old country music legend might remain at Baptist Hospital overnight, but that his doctors didn't think the problem was anything serious.

``They're always cautious with any trouble he might have,'' Robin said.

Cash, who has scored dozens of hits like ``I Walk the Line'' and ``A Boy Named Sue,'' suffers from autonomic neuropathy, a disease of the nervous system that makes him susceptible to pneumonia. He was hospitalized twice last fall for treatment of bronchitis.

The Grammy-winner was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1980 and inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992.

Bilboard Mag

August 20, 2002

Along with being treated to a slew of vault material and a pair of tribute records this year, Johnny Cash fans will be given yet another reason to smile Nov. 5, when the Man In Black's fourth collaboration with producer Rick Rubin arrives via American Recordings/Island Def Jam. The 15-track "American IV: The Man Comes Around" features such guests as Nick Cave, Fiona Apple, and Don Henley, and sees Cash cover songs by such diverse artists as the Beatles, Depeche Mode, Hank Williams, Nine Inch Nails, the Eagles, Sting, and Simon & Garfunkel.

The title of the album takes it name from one of the set's three Cash originals. "It's a spiritual about Judgment Day," Cash told Billboard in February, shortly before his 70th birthday. "The idea is there's a man going around taking names, and he decides who to free and who to blame," Cash said, offering these lines: "Everybody won't be treated the same/There'll be a golden ladder reaching down when the man comes around."

Cash also reworks his classic 1957 Sun Records single "Give My Love to Rose" (which also appeared on his 1964 CBS album "I Walk the Line"), and his "Tear Stained Letter," from his 1972 CBS set "A Thing Called Love."

Henley joins Cash for a cover of his Eagles classic "Desperado," while Cave and Apple add vocals to Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" and Simon & Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water," respectively. One of the most peculiar selections is a reworking of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt," of which Cash told Billboard, "When I first heard the song, I thought, 'That's something I might have written in the '60s, if I had been that good a writer.'"

Also performing on the album are Billy Preston, Randy Scruggs, Marty Stuart, John Frusciante (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Roger Manning Jr. (Jellyfish, Beck), Smokey Hormel (Tom Waits, The Blasters), Joey Waronker (R.E.M., Beck), and Benmont Tench and Mike Campbell (of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers).

It's unlikely that Cash will support the album with public performances. Whether or not he does so depends on his health, according to Lou Robin, his longtime manager. The singer/songwriter, who suffers from diabetic neuropathy -- a disease of the nervous system that leaves its victims susceptible to pneumonia -- has played in public only a handful of times since slipping into a diabetes-related coma in 1997. "It depends on how he's feeling," Robin says. "It's not a matter of wanting to perform -- he misses doing that."

However, Robin notes that Cash is feeling so good at the moment that he's already begun working on his next album at his rural Nashville home. "I would be satisfied, so far as accomplishments, if it all ended now," Cash said in February. "But, boy, I sure wish I could live another few years and take it one, two, three years at a time, and do some more things like these records. That's what I really wanna do -- some more of these records."

While still a consistent concert draw in the U.S. -- and around the globe -- the recording side of Cash's career was boosted in 1994 when he began working with Rubin, known for his production work with everyone from Beastie Boys to Slayer to Tom Petty. Since then he has released a series of spare, back-to-basics recordings that, like "American IV," include a number of unlikely covers, such as Soundgarden's "Rusty Cage" and Beck's "Rowboat."

Earlier this year, Columbia/Legacy kicked off a year-long 70th birthday celebration for Cash by releasing the two-disc best-of "The Essential Johnny Cash." Since then, the label has reissued five albums, including "The Fabulous Johnny Cash" and "Hymns by Johnny Cash." Columbia/Legacy delivers another batch of reissues Aug. 27 in tandem with a previously unreleased recording of Cash's Dec. 5, 1969, set at New York's Madison Square Garden.

In addition, Dualtone has just issued "Dressed in Black: A Tribute to Johnny Cash," which features covers by a host of respected Americana artists, including Rosie Flores, Bruce Robison, Rodney Crowell, and Mavericks singer Raul Malo. Coming Sept. 24 is another tribute, titled "Kindred Spirits." The Lucky Dog/Sony Nashville set, produced by Cash's former guitarist/former son-in-law Marty Stuart, features performances by such artists as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Sheryl Crow, Hank Williams Jr., Keb' Mo', and Dwight Yoakam.

In still more Cash-related news, BMG just released a two-disc Sun Records collection featuring several early Cash classics; and Chris Martin, singer of British rock act Coldplay, recently told Billboard that the title track on the band's forthcoming album, "A Rush of Blood to the Head," is an homage to Cash. Martin called Cash "the greatest. Him, Dylan, and Hank Williams are just the greatest men with just guitars."

Here is the full "American IV" track listing:

-- Wes Orshoski, N.Y.

August 15, 2002

Fourth "American" recording includes songs by Paul Simon, Trent Reznor

Another Cash Tribute Due

Johnny Cash will release his fourth Rick Rubin-produced album, American IV: The Man Comes Around, on November 5th. The fifteen-track album comes just two years after American III: Solitary Man.

Again, Cash and Rubin assemble a mix of songs penned by Cash, traditional material, and some more contemporary offerings. Country music past is represented by a cover of Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," which features a guest vocal by Nick Cave. Fiona Apple sings with Cash on Paul Simon's "Bridge Over Troubled Water," and Don Henley guests on his own tune, "Desperado."

Other tunesmiths covered include Trent Reznor ("Hurt"), Depeche Mode's Martin Gore ("Personal Jesus"), Sting ("I Hung My Head") and John Lennon and Paul McCartney ("In My Life").

Cash penned four of the songs himself, including a reprise of his classic "Give My Love to Rose," and the new title cut. "It's a gospel song," Cash sideman Marty Stuart said of the song. "It is the most strangely marvelous, wonderful, gothic, mysterious, Christian thing that only God and Johnny Cash could create together."

Among the musicians who appear on the record are Red Hot Chili Pepper John Frusciante, Beck's guitarist Smokey Hormel, Billy Preston, drummer Joey Waronker (R.E.M.), Benmont Tench and Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and bluegrass/country pickers Randy Scruggs and Marty Stuart.

Cash and Rubin first began working together on 1994's American Recordings, a solo acoustic recording which featured covers of songs by Nick Lowe, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Glenn Danzig and others.

To: ALL (1 of 1)

1817.1

The 32nd Annual Conference of the International Entertainment Buyers

Association (IEBA) will present its prestigious "Founders Award to "The

Man In Black" - Johnny Cash on October 6-9th in Nashville, Tennessee. The

IEBA Founders Award gives recognition to those whose career ethics and

accomplishments within the industry have made significant contributions to

the advancement of the entertainment community and its audience as a whole.

Last year's 2001 recipient was artist manager, Irby Mandrell.

Cash is expected to be on hand (health permitting) to accept the honor, to

be presented by his lifelong friend, fellow performer, and songwriter of

Cash's notable hit "Ring of Fire" - Merle Kilgore, now manager of Hank

Williams Jr.

To: ALL (1 of 3)

1804.1

"Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone," the new Carter Family book by Mark Zwonister (sp?)is a must for fans of the Carters and Cash. For that matter, it's a must for anyone interested in traditional American music and great storytelling. As far as I know, this is the first serious book about the Carters, in all their various incarnations. It's a treasure trove of scholarly information mixed with juicy anecdotes--including an especially harrowing one involving June and Hank Williams. Although it's ultimately a very sad story, "Will You Miss Me..." is engrossing and surprising, and gave me a new appreciation for the Carter Family's legacy. I highly recommend it.

Randy

Along with the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Dwight Yoakam, and Travis Tritt, country legend Johnny Cash appears on his own upcoming tribute album, "Kindred Spirits." Due Sept. 24 from Lucky Dog/Sony Music Nashville, the 14-track compilation includes a rendition of his song "Meet Me in Heaven" on which Cash guests, along with his wife June Carter Cash.

The track is led by June's cousin, Janette Carter, a member of the legendary Carter Family, and also features banjo great Earl Scruggs, veteran country vocalist Connie Smith, and guitarists Darrin Vincent and Marty Stuart. The new rendition of the spiritual -- which first appeared on Cash's 1996 American Recordings album "Unchained" -- was recorded in Mount Vernon United Methodist Church in Hiltons, Va. In another family move, the album also features daughter Rosanne Cash covering "I Still Miss Someone."

"Kindred Spirits" boasts some of Cash's greatest songs, according to Stuart, who produced the album and was previously a member of Cash's backing band. "My vision from the start has been to portray Johnny Cash the songwriter," Stuart said in a statement. "He's such a poignant and insightful writer and this has never been done. In the likeness of Johnny, each artist brought their own interpretation to the songs. Johnny's renegade spirit transcends throughout the project."

Among those interpretations is, as previously reported, Springsteen's stark rendition of "Give My Love to Rose," along with Little Richard's rollicking romp through "Get Rhythm," the B-side to Cash's third Sun Records single, "I Walk the Line." The A-side of that 1956 single is covered here by country star Tritt, while Stuart tackles another early cut, "Hey Porter," the B-side to Cash's very first Sun 45, "Cry Cry Cry."

Elsewhere on the collection, Dylan adds "Train of Love," contemporary bluesman Keb' Mo' covers the classic "Folsom Prison Blues," while veteran blues artist Charlie Robison contributes "Don't Take Your Guns to Town." In addition to cuts by Hank Williams Jr., Steve Earle, and others is a collaboration by Mary Chapin Carpenter, Sheryl Crow, and Emmylou Harris on the song "Flesh and Blood."

This much-anticipated collection will follow the Sept. 10 release of Dualtone's Cash tribute, "Dressed in Black." Co-produced by BR5-49's Chuck Mead and longtime Cash band member Dave Roe, the 18-track set includes songs by Hank Williams III, Rodney Crowell, the Mavericks' Raul Malo, Rosie Flores, Rev. Horton Heat, and Robbie Fulks, among others.

Both collections come within a year of Cash's 70th birthday, celebrated in February. On Sept. 3, Columbia/Legacy will release its next set of Cash reissues, as well as a new live album that stems from a 1969 concert at New York's Madison Square Garden.

Earlier this year Cash told Billboard that his next studio album, "American Four," is due out sometime this summer. As was the case with his last three albums, he recorded the set with producer Rick Rubin, who will release it through his American Recordings imprint. "These records have meant everything to me," he says. "The last 10 years I've been working with Rick -- it's been like a new lease on life."

Here is the "Kindred Spirits" track listing:

"Understand Your Man," Dwight Yoakam

"I Still Miss Someone," Rosanne Cash

"Train of Love," Bob Dylan

"Get Rhythm," Little Richard

"Folsom Prison Blues," Keb' Mo'

"I Walk the Line," Travis Tritt

"Big River," Hank Williams, Jr.

"Give My Love to Rose," Bruce Springsteen

"Don't Take Your Guns to Town," Charlie Robison

"Flesh and Blood," Mary Chapin Carpenter, Sheryl Crow, and Emmylou Harris

"Hardin Wouldn't Run," Steve Earle

"Hey Porter," Marty Stuart

"Meet Me In Heaven," Janette Carter with special guests Johnny Cash, June Carter Cash, Earl Scruggs, Connie Smith, Marty Stuart, and Darrin Vincent

"For Luther (I Walk the Line Reprise)"

-- Barry A. Jeckell, N.Y.

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Posted by Johnny Cash (195.75.83.237) on July 09, 2002 at 07:38:30:

4 Johnny Cash albums are scheduled for release in September, 901.

The cornerstone of this phase of Legacy's year-long Johnny Cash 70th Birthday celebration is At Madison Square Garden - a never-before-released, fantastic sounding, concert recording from 1969.

All albums are remastered, include liner notes, photos, etc, & the reissues include bonus tracks.

Live At Madison Square Garden 509410 2 - recorded 1969, 77 minutes playing time!

Songs Of Our Soil 509411 2 - from 1959, with 2 bonus tracks

Sings Ballads Of The True West 509412 2 - from 1965, with 2 bonus tracks (68 minutes playing time, this was a double LP)

Silver 509413 2 - from 1979, with 2 bonus tracks

At Madison Square Garden-

1. Big River

J.R. Cash

2. I Still Miss Someone

J.R. Cash - R. Cash, Jr.

3. Five Feet High and Rising

J.R. Cash

4. Pickin' Time

J.R. Cash

5. Remember The Alamo

J. Bower

6. Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream

E. McCurdy

7. Wreck of the Old '97

J.R. Cash - N. Blake - B. Johnson

8. The Long Black Veil

D. Dill - M. Wilkin

9. The Wall

H. Howard

10. Send A Picture of Mother

J.R. Cash

11. Folsom Prison Blues

J.R. Cash

Previously available on promo-only 70th Birthday

commemorative 7" vinyl single (Columbia/Legacy CS7 56799)

12. Blue Suede Shoes

(Carl Perkins)

C. Perkins

13. Flowers on the Wall

(The Statler Brothers)

L. DeWitt

14. Wildwood Flower

(The Carter Family)

A.P. Carter

15. Worried Man Blues

(The Carter Family)

A.P. Carter

16. A Boy Named Sue

S. Silverstein

17. Cocaine Blues

T.J. Arnell

18. Jesus Was a Carpenter

C. Wren

19. Ballad of Ira Hayes

P. LaFarge

20. As Long As the Grass Shall Grow

P. LaFarge

21. Sing a Traveling Song

(Anita Carter - background solos)

K. Jones

22. He Turned the Water Into Wine

(Anita Carter - background solos)

J.R. Cash

23. Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord)

(Johnny Cash with the Carter Family)

arr. And adapted by J.R. Cash

24. Daddy Sang Bass

C. Perkins

25. Finale Medley

a. Do What You Do Do Well

(Tommy Cash and Johnny Cash)

N. Miller

b. I Walk The Line

(The Carter Family)

J.R. Cash

c. Ring of Fire

(The Statler Brothers)

J. Carter - M. Kilgore

d. Folsom Prison Blues

(Carl Perkins)

J.R. Cash

e. The Rebel - Johnny Yuma

R. Markowitz - A. Fenady

f. Folsom Prison Blues

J.R. Cash

26. Suppertime

I. Stamphill

All tracks recorded live at Madison Square Garden, New York, NY on December 5, 1969

Johnny Cash - vocals, acoustic guitar

Marshall Grant - bass

W.S. Holland - drums

Bob Wooton - electric guitar

Carl Perkins - electric guitar, vocals

Tommy Cash - announcer, acoustic guitar, vocals

The Statler Brothers (Harold Reid, Don Reed, Phil Balsley, Lew DeWitt) - vocals

The Carter Family (Mother Maybelle, Helen, Anita & Robbie Harden) - vocals

___________________________________________________________________

JOHNNY'S BLURB

PENDING

___________________________________________________________________

LINER NOTES

Pop Music

By Alfred G. Aronowitz

From The New York Post - Monday December 8, 1969

A Man Called Johnny Cash

It isn't just bullets that can shoot a man down, and when you saw Johnny Cash walk into the room,you knew immediately what Jesse James and Doc Holiday and John Wesley Hardin and maybe even Clyde Barrow had fought to become, if only they could have survived.

Johnny's career has taken him through almost 20 years of the kind of gunfighting that isn't done with guns, and if you couldn't see the scars this life had given him, the reason had to do with the miracle of learning how to drink all night and not fall down, how to be kicked in your manhood and laugh at the hurt, how to be calloused by sledgehammers and still leave a touch as gentle as Christ.

He was dressed in his usual outlaw black, with his long country jacket, as much a young man from the muddy bottomlands of Dyess, Ark., as he was at home in New York, having spent enough time in this city to know both its towers and its ratholes.

We were on the 21st floor of the Hotel Warwick, and he was just a little nervous at meeting a few select members of the press, but he strode right over to the canape table and helped himself to the only supper he would get this night. It was a couple of hours before his concert at the Garden Friday, and he was bringing the country to the city with an authority that nobody else possesses in this fragmented nation.

Johnny Cash knew how to talk to prisoners and to presidents. He knew, as a matter of fact, how to talk to all America. "I just about say and do what I want," he said when someone asked him about his TV show. "I think I know what's in good taste."

Only Johnny knows how many times he's been shot down in this life, but he has kept picking himself up to become a folk figure so real, so heroic and so American that he could, as he did later that night, endorse Richard M. Nixon's conduct of the Vietnam war and still give a "V" sign from the same stage.

At the press conference, the questions were all friendly. Nobody asked him about the pills or the dope you can hear him joke about on his "San Quentin" album. Nobody even asked him about the war, although, later, on the arena stage of the Garden, he said the war was the one question that reporters brought up most.

"I'll tell you exactly how I feel about it," he announced. "This past January, we brought our whole show over to the air base at Long Binh, and a reporter asked, 'That makes you a hawk, doesn't it?' And I said 'No, that doesn't make me a hawk, but when you watch the helicopters bringing in the wounded, that might make you a dove with claws.'

The ovation that flled the Garden for Johnny's Vietnam announcement lasted longer than it did for any of Johnny's songs, which were certainly worth as much. It is perhaps America's commentary on itself that an even greater ovation came when Johnny announced that his TV show had been renewed and would resume on Jan. 21.

Otherwise, the rebel yelps and truck-driver howls, the law-and-order ladies leaping to their feet and the graying, grey suited men whistling through their teeth, the foot-stamping of the Wallacities and the screaming of the lesser conservatives must have been terrifying to the longhairs who also helped fill the Garden with a record crowd of over 21,000.

The audience had come mostly from Johnny's TV fans in the suburbs, overburdening the parking garages in the Garden area, where they had to wait in some cases for more than an hour to get their cars back. But if they came in by the minions from the country music strongholds in Pennsylvania and Jersey and Upstate and Connecticut, they also came from Av. C, where the Underground is breeding big Johnny Cash fans who are no less devoted.

If anyone felt uneasy, however. Johnny soon vindicated himself with the peace sign while he sang, "Last night I had the strangest dream I'd ever known before... I dreamed that all the world agreed to put an end to the war." Actually the concert needed no vindication. Could Johnny's deep baritone ever have been put to greater songs with a clearer or more tuneful authority than it was Friday night?

He sang "Big River" and he sang "The Wall" and he sang about the floods of Arkansas. "How high is the water, mama? Two feet high and rising..." He introduced his 72-year-old father and his kid brother, Tommy. He sang "I Still Miss Someone" and "A Boy Named Sue" and he sang with the Statler Brothers and the Carter Family, minus, unfortunately, his wife, June, who's expecting another child. He sang about the Alamo and he sang about Ira Hayes and he sang prison songs and he sang "Wreck of the Old 97" and he sang "Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?"

He sang and sang and sang and he sang so well that even if he had stayed on the revolving stage another two hours it wouldn't have been enough. "The cities were looking for something and I think they found it in country music," Johnny had said at his press conference. "I think they found it in the realism and the truth." Certainly New York has found it in Johnny Cash.

_____________________________________________________________________

NEW LINER NOTES

JOHNNY CASH LIVE AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN 1969

By Holly George-Warren

"THE ROUGH-CUT KING OF COUNTRY MUSIC" That's what Life magazine called Johnny Cash on its June 21, 1969, cover featuring the Man in Black poised with his guitar, a smoking locomotive behind him. In the last year of the twentieth century's most tumultuous decade, the Arkansas-born singer-songwriter ruled the C&W charts. A pair of Cash hits - "Daddy Sang Bass" at Number One, followed by "A Boy Named Sue" - were the top two country songs of 1969, and his second live album recorded at a prison, Johnny Cash At San Quentin, stayed at Number One for five months. (At Folsom Prison spent four weeks at Number One the previous year.) In 1969, Cash placed an unprecedented seven albums onto Billboard's Country & Western album chart.

Fourteen years after his first pop hit on Sun Records - 1955’s primal "I Walk the Line" - Cash also had recaptured the imagination of the public at large. "Boy Named Sue" had crossed over to land at Number Two on the pop chart, and the down-homey Johnny Cash Show, which had begun as a summer replacement TV program, had just been renewed by ABC for its 1970 season. (Cash had stood up to television execs who wanted the show to be filmed on a soundstage, insisting that if he couldn’t do it at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, which had been home to the Grand Ole Opry, then he wouldn’t do the show at all. It remained at the Ryman.)

It's no wonder the audience at his record-breaking December 5, 1969, Madison Square Garden concert represented a cross-section of America, as described so colorfully by Post critic Al Aronowitz in his rave review. It took a man as courageous, iconoclastic, outspoken, and talented as salt-of-the-earth Johnny Cash to win over a nation divided by war - the one being fought in Southeast Asia and the one waged at home over social, sexual, and lifestyle upheavals brought forth by the burgeoning counterculture. His booming, trademark greeting, "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash" communicated a warmth and camaraderie to long hairs, short hairs, even no hairs - like Shel Silverstein, composer of "Sue" sitting front row center that night at the Garden.

Six months earlier, Life had chosen Cash for its cover because the Arkansas native had sold over a million copies of "Sue" since its release in the spring. Earlier that year, "Daddy Sang Bass" had also hit Number One on the C&W chart, which was especially gratifying since it was written by Cash's longtime friend, Sun labelmate, and fellow rockabilly architect Carl Perkins, who now toured with Cash's revue (and is spotlighted here performing his signature "Blue Suede Shoes"). "Daddy Sang Bass" also featured Cash's vivacious wife June Carter and her family members - on record and, usually, on tour. Legendary Mother Maybelle Carter, along with June and her sisters, Anita and Helen, had been traveling with Cash for nearly a decade, but June had taken time off near the end of ’69 since the Cashs' son, John Carter Cash, was due in March.

Perhaps the quality that most endeared Cash to the Garden audience that December night (which comes across on this powerful live recording), as well as the American mainstream, was - and is - his realness. Rather than a pose, Cash's down-to-earth demeanor and sociopolitical concerns are the real deal. A cinema verite documentary, Johnny Cash! The Man and His Music, filmed over several months in 1968 and 1969, depicted Cash on the road, gigging at a prison (doing "Folsom Prison Blues") and on an Indian reservation (performing a moving "The Ballad Of Ira Hayes"), in the studio with his band, the Tennessee Three (drummer W.S. Holland, bassist Marshall Grant, and guitarist Bob Wootton, who replaced the late Luther Perkins), and cutting a song with his pal Bob Dylan. (Some of the Dylan-Cash collaborations would end up on Dylan's pastoral Nashville Skyline, for which Cash would pen liner notes.)

The film also documents Cash's support of struggling songwriters, as he listens in Oregon to a hillbilly picker doing a number comparing his wife to a biscuit, and backstage another night Cash encourages a Dylan wannabe from Saskatoon. At Madison Square Garden, as we can hear, Cash makes a point of crediting his late nephew as the fourteen-year-old author of the folky "Sing a Traveling Song" and journalist Christopher Wren as the composer of "Jesus Was a Carpenter," along with his announcement of Silverstein's presence. The documentary film also found Cash and company back in his boyhood hometown of Dyess, Arkansas (the locale for "Big River," "Five Feet High and Rising," and "Pickin' Time"), walking through the empty house his family once lived in and shaking hands with former neighbors and the guy who ran the local gas station. It sounds as if these events were still fresh on Cash’s mind as he described his youthful stomping grounds from the Garden stage.

In the 1970s, Cash’s impact on the American psyche would continue to reverberate, as he campaigned for Native American rights and prison reform. That decade's most controversial and highly publicized inmate, Gary Gilmore, whose death wish coincided with the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976, spoke on the phone with Cash, who sent him an autographed copy of his memoir, Man in Black (which, following his execution, Gilmore left to his mother, also a Cash fan). On the opposite end of the spectrum, Cash became a confidante of President Jimmy Carter that same year - a close relationship the two have maintained to this day.

More than a quarter of a century later, a new generation of fans - many of whom were not yet born in 1969 - have joined in the adulation of the seventy-year-old singer-songwriter and, thanks to this recording, can hear the Man in Black onstage. Just as Johnny Cash broke down barriers between people in the 1960s, he reaches an incredibly diverse audience in the first decade of the twenty-first century, as proven by the eclectic group of young artists participating in recent Cash tributes on television and on CD.

Perhaps at his peak in 1969 - playing a repertoire ranging from rockabilly to country to gospel to folk to blues - the then-thirty-seven-year-old Cash's enthralling performance illustrates something he told me a few years ago: "When I'm in that studio or on that stage, [a fire] is coming out of me," Cash said in 1997. "That fire is just as bright and hot today as when I was twenty-three."

Rest assured, Mr. Cash, your music will continue to burn for all of us for many years to come.

_____________________________________________________________________

Promoting country shows in New York City was virtually unheard of in December of 1969, much less at Madison Square Garden. However, Johnny Cash had played a memorable concert at Carnegie Hall in October of 1968, so it seemed fitting to take this opportunity to promote Johnny's show at Madison Square Garden as the climax of our first year of working with the Johnny Cash group, which included arranging the famous San Quentin Prison concert the previous February.

According to the official box office reciepts, the Madison Square Garden concert played to an advance sellout capacity of 19,342 people.

The show was performed in the round on a stage that rotated, thus giving a much more intimate feeling to Johnny and his audience. During sound check the afternoon of the show, Johnny, Carl Perkins, The Statler Brothers and the Carter Family found the acoustics in the middle of the Garden with no audience to absorb some of the sound feedback quite unnerving. Fortunately, once the show began, these concerns disappeared as attested by this album.

Johnny remarked as he left the stage that "it was almost like performing for friends in my living room." It seemed like the audience concurred.

It is a rare occasion when such a memorable event happens to be recorded for future enjoyment. This was one of those historic evenings. It was quite a contrast for the Cash show, which had performed in Mobile, Alabama three nights earlier.

Enjoy this milestone in the Johnny Cash worldwide musical odyssey that goes on and on.

Lou Robin and Allen Tinkley

Artist Consultants Productions, Inc.

SPINE BLURB

When Johnny Cash played a packed Madison Square Garden in December 1969, he was at the top of his game. With a hit TV show, a #1 album and the top two country songs of the year, "Daddy Sang Bass" and "A Boy Named Sue" under his belt, he drew an audience as diverse as his material. Backed by his Tennessee Three and showcasing performances by guitarist/rockabilly legend Carl Perkins, Maybelle Carter and the Carter Sisters (wife June notably absent - at home expecting their first child), the Statler Brothers, and brother Tommy, Cash played his hits - including the aforementioned smashes of '69, "Big River," and "Folsom Prison Blues," as well as songs that touched on such themes as his Arkansas childhood ("Five Feet High And Rising" - dedicated to his father Ray Cash, who was in the front row) and the conflict in Vietnam ("Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream"). Never before available, this live concert recording, which also includes Cash's between-song comments to the audience, is a must-have for every Johnny Cash fan.

TRACK LISTING

1. Big River

2. I Still Miss Someone

3. Five Feet High and Rising

4. Pickin' Time

5. Remember The Alamo

6. Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream

7. Wreck of the Old '97

8. The Long Black Veil

9. The Wall

10. Send A Picture of Mother

11. Folsom Prison Blues

12. Blue Suede Shoes (Carl Perkins)

13. Flowers on the Wall (The Statler Brothers)

14. Wildwood Flower (The Carter Family)

15. Worried Man Blues (The Carter Family)

16. A Boy Named Sue

17. Cocaine Blues

18. Jesus Was a Carpenter

19. Ballad of Ira Hayes

20. As Long As the Grass Shall Grow

21. Sing a Traveling Song

22. He Turned the Water Into Wine

23. Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord)

24. Daddy Sang Bass

25. Finale Medley

a. Do What You Do Do Well (Tommy Cash and Johnny Cash)

b. I Walk The Line (The Carter Family)

c. Ring of Fire (The Statler Brothers)

d. Folsom Prison Blues (Carl Perkins)

e. The Rebel - Johnny Yuma

f. Folsom Prison Blues

26. Suppertime

ALL TRACKS PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED

Songs Of Our Soil

1. Drink To Me 1:53

J. Cash

Recorded 7/24/58 Nashville, TN

2. Five Feet High and Rising 1:45

J. Cash

Recorded 3/12/59 Nashville, TN

3. The Man On the Hill 2:07

J. Cash

Recorded 3/12/59 Nashville, TN

4. Hank and Joe and Me 2:11

J. Cash

Recorded 3/12/59 Nashville, TN

5. Clementine 2:28

J. Cash

Recorded 3/12/59 Nashville, TN

6. The Great Speckle Bird 2:07

J. Cash

Recorded 3/12/59 Nashville, TN

7. I Want to Go Home 1:56

J. Cash

Recorded 3/12/59 Nashville, TN

8. The Caretaker 2:04

J. Cash

Recorded 3/12/59 Nashville, TN

9. Old Apache Squaw 1:44

J. Cash

Recorded 3/12/59 Nashville, TN

10. Don't Step On Mother's Roses 2:32

J. Cash

Recorded 3/12/59 Nashville, TN

11. My Grandfather's Clock 2:43

J. Cash

Recorded 3/12/59 Nashville, TN

12. It Could Be You (Instead of Him) 1:48

V. McAlpin - D. G. Tubb

Recorded 1/13/59 Nashville, TN

BONUS TRACKS

13. I Got Stripes 2:03

J. Cash - C. Williams

Columbia single 4-41427

Also appeared on album "The Big Hits" (Columbia CS-8161)

Recorded 3/12/59 Nashville, TN

14. You Dreamer You 1:48

J. Cash

Columbia single 4-41371

Also appeared on album "Old Golden Throat" (CBS 63316)

Recorded 3/12/59 Nashville, TN

Tracks 1-12 Originally Columbia CS 8148, Released 1959

Personnel:

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

Marshall Grant - bass

Murray Harmon, Jr. - drums

Morris Palmer - drums (Track 1)

Luther Perkins - electric guitar

Marvin Hughes - piano

[unknown chorus] - vocals

_______________________________________________________________

LINER NOTES

Original liner notes (CS 8148)

Once more the great Johnny Cash offers a group of superb interpretations of some unusually interesting songs, many of them of his own composition. The folk ballad has a long and fascinating history, and from the genre have come some of America’s finest songs, giving glimpses of history, of life as it was lived years ago and of many varieties of human experience. With the increasing speed and complexity of life these days, not many new ballads are being written, but among those that are, the ones from the pen of Johnny Cash stand at the top, and he presents some of his newest in this album, along with some old favorites for perspective.

Gifted with a voice particularly well suited for folk ballads, Johnny Cash also brings to them a special kind of understanding that heightens their impact. As he has demonstrated again and again, his warmth and sincerity build up a conviction that is shared by the listener, and, when he is singing his own songs, his performances are definitive.

He begins his program with Drink to Me, a kind of temperance message with echoes of Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes threaded through it; what is heard here is a more contemporary arrangement of the basic theme. In Five Feet High and Rising Johnny offers in a singularly convincing ballad of flood waters and the imminent threat they provide, while The Man on the Hill is a ballad of hard times that might have originated in the dust bowls in the thirties. Hank and Joe and Me tells a story of waterless miners making their way across a desert, while Clementine is an outstanding example of the narrative ballad form. The Great Speckled Bird, which closes the first half of the program, is a widely-known ballad of the religious variety, with a mystic approach unusual in such music.

In the second portion, Johnny begins with I Want to Go Home, a lively number with a delightful, quiet humor, and then changes pace with The Caretaker, a mournful morality tale of a hermit who has withdrawn from the world. An air of authentic history is the special feature of Old Apache Squaw, while Don’t Step on Mother’s Roses is a sentimental tale told in terms of country music. My Grandfather’s Clock, of course, is an old favorite, and Johnny concludes his program with the simple philosophy of It Could Be You.

Whether singing folk ballads, hymns or any kind of song Johnny Cash has proved himself one of the most versatile and popular artists of today. He comes naturally by his feeling for the ballad form, having heard many of them in his home town of Dyess, Arkansas, and having himself sung many of them to entertain his family and friends. As he gained experience, he also gained confidence in his singing and playing, and began to compose songs and ballads himself. When he took some of his work to record companies, his potential was recognized at once, and indeed his first four songs were all huge successes. Since that time, he has appeared as a member of the cast of the Grand Ole Op’ry, and has started out on an equally promising career in movies. In this collection of ballads, Johnny is heard at his finest, singing songs of outstanding interest in his immitable and uniquely expressive style.

NEW LINER NOTES

As noted in Christopher Wren's 1971 biography, Winners Got Scars Too,

Johnny Cash was fond of saying that he "grew up under socialism." It

wasn't far from the truth. Cash was just three years old in 1935 when

his sharecropping father Ray, seeking a better life for himself, wife

Carrie and their then five children (John the youngest) applied for and

was awarded one of 500 homesteads in the northeast corner of Arkansas

created by the federal government's Emergency Relief Administration to

help America's farmers work their way out of the Great Depression.

The first of what became nearly four dozen cooperative resettlement

projects across the nation, Colonization Project Number One - or as it

soon came to be known, Dyess Colony (in honor of state ERA administrator

W.R. Dyess) - provided each of its "licensees" a new five-room

farmhouse, barn and coop to go with their 20-acre parcels of land. At

the community center was a general store offering clothing and supplies

in exchange for scrip; there was even cooking and canning advice from an

on-site home economist.

It was here that Johnny Cash learned much about "Our Soil" and what it

represented - both in terms of value (the cotton, corn and other crops

that the rich bottomland yielded after the family had cleared and

cultivated the swampy terrain) and values: the hard-working,

Church-going, sharing-of-strength attitudes that bound the Dyess Colony

population together.

The facts show that Johnny Cash left the family farm in Arkansas for

good in 1950. After graduating high school in Dyess, he enlisted in the

Air Force and served overseas in Germany as a radio intercept operator.

Cash returned to the U.S. in '54, married Vivian Liberto (whom he'd met

during basic training in Texas) and moved to Memphis, where his

recording career began a year later at Sam Phillips' legendary Sun

Records, and after signing with Columbia Records in 1958 he and his

family headed west to live in Southern California. And yet, while he now

dwelled in a booming metropolis near the Pacific Ocean, the memories of

a childhood spent in cotton fields near the mighty Mississippi River

were never far from his thoughts - or his music.

Recorded almost in its entirety in a single marathon session held at

Columbia's Nashville studios on March 12, 1959, Songs Of Our Soil stands

as one of the purest statements within the estimable canon of Johnny

Cash's near-50 year recording career. A concept album in the truest

sense of the word - and keep in mind that the long-playing album itself,

especially for popular music performers, was in 1959 still a relatively

new medium - it is a work filled with stories, snapshots and sketches

that collectively reflect deep connections with, and wonder of, the

inscrutable mystery and beauty of nature and its effect on man.

Take the remarkable "Five Feet High and Rising." Listening to its

jaunty rhythm and buoyant vocal, one would never know that the song was

written by Cash to commemorate the Mississippi River flood of 1937 that

nearly wiped out the entire Dyess colony - including his own family's

farm. Swelled to fifteen feet above flood levels by twenty-one straight

days of rain, the waters of the raging river submerged most of Dyess,

leading to a wholesale evacuation of its inhabitants. Fortunately for

the Cashes, precautionary steps taken by the astute Ray resulted in

little significant damage when they safely returned home a month later.

For John, just five at the time, the flood was mainly an adventure - and

would remain forever so in his mind's eye. "Hey, come look through the

windowpane/ The bus is coming, gonna take us to the train/Looks like

we'll be blessed with a little more rain/Four feet high and risin.'"

While farming provides the thematic backdrops for "Five Feet High and

Rising" and "Man On the Hill" (about the precariousness of the

sharecropping life that families not as fortunate as the Cashes remained

stuck in before, during and after the Depression), death and subsequent

internment *in* the soil are at the forefront of a significant number of

the album's tracks. Taking for its title the popular ballad about the

doomed miner's daughter, Cash turns things around by fashioning a

different "Clementine," whose cowboy fiancé takes part in an ill-advised

night of carousing, and whose story Cash finishes with the poignant

line, "Mother, help your daughter put her wedding dress away." "Hank and

Joe and Me" posits us in a Southwestern desert as members of a trio of

prospectors who start out "bold and brave and free" seal their own fate,

Treasure of Sierra Madre style, by choosing to be covetous rather

compassionate when one of their team falls ill.

"The Caretaker" is situated in the graveyard itself, viewed from the

knowing perspective of an elderly cemetery worker who, fittingly, mourns

not for "the peaceful dead," but the troubled living: "Through their

grief I still see/ Their hate and greed and jealousy." That song opens

up to a short series of additional tunes about age and experience

centered around more salt-of-the earth characters: "Old Apache Squaw,"

which asks sympathetically, "You've had misty eyes for years/Could that

mist be tears?"; "Don't Step on Mother's Roses," which evocatively ties

together the notion of ever-fragile life ending with the image of a rose

being "crushed into the dirt"; and the traditional parlor song, "My

Grandfather's Clock," which runs perfectly throughout the course of one

man's life, prophetically sounds an alarm as he dies at age 90, and then

simply never runs again.

Filled in with straight-shooting covers of the folk evergreen "Sloop

John B" (here titled "I Want To Go Home") and the classic Roy

Acuff-associated hymn, "The Great Speckle Bird," as well as "Drink To

Me," a sideways re-vamping of the sentimental standard, "Drink To Me

Only With Thine Eyes," and the there-but-for-the grace-of-God gospel

advisory, "It Could Be You (Instead of Him)," Songs of Our Soil is

reissued here with the sprightly hit single "I Got Stripes" and the

pastoral "You Dreamer You." These bonus tracks were also recorded at the

March 12, 1959 session that yielded eleven of Songs of Our Soil's

original twelve tracks. That's some kind of productivity - but then

again, as they say in socialist circles: from each according to his

ability.

Billy Altman, 2002

Billy Altman is a Grammy-nominated music critic and historian, and the

recipient of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Excellence in Music

Journalism.

_________________________________________________________________

Sings Ballads Of The True West

1. Hiawatha's Vision 2:25

J. Cash

Recorded 3/23/65 Nashville, TN

Johnny Cash - narration

Maybelle Carter - autoharp

Bob Johnson - five-string lute

Charlie McCoy - harmonica

2. The Road To Kaintuck 2:44

J. Carter

Recorded 3/11/65 Nashville, TN

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

The Carter Family - vocals

Marshall Grant - bass

W.S. Holland - drums

Bob Johnson - five-string banjo

Luther Perkins - electric guitar

The Statler Brothers - vocals

3. The Shifting, Whispering Sands - Part I 2:55

V.C. Gilbert - M. Hadler

Recorded 3/10/65 Nashville, TN

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

The Carter Family - vocals

Marshall Grant - bass

W.S. Holland - drums

Bob Johnson - rhythm guitar

Luther Perkins - electric guitar

The Statler Brothers - vocals

[unknown] - strings

4. The Ballad of Boot Hill 3:49

C. Perkins

Recorded 8/14/59 Nashville, TN

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

Marshall Grant - bass

Michael Kazak - drums

Bob Johnson - mando-lute

The Anita Kerr Singers - vocals

Luther Perkins - electric guitar

James Carter Wilson - piano

5. I Ride An Old Paint 2:58

Arr: Johnny Cash

Recorded 3/10/65 Nashville, TN

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

The Carter Family - vocals

Marshall Grant - bass

W.S. Holland - drums

Bob Johnson - twelve-string banjo

Luther Perkins - electric guitar

[unknown] - strings

6. Hardin Wouldn't Run 4:19

J. Cash

Recorded 3/11/65 Nashville, TN

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

Marshall Grant - bass

W.S. Holland - drums

Luther Perkins - electric guitar

7. Mister Garfield 4:36

J. Elliot, arr. Johnny Cash

Recorded 3/11/65 Nashville, TN

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

The Carter Family - vocals

Marshall Grant - bass

W.S. Holland - drums

Bob Johnson - lead guitar

Luther Perkins - electric guitar

The Statler Brothers - vocals

8. The Streets of Laredo 3:39

Arr. Johnny Cash

Recorded 3/10/65 Nashville, TN

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

The Carter Family - vocals

Marshall Grant - bass

W.S. Holland - drums

Bob Johnson - rhythm guitar

Luther Perkins - electric guitar

The Statler Brothers - vocals

[unknown] - strings

9. Johnny Reb 2:51

M. Kilgore

Recorded 3/11/65 Nashville, TN

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

The Carter Family - vocals

Marshall Grant - bass

W.S. Holland - drums

Bob Johnson - five-string lute

Charlie McCoy - harmonica

Luther Perkins - electric guitar

The Statler Brothers - vocals

10. A Letter From Home 2:35

M. Carter - D. Dean

Recorded 3/12/65 Nashville, TN

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

Marshall Grant - bass

W.S. Holland - drums

Bob Johnson - five-string banjo

Luther Perkins - electric guitar

The Statler Brothers - vocals

11. Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairie 2:27

Arr: Johnny Cash

Recorded 3/10/65 Nashville, TN

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

The Carter Family - vocals

Marshall Grant - bass

W.S. Holland - drums

Bob Johnson - mando-cello

Luther Perkins - electric guitar

The Statler Brothers - vocals

[unknown] - strings

12. Mean As Hell 3:08

J. Cash

Recorded 3/18/65 Nashville, TN

13. Sam Hall 3:15

Arr: Tex Ritter

Recorded 3/11/65 Nashville, TN

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

Marshall Grant - bass

W.S. Holland - drums

Bob Johnson - guitar

Luther Perkins - electric guitar

14. 25 Minutes To Go 3:14

S. Silverstein

Recorded 3/12/65 Nashville, TN

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

Marshall Grant - bass

W.S. Holland - drums

Bob Johnson - mando-cello

Luther Perkins - electric guitar

The Statler Brothers - vocals

15. The Blizzard 3:54

H. Howard

Recorded 3/11/65 Nashville, TN

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

The Carter Family - vocals

Marshall Grant - bass

W.S. Holland - drums

Bob Johnson - twelve-string guitar

Luther Perkins - electric guitar

Bill Pursell - harpsichord

The Statler Brothers - vocals

16. Sweet Betsy From Pike 3:57

Arr. Johnny Cash

Recorded 3/18/65 Nashville, TN

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

Marshall Grant - bass

W.S. Holland - drums

Bob Johnson - guitar, five-string banjo, twelve-string guitar

Charlie McCoy - harmonica

Luther Perkins - electric guitar

17. Green Grow the Lilacs 2:47

Arr. Johnny Cash

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

Maybelle Carter - autoharp

Marshall Grant - bass

W.S. Holland - drums

Luther Perkins - electric guitar

18. Stampede 4:01

P. LaFarge

Recorded 3/13/65 Nashville, TN

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

Maybelle Carter - autoharp

The Carter Family - vocals

Marshall Grant - bass

W.S. Holland - drums

Bob Johnson - guitar

Luther Perkins - electric guitar

The Statler Brothers - vocals

19. The Shifting, Whispering Sands - Part II 2:28

V.C. Gilbert - M. Hadler

Recorded 9/18-19/63 Nashville, TN

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

Norman Blake - dobro

Jack Clement - guitar

Marshall Grant - bass

W.S. Holland - drums

Bob Johnson - guitar

Luther Perkins - electric guitar

Bill Pursell - piano

[unknown chorus] - vocals

20. Reflections 2:48

J. Cash

Recorded 3/15/65 Nashville, TN

Johnny Cash - narration

Bob Johnson - five-string banjo

Charlie McCoy - harmonica

BONUS TRACKS

21. Rodeo Hand 2:28

P. LaFarge

Recorded 3/13/65 Nashville, TN

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

Marshall Grant - bass

W.S. Holland - drums

Bob Johnson - guitar

Luther Perkins - electric guitar

The Statler Brothers - vocals

released on Bear Family BCD 15563

22. Stampede (alternate instrumental) 1:07

P. LaFarge

Previously unissued

Bob Johnson - guitar, five-string banjo, twelve-string guitar

Tracks 1-20 Originally Columbia C2S 838, Released 1965

_________________________________________________________________

LINER NOTES

Original Liner Notes (C2S 838)

Notes by Johnny Cash

Four years ago, Columbia Records album producer Don Law said to me, "John, think about making an album of Western songs." I thought about it, and Don knew I would attempt it when I was ready. Later, as a guest in my house, he brought me two books on Western lore. But nothing was mentioned about a Western album. Instead, we talked about fishing.

Reading the books Don Law left me, I became fascinated by true tales of the West. I bought up every issue of "True West," a successful magazine published in Texas and sold coast to coast. (Later, I learned that the magazine is read and swapped around by servicemen overseas, and that some early issues are worth up to ten dollars apiece.)

Then, while I was making a personal appearance in Austin, Texas, Joe Austell Small, a publisher of Western Publications, said to me, "John Cash, you’d be a good feller to ride the river with." He invited me to his offices where he publishes "True West," "Frontier Times" and "Old West." I saw his Remington and Russell paintings, and later, over a Mexican-style buffet, we got excited about the record album I was planning called THE TRUE WEST. Joe Small rode the river with me, and we became the best of friends. I hope we still are after he hears it; he sweated blood along with me to help me make it.

A few months ago, Don Law called me. "Johnny, old boy, aren’t we about ready to do that Western album?" I was afraid he’d ask that. I said, "Yes," then locked myself in my room full of books and took out pen and paper to begin sketching my plans for the songs and stories that would go into THE TRUE WEST.

The books - by John Lomax, Carl Sandburg, Botkin, Dobie and all the rest - were confusing. I closed the books and decided to call Tex Ritter to ask if he would come and help me and let me hear his side of it all. Mr. Ritter drove to my home and sat with me three hours with a tape recorder running and we went over the possibilities of the album. We became so involved in going over some three hundred Western songs that we developed an intense, "true West" attitude toward it all. So far as songs are concerned, there was only room for about twenty, at the most, on the two records - and that would only just about touch the forty or fifty years that I was to sing about.

But here, at least, is a part of it. Thanks to Joe Small and to Tex Ritter, a man whom I respect and am so very much indebted to for the time he gave me; to Peter LaFarge, my Indian friend who had almost every bone broken in his rodeo days; to "Ramblin’" Jack Elliott, who came to Nashville and advised me when I "didn’t know gee from haw"; to Gene Ferguson, of Columbia Records, who quietly sat still and pulled for me; to the Tennessee Three; to the Nashville Symphony Orchestra; to the Carter Family; to the Statler Brothers; to Bob Johnson, who plays 2,001-year-old folk songs because he simply likes them; to Tom Morgan of Hollywood who sat up all night writing violin arrangements for some of these songs.

But thanks mainly to album producers Don Law and Frank Jones who worked seven nights, all night long, to help capture the sound of the West wind. There are also many others I haven’t space to thank here.

Here is a tick of "that" time, just a glimpse beyond the movies and television, back to when a few tales could show us THE TRUE WEST.

We aren’t sorry for the modern sounds and modern arrangements on classics like "I Ride an Old Paint" or "The Streets of Laredo;" after all, they were meant to be heard on twentieth-century record players and transistor radios! For today that same West wind is blowing, although buckboards and saddles are lying out there turning to dust or crumbling from dry rot.

How did I get ready for this album? I followed trails in my Jeep and on foot, and I slept under mesquite bushes and in gullies. I heard the timber wolves, looked for golden nuggets in old creek beds, sat for hours beneath a manzanita bush in an ancient Indian burial ground, breathed the West wind and heard the tales it tells only to those who listen. I replaced a wooden grave marker of some man in the Arizona who "never made it." I walked across alkali flats where others had walked before me, but hadn’t made it. I ate mesquite beans and squeezed the water from a barrel cactus. I was saved once by a forest ranger, lying flat on my face, starving. I learned to throw a bowie knife and kill a jack rabbit at forty yards, not for the sport but because I was hungry. I learned of the true West the hard way - á la 1965.

Yes, it was an obsession, but I learned the ways of the West. It’s still there, and even though the people I sing about are gone, I saw something of what their life was like. Most of it I enjoyed. Some of it was mean as hell. But it’s the same West: it’s wild and hot and unbelievable till you try it on foot. It was the true West.

Here are a few words about some of the narrations and songs, including some definitions of cowboy lingo.

Hiawatha’s Vision. This was inspired by Longfellow’s "The Song of Hiawatha," in particular, the part called "The White Man’s Foot."

The Road to Kaintuck. This is about one of the first main roads leading West that was blazed by Daniel Boone. Others were the Dug Road, the Old Reedy Creek Road, the Road Down Troublesome, The Road to Moccasin Gap runs along Clinch Mountain, through Big Moccasin Gap, near Gate City, Tennessee.

The Shifting, Whispering Sands, Part I. This one has special meaning for me. I often go to an old, abandoned ranch near Maricopa, California, in my 1946 Jeep. No electricity, no running water, no phone. I sleep in a little shack heated by a wood-burning stove and use candles for light. There are rabbits, deer, badgers, coyotes, squirrels and, once in a while, a bear. I know the 480 acres like the back of my hand. I’ve spent hours walking around the original homesteaders’ homesites. The buildings are long fallen and crumbling into dust. I found a buckboard that fell apart when I tried to move it. There’s a windmill that sways in the wind. I sat under a manzanita bush one hot day with pen and paper, all set for a song inspiration. I looked around and discovered I was in an Indian burial ground. I sat for three hours, then wrote: "Under the manzanita tree - sits a pencil, a piece of paper and me." To my knowledge, no one else knows of this Indian graveyard - and I won’t show you where it is. (This is the ranch, incidentally, where Frank Bez photographed the album’s cover picture.) Out there at night, the stars seem twice as bright as anywhere else. you have to "gaze on high at the heavens, where you’re hoping you’ll be going when you die."

The Ballad of Boot Hill. I walked through Tombstone, Arizona’s Boot Hill Cemetery eight years ago for the first time. The view from Boot Hill across the valleys is beautiful - it’s hard to believe that the place saw so much killing. One grave marker reads simply "Hung By Mistake - 1882."

I Ride an Old Paint. Definitions you might find helpful: Montan = Montana; Hooley-ann = a roping term for a fast loop over the horse’s head; Coulee = a ravine, a creek bed; Draw = a shallow drain for rainfall, among other meanings; Dogie = a maverick’s scrubby calf; another meaning, for some cowboys, is laced shoes.

Hardin Wouldn’t Run. I wrote this after reading the autobiography John Wesley Hardin wrote just before he was killed. Mr. Goddard Lieberson, President of Columbia Records, asked me to write something for "The Badmen," a volume in the Columbia Records Legacy Collection he produced not long ago. I was late getting the song in, so we saved it for this album.

John Wesley Hardin, a desperado, married Jane Bowen; the two were on a train headed for Pensacola when Hardin was arrested. He was imprisoned at Huntsville, Texas, for fifteen years. Jane waited faithfully but died just a few months before her husband’s pardon. In prison, Hardin studied law and opened a law office in El Paso soon after his pardon. Clients were few. Juarez, Mexico, and its women were handy, and booze was plentiful. John Selman, a local constable, shot Hardin in a saloon after Hardin’s Mexican sweetheart had pistol-whipped Selman’s son.

Here are some more definitions that will help you understand the song better: Plow-handle hand = the drawing hand; plow-handle is a nickname for the shape of the stock on the Colt single-action Army revolver. (Col. Samuel Colt invented the revolver; his first one was a five-shooter, not a six. He said he got the idea from watching the paddle wheel of the ship he was going to India on in 1835.) Skin his gun = a fast draw; top hand = boss or number-one man, an expert; goose-hair = feather bed; red-eye = whiskey.

Mister Garfield. This song was brought to me by folk singer Jack Elliott. I wrote most of the song’s dialogue. It is eighty years old and to my knowledge has never been recorded. Jack recorded "The Ballad of Charles Guiteau," about the man who shot President Garfield.

The Streets of Laredo. A British tune, the original is supposed to be about a man who died of syphilis in a London hospital. The second and third verses here (author unknown) are from "Cowboy Songs" by John Lomax, published in 1910.

Johnny Reb. The Civil War was directly or indirectly the cause of thousands upon thousands going West. A surprising fact I uncovered was that both the Northern and the Southern armies used prisoners-of-war to fight Indians. Many more were killed. Speaking of death in the West, it’s a proven fact that more men died of rattlesnake bite than of bullets. (Don’t tell the movie producers.)

A Letter from Home. I asked Mother Maybelle Carter one night to write me a Western song for this album. The next morning she gave me this. Since the Bible on the plains was as uncommon as a letter from home, many cowboys called it that.

Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie. In those days, there simply wasn’t a way to transport a dead man across hundreds of miles of open country. Anyway, after he died, maybe he didn’t mind being buried on the lone prairie.

Sam Hall. I first heard this sung by Tex Ritter. Some people say that the morning Sam Hall was to be hanged, a friend slipped him a bottle. He staggered up the gallows, cursing everyone in the crowd.

Green Grow the Lilacs. Done best in our time by Tex Ritter, this song was written in 1848 by a Texas soldier during the strife with our Mexican neighbors.

WESTERN LINGO

All hands and the cook - An emergency call, usually to prevent a stampede,

Arbuckles - A coffee so common on the range that no other brand was known of.

Axle grease - Butter.

Bake - To ride a horse too long.

Black chaparral - A thorny bush native to the Southwest.

Box canyon - A gorge with only one opening.

Bronco - A wild or semiwild horse; from a Spanish word meaning rough or rude.

Buck out - To die.

Calico - A common cloth; sometimes, a woman.

Chaps - Pronounced "shaps." Leggings usually made of leather to give protection from thorns, the cold, and so on.

Chuck - A meal.

Chuck wagon - Where the meal is prepared or preserved.

Dead man’s hand - Aces and eights, the cards Wild Bill Hickok was said to be holding when Jack McCall shot him.

Dry gulch - To be in wait for.

Equalizer - A pistol.

Grassed - Thrown from a horse.

Grizzlies - Chaps made of bearskin with the hair left on.

Gunman’s sidewalk - The middle of the street.

Hackamore - A horse’s halter.

Hand - Four inches in measuring a horse from the ground to the top of his withers.

He’s blown in - He is here.

High lonesome - A big drunk

Hook up - To harness (the word "harness" is never used).

Horse - Sometimes referred to as: Bangtail, Bronco, "Carry the news to Mary," Pecker-neck, and dozens of others.

Hundred and sixty - A homestead, usually 160 acres.

Jerky - Thin strips of dried meat.

Judas steer - A steer trained to lead the others to the slaughterhouse, then return to lead another bunch.

Maverick - An unbranded animal of unknown ownership.

Norther - A blizzard.

Sheep dip - One of the many nicknames of whiskey.

___________________________________________________________________

NEW LINER NOTES

1965 was a particularly punishing year for Johnny Cash. At the height of a

long running romance with amphetamines, the chart-topping 33 year old singer

was carrying a large road show troupe, juggling a road schedule that averaged

300 dates annually, embarking on a heavy romance with June Carter, and some

equally weighty legal issues: a narcotics rap in El Paso, a divorce from wife

Vivian, and having to accept responsibility for unwittingly sparking a

wildfire that consumed over 400 acres outside Ventura, California. Gaunt to

the point of appearing Auschwitz skeletal, it was in also 1965 that he pulled

his infamous footlight smashing incident at the Grand Ole Opry, the toxic

cherry atop a notorious confection of vandalism and havoc wrought in hotel

rooms across the country.

This bizarre juxtaposition of chaos and creativity, whether scoring a top

five hit with a Bob Dylan cover or playing a psycho gunman in a low budget

exploitation flick (and contributing the title song, perhaps most memorable

for the line "Come on babe let's get primitive-you've got five minutes to

live,") seemed to propel Cash at an unimaginable hyper-speed. Nonetheless,

this wildman continued to clog the charts with hit records and was in the

midst of a series of highly ambitious concept albums; the previous year saw

release of "Bitter Tears," an outspoken collaboration with Peter LaFarge,

consisting of songs about the plight Native Americans (after the "Ballad Of

Ira Hayes" single met resistance at radio, Cash took out a full page in the

trades demanding of programmers "Where Are Your Guts?"). The man seemed to

trying to do everything at once, and with his double album "Ballads of the

True West," he took on one of the most demanding cultural explorations any

American could.

The attempt to rectify myth with reality and genuine folk music with

commercial Western song was a daunting one. 19th century historic fact,

1930s-era Hollywood fantasy and contemporary folkloric ideology, only

recently codified by an Eastern elite who spearheaded the late 1950s folk

revival, had collided in the popular mind as mass of themes and images from

which the notion of a true West seemed inextricable. Perhaps Tex Ritter, who

assisted Cash closely in preparing the album, best typifies this

contradictory state of mind. Born in Texas in 1907, Ritter grew up in a time

and place about as close to the real West as one in the 20th century could,

but after graduating at the head of his class he decided to study law; by

1928, he bailed out on that to concentrate on acting, music and studying

American folklore. His success on Broadway eventually led Ritter to become

one of the first Hollywood Singing Cowboys, but one whose gruff, authentic

delivery bore little resemblance to the smooth crooning of Roy Rogers and

Gene Autry. A heroic figure, Ritter's zeal for accuracy and research set him

as far apart from most of the silver screens singing cowboys as it did such

folk singers as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Ritter's singular intersection

of fact and fiction pointed the way for Cash's journey back into a search for

genuine Americana.

With this set, Cash painstakingly researched and assembled elements from each

source, creating a mix of straight spoken recitation ("Hiawatha's Vision"),

symphonic reworkings of cowboy arcana ("I Ride an Old Paint") and startlingly

theatrical performances ("Sam Hall") along with his own original

compositions, and he managed to bridge the seemingly insurmountable gaps that

yaw between the work of a heartsick Texan soldier in 1848 and the classic

Western numbers worked up in a Los Angeles garage by the Sons of the Pioneers

nearly 80 years later. As focused and convincing an assemblage on the subject

as anyone could put together, Cash should be proud of what he achieved with

Ballads of the True West, because he brings us closer to the harsh reality

and sublime romance of the untamed frontier than perhaps any other artist or

historian has managed.

Jonny Whiteside

Veteran music journalist Jonny Whiteside is the author of the award-wining

"Ramblin' Rose: The Life & Career of Rose Maddox," and "Cry: The Johnnie Ray

Story." A regular contributor to the LA Weekly, his work has also appeared in

Variety, the Journal of Country Music, Spin and numerous other publications.

BACK OF BOOKLET (scan from original LP)

THE TRUE WEST

Never in this land before us,

And nevermore hereafter,

Could a land know such a people

As the pioneer, or cowboy;

His unique brand of lingo,

His boots and his bandana,

All his devil deeds of daring,

His clothes, and way of living

But mainly, that gun dangling

So his hand could get it quickly;

Always wary of the weather

Always ready - for he must be!

Listen to the cowboy’s story,

And if you cannot hear it

In these legends, songs and stories,

Listen closely to the west wind

And the secrets that it whispers

In the forest, plains and valleys,

In the sand forever shifting.

Johnny Cash

_____________________________________________________________________

Silver

1. The L&N Don't Stop Here Anymore 3:14

T. Hall

Recorded 4/79

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

Jack Clement - rhythm guitar

Jack Routh - guitar

Bob Wootton - electric guitar

Marshall Grant - electric bass

Jerry Hensley - guitar

Brian Ahern - acoustic guitar

Ricky Scaggs - fiddle

Bob Johnson - mandocello

W.S. Holland - drums

Mark Morris - percussion

Earl Ball - piano

Jack Hale - trumpet, french horn

Bob Lewin - trumpet, french horn

2. Lonesome To The Bone 2:36

J.R. Cash

House of Cash, Inc. (BMI)

Recorded 5/79

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

Jerry Hensley - guitar

Bob Wootton - electric guitar

Marshall Grant - electric bass

W.S. Holland - drums

Earl Ball - piano

Jack Hale - trumpet

Bob Lewin - trumpet

3. Bull Rider 3:09

R. Crowell

Recorded 5/19/79

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

Jerry Hensley - guitar

Jack Routh - guitar, acoustic guitar

Bob Wootton - electric guitar

Ricky Skaggs - banjo, fiddle

Marshall Grant - electric bass

W.S. Holland - drums

Earl Ball - piano

Charlie Cochran - piano

4. I'll Say It's True (with George Jones) 2:47

J.R. Cash

Recorded 2/14/79

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

George Jones - vocal

Jack Clement - rhythm guitar

Jack Routh - guitar

Bob Wootton - electric guitar

Marshall Grant - electric bass

Jerry Hensley - guitar

W.S. Holland - drums

Mark Morris - percussion

Earl Ball - piano

5. (Ghost) Riders In The Sky 3:45

S. Jones

Recorded 2-4/79

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

Jack Clement - rhythm guitar

Jack Routh - guitar

Bob Wootton - electric guitar

Marshall Grant - electric bass

Jerry Hensley - guitar

Ricky Scaggs - fiddle

Bob Johnson - mandocello, banjo-lute

W.S. Holland - drums

Mark Morris - percussion

Earl Ball - piano

The Carter Family - vocals

Jan Howard - vocal

Alisa Jones - dulcimer

Wayne Jackson - trumpet

Jack Hale - trumpet, french horn

Bob Lewin - trumpet, french horn

6. Cocaine Blues 3:18

T.J. Arnall

Recorded 5/23/79

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

Jack Clement - acoustic guitar

Jerry Hensley - guitar

Jack Routh - guitar

Bob Wootton - electric guitar

Ricky Skaggs - twelve-string guitar

Marshall Grant - electric bass

W.S. Holland - drums

Earl Ball - piano

Charlie Cochran - piano

7. Muddy Waters 3:26

P. Rosenthal

Recorded 4/27/79

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

Jack Clement - acoustic guitar

Jerry Hensley - guitar

Bob Johnson - mando-cello

Jack Routh - guitar

Brian Ahern - acoustic guitar

Bob Wootton - electric guitar

Marshall Grant - electric bass

Ricky Skaggs - fiddle

W.S. Holland - drums

Earl Ball - piano

8. West Canterbury Subdivision Blues 3:45

J. Clement

Recorded 4/26/79

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

Jack Clement - rhythm guitar

Jack Routh - guitar

Bob Wootton - electric guitar

Marshall Grant - electric bass

Jerry Hensley - guitar

Ricky Scaggs - fiddle

Bob Johnson - mandocello

W.S. Holland - drums

Mark Morris - percussion

Earl Ball - piano

Jack Hale - trumpet

Bob Lewin - trumpet

9. Lately I Been Leanin' Toward The Blues 2:33

B.J. Shaver

Recorded 5/79

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

Jack Clement - rhythm guitar

Jack Routh - guitar

Bob Wootton - electric guitar

Marshall Grant - electric bass

Jerry Hensley - guitar

Ricky Scaggs - fiddle

Bob Johnson - mandocello

W.S. Holland - drums

Mark Morris - percussion

Earl Ball - piano

Jack Hale - trumpet

Bob Lewin - trumpet

10. I'm Gonna Sit On the Porch and Pick On My Old Guitar 3:00

J.R. Cash

Recorded 2/24/79

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

Jack Clement - rhythm guitar

Jack Routh - guitar

Bob Wootton - electric guitar

Marshall Grant - electric bass

Jerry Hensley - banjo-lute, guitar

W.S. Holland - drums

Mark Morris - percussion

Earl Ball - piano

Alisa Jones - dulcimer

Wayne Jackson - trumpet

BONUS TRACKS

11. I Still Miss Someone (with George Jones) 2:49

J. Cash - R. Cash Jr.

Recorded 2/14/79

Previously unissued

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

George Jones - vocal

Jack Clement - rhythm guitar

Jack Routh - guitar

Bob Wootton - electric guitar

Marshall Grant - electric bass

Jerry Hensley - guitar

W.S. Holland - drums

Mark Morris - percussion

Earl Ball - piano

12. I Got Stripes (with George Jones) 2:17

J. Cash - C. Williams

Recorded 2/14/79

Previously unissued

Johnny Cash - vocal, guitar

George Jones - vocal

Jack Clement - rhythm guitar

Jack Routh - guitar

Bob Wootton - electric guitar

Marshall Grant - electric bass

Jerry Hensley - guitar

W.S. Holland - drums

Mark Morris - percussion

Earl Ball - piano

All tracks recorded February through May, 1979

Tracks 1-10 Originally Columbia JC 36086, Released 1979

__________________________________________________________________

LINER NOTES

Original Liner Notes (JC 36086)

Hendersonville, Tennessee, June, 1979

Dear Mama,

I remember a hot August day in 1949. I was seventeen, but I was six feet tall and had been doing a man's work in the cotton fields since I was twelve.

The cotton was "laid by." That didn't mean that we were through working. That meant that we were through working the cotton fields until it was ready to pick the cotton in late September or October. Laying by time was not a time to lay down and rest from my work. It was another phase of our farm life where we really went to work, not only for ourselves, but for the animals. We canned the food, we hauled the hay, we harvested the corn, the alfalfa, the soy beans, and for me, the most dreaded job of all, cutting our winters wood supply for the heating and for the cookstove.

From sunup to sundown Daddy and I worked. He'd pick out the trees that we would cut down, usually a White Oak, a Pin Oak, or maybe a Hackberry, which was easier to cut. Sometimes we cut a tough Ash or an Elm. "Come on, son," he'd say as we swung back and forth a six foot cross-cut saw. "Pull hard, then push back a little when I pull, and I'll do the same for you." Over and over, on and on, in a straight line until the tree fell, always where he had planned for it to. After it crashed, he took a double bladed axe and walked down the tree, cutting the limbs off. My job was to pile the limbs in a neat pile, a tall, wide , neat pile.

"We don't want to leave the woods looking trashy," said Daddy. "Gotta have clean ground so the mules can pull the wagon around from one cut to the next when we get ready to load up." Three days we worked at cutting. We didn't have a watch, but sunup to sundown in Arkansas in August is a long, long time. The fourth day we started hauling the wood home, load after load. "Whoa, mule," said Daddy when we reached the mushrooming pile of wood near our back door, and he said, "I'll unhitch the mules, feed and water them while you unload the wagon, son."

"Yes, sir," I shouted. This was some kind of celebration, unloading the last of the wood. I threw the light and the heavy blocks over the side of the wagon and I started singing as I worked. I'd grunt a little when I would throw over an eighty or ninety pound block of wood, but it seemed the harder I worked, the harder I sang. Melodies were going through my mind and sometimes coming out rhythmically like the swinging back and forth of that cross-cut saw had been for three previous days.

I felt strong, tough and happy as the sun was finally sinking.

I jumped off the empty wagon singing an old gospel favorite, GOSPEL BOOGIE. This was recorded later as A WONDERFUL TIME UP THERE.

I finished my job. I sang my way into the back door where you stood wide-eyed, looking knowingly at me. "Who was that singing?" you asked. "that was me, Mama," I said, hugging you, dancing you around and continuing the song. You stopped me. "Your voice has dropped," you said. "I never heard you sing those low notes before."

"It's that cross-cut saw, Mama," I grinned, "and those big blocks of wood."

You stopped me again with a serious, earnest look in your eyes. I stood still and listened to what you were about to say.

"God has His hand on you, son," you said. "Someday you'll be singing on the radio, not just KLCN, Blytheville, not just WMPS, Memphis, but everywhere. Everybody will hear you sing, and the life you live will be a beacon. You'll have many followers. I pray that you'll have the wisdom to lead in the right direction. You have a special calling, a gift. Always remember that and always know that His hand is upon you and you won't go wrong so long as you used your gift as He wills." I paused and slowly nodded as if to say "I know and understand," then strolled out onto the front porch, sat on the swing, and started quietly singing again, playing with the new notes that had been added when my voice had dropped, amazed at the sounds I was making.

"Everybody's gonna have a wonderful time up there

Everybody's gonna have a wonderful time up there, O glory halleluiah

Boom-baba-boom-baba-boom

Brother there's a reckonin' a-comin' in the morning

. . . . . . . . . . . ."

I sang on and on, and I dreamed my dreams of the years to come. There hasn't been a day passed in the last thirty years that I haven't recalled that scene in the kitchen with you, Mama, and the things you said and how you said it as if you KNEW. I remember that afterwards, I nodded my head and almost said "I know it, Mama," but I didn't, I just started singing.

Now, after twenty-five years in the profession, I think maybe my voice is still suitable at time to be played on the radio. You still like it, don't you, Mama? that's what matters to me.

All my love,

--J. R.

____________________________________________________________________

NEW LINER NOTES

When Johnny Cash cut this album in 1979, celebrating his twenty-fifth

anniversary in the business, country music was in a severe state of flux.

Coming off the Outlaw movement, and just before the Urban Cowboy craze, both

huge successes that owed absolutely nothing to the Nashville establishment's

jealous stewardship, the entire field seemed both wide open and on the verge

of losing its balance. While it is tempting to say these dual, roughly

contemporaneous breakthroughs were unprecedented, there was one man, of

course, who had already defied Music City's arbiters and made a stunning

artistic, commercial and popular impact: Cash.

The Dyess, Arkansas born singer had staked out some extraordinary ground for

himself over the past quarter of a century, mixing a tough, terse rockabilly

style ("Big River," "Folsom Prison Blues,") with heartfelt messages of home,

family life and romance ("Give My Love To Rose," I Walk the Line"), that

covered far deeper emotional territory than such celebrated Sun labelmates as

Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis. After his move from Sun Records to

Columbia in 1958, Cash embarked on one of the most remarkable artistic and

personal odysseys in country history, a cyclical clash of lows and highs that

kept his audience as much fascinated with his life off stage as on. It was

all tempest and triumph for Cash: just months after these sessions, he became

the youngest living artist ever inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

While his high-flying glory days--outselling even the Beatles circa

1968-69--were behind him, and Cash himself has described his work during this

period as time when "when I wasn't paying enough attention to the music,"

Silver is a damn good album. Produced by the West Coast-based Brian Ahern,

and reunited with his old Sun studio cohort, the eccentric musician-producer

Jack "Cowboy" Clement, it definitely has a non-Music Row approach. Featuring

such up and coming talent as Ricky Skaggs and Rodney Crowell, not to mention

superb contributions from the King himself, George Jones, Cash is fine form,

relaxed yet authoritative. The musicians here also include the core of Cash's

road band, pianist Earl Ball, the phenomenal drummer W.S. Holland, who been

with the singer since 1960, and original Tennessee Two bassist Marshall

Grant--one the last times that Grant ever worked with Cash (in March 1980,

Cash would fire him and Grant would file a law suit, touching off an

apparently never to be resolved feud).

Ahern, a country-rock renegade by Nashville standards, best known at the time

for producing (and subsequently marrying) EmmyLou Harris, brought new

textures to the classic Cash sound, using filters and phase shifters, adding

such unconventional for the Man in Black instrumentation as trumpet,

flugelhorn, fiddle and banjo. A cool breeze from California, Ahern also

brought Cash several of the titles featured here, including folkie story-song

"The L&N Don't Stop Here Anymore," which kicks the disc off with a convincing

blend of Grant's vintage rhythmic drive, Skagg's fiddle and the post-Sergeant

Pepper pop-style horn lines. While hardcore fans of the old school style may

bridle at Ahern's inclusion of the unusual, it only underscores Cash's

freewheeling nature, a fearless bent for trying just about anything that

continues to serve him well. With Silver, too, there was a sense of

family--Grant was still a loyal, career long pal; Clement remains one the

singer's closest friends (Cash calls him brother); both Skaggs and Crowell

worked more than a few years in EmmyLou Harris' Hot Band, linking them

closely to Ahern, and Crowell had just become Cash's son-in-law. A tight knit

band, they were.

Thoroughly at ease, Cash rumbles merrily through a set of the familiar, the

outlaw pleasing "Cocaine Blues" and "Ghost Riders in the Sky," a staple in

Cash's live show, along with offbeat tunes like "West Canterbury Subdivision

Blues" and Billy Joe Shaver's "Lately I've Been Leaning Toward The Blues."

The latter, a song dealing intimately with the songwriter's soul, is couched

in such opaquely simplistic language that it seems on the surface to be about

mostly nothing, yet Cash's interpretation reveals Shaver's sophisticated

between the lines pathology with far more success than even the composer's

own recorded version. That ability for precise, spontaneous transmission of

information has always set Cash apart, and here, even when he's on cruise

control, the masterly nature of his gift is never less than riveting.

Jonny Whiteside, 2002

Veteran music journalist Jonny Whiteside is the author of the award-wining

"Ramblin' Rose: The Life & Career of Rose Maddox," and "Cry: The Johnnie Ray

Story." A regular contributor to the LA Weekly, his work has also appeared in

Variety, the Journal of Country Music, Spin and numerous other publications.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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: 4 Johnny Cash albums are scheduled for release in September, 901.

: The cornerstone of this phase of Legacy's year-long Johnny Cash 70th Birthday celebration is At Madison Square Garden - a never-before-released, fantastic sounding, concert recording from 1969.

: All albums are remastered, include liner notes, photos, etc, & the reissues include bonus tracks.

: Live At Madison Square Garden 509410 2 - recorded 1969, 77 minutes playing time!

: Songs Of Our Soil 509411 2 - from 1959, with 2 bonus tracks

: Sings Ballads Of The True West 509412 2 - from 1965, with 2 bonus tracks (68 minutes playing time, this was a double LP)

: Silver 509413 2 - from 1979, with 2 bonus tracks

:

: At Madison Square Garden-

: 1. Big River

: J.R. Cash

: 2. I Still Miss Someone

: J.R. Cash - R. Cash, Jr.

: 3. Five Feet High and Rising

: J.R. Cash

: 4. Pickin' Time

: J.R. Cash

: 5. Remember The Alamo

: J. Bower

: 6. Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream

: E. McCurdy

: 7. Wreck of the Old '97

: J.R. Cash - N. Blake - B. Johnson

: 8. The Long Black Veil

: D. Dill - M. Wilkin

: 9. The Wall

: H. Howard

: 10. Send A Picture of Mother

: J.R. Cash

: 11. Folsom Prison Blues

: J.R. Cash

: Previously available on promo-only 70th Birthday

: commemorative 7" vinyl single (Columbia/Legacy CS7 56799)

: 12. Blue Suede Shoes

: (Carl Perkins)

: C. Perkins

: 13. Flowers on the Wall

: (The Statler Brothers)

: L. DeWitt

: 14. Wildwood Flower

: (The Carter Family)

: A.P. Carter

: 15. Worried Man Blues

: (The Carter Family)

: A.P. Carter

: 16. A Boy Named Sue

: S. Silverstein

: 17. Cocaine Blues

: T.J. Arnell

: 18. Jesus Was a Carpenter

: C. Wren

: 19. Ballad of Ira Hayes

: P. LaFarge

: 20. As Long As the Grass Shall Grow

: P. LaFarge

: 21. Sing a Traveling Song

: (Anita Carter - background solos)

: K. Jones

: 22. He Turned the Water Into Wine

: (Anita Carter - background solos)

: J.R. Cash

: 23. Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord)

: (Johnny Cash with the Carter Family)

: arr. And adapted by J.R. Cash

: 24. Daddy Sang Bass

: C. Perkins

: 25. Finale Medley

: a. Do What You Do Do Well

: (Tommy Cash and Johnny Cash)

: N. Miller

: b. I Walk The Line

: (The Carter Family)

: J.R. Cash

: c. Ring of Fire

: (The Statler Brothers)

: J. Carter - M. Kilgore

: d. Folsom Prison Blues

: (Carl Perkins)

: J.R. Cash

: e. The Rebel - Johnny Yuma

: R. Markowitz - A. Fenady

: f. Folsom Prison Blues

: J.R. Cash

: 26. Suppertime

: I. Stamphill

: All tracks recorded live at Madison Square Garden, New York, NY on December 5, 1969

: Johnny Cash - vocals, acoustic guitar

: Marshall Grant - bass

: W.S. Holland - drums

: Bob Wooton - electric guitar

: Carl Perkins - electric guitar, vocals

: Tommy Cash - announcer, acoustic guitar, vocals

: The Statler Brothers (Harold Reid, Don Reed, Phil Balsley, Lew DeWitt) - vocals

: The Carter Family (Mother Maybelle, Helen, Anita & Robbie Harden) - vocals

: ___________________________________________________________________

: JOHNNY'S BLURB

: PENDING

: ___________________________________________________________________

: LINER NOTES

: Pop Music

: By Alfred G. Aronowitz

: From The New York Post - Monday December 8, 1969

: A Man Called Johnny Cash

: It isn't just bullets that can shoot a man down, and when you saw Johnny Cash walk into the room,you knew immediately what Jesse James and Doc Holiday and John Wesley Hardin and maybe even Clyde Barrow had fought to become, if only they could have survived.

: Johnny's career has taken him through almost 20 years of the kind of gunfighting that isn't done with guns, and if you couldn't see the scars this life had given him, the reason had to do with the miracle of learning how to drink all night and not fall down, how to be kicked in your manhood and laugh at the hurt, how to be calloused by sledgehammers and still leave a touch as gentle as Christ.

: He was dressed in his usual outlaw black, with his long country jacket, as much a young man from the muddy bottomlands of Dyess, Ark., as he was at home in New York, having spent enough time in this city to know both its towers and its ratholes.

: We were on the 21st floor of the Hotel Warwick, and he was just a little nervous at meeting a few select members of the press, but he strode right over to the canape table and helped himself to the only supper he would get this night. It was a couple of hours before his concert at the Garden Friday, and he was bringing the country to the city with an authority that nobody else possesses in this fragmented nation.

: Johnny Cash knew how to talk to prisoners and to presidents. He knew, as a matter of fact, how to talk to all America. "I just about say and do what I want," he said when someone asked him about his TV show. "I think I know what's in good taste."

: Only Johnny knows how many times he's been shot down in this life, but he has kept picking himself up to become a folk figure so real, so heroic and so American that he could, as he did later that night, endorse Richard M. Nixon's conduct of the Vietnam war and still give a "V" sign from the same stage.

: At the press conference, the questions were all friendly. Nobody asked him about the pills or the dope you can hear him joke about on his "San Quentin" album. Nobody even asked him about the war, although, later, on the arena stage of the Garden, he said the war was the one question that reporters brought up most.

: "I'll tell you exactly how I feel about it," he announced. "This past January, we brought our whole show over to the air base at Long Binh, and a reporter asked, 'That makes you a hawk, doesn't it?' And I said 'No, that doesn't make me a hawk, but when you watch the helicopters bringing in the wounded, that might make you a dove with claws.'

: The ovation that flled the Garden for Johnny's Vietnam announcement lasted longer than it did for any of Johnny's songs, which were certainly worth as much. It is perhaps America's commentary on itself that an even greater ovation came when Johnny announced that his TV show had been renewed and would resume on Jan. 21.

: Otherwise, the rebel yelps and truck-driver howls, the law-and-order ladies leaping to their feet and the graying, grey suited men whistling through their teeth, the foot-stamping of the Wallacities and the screaming of the lesser conservatives must have been terrifying to the longhairs who also helped fill the Garden with a record crowd of over 21,000.

: The audience had come mostly from Johnny's TV fans in the suburbs, overburdening the parking garages in the Garden area, where they had to wait in some cases for more than an hour to get their cars back. But if they came in by the minions from the country music strongholds in Pennsylvania and Jersey and Upstate and Connecticut, they also came from Av. C, where the Underground is breeding big Johnny Cash fans who are no less devoted.

: If anyone felt uneasy, however. Johnny soon vindicated himself with the peace sign while he sang, "Last night I had the strangest dream I'd ever known before... I dreamed that all the world agreed to put an end to the war." Actually the concert needed no vindication. Could Johnny's deep baritone ever have been put to greater songs with a clearer or more tuneful authority than it was Friday night?

: He sang "Big River" and he sang "The Wall" and he sang about the floods of Arkansas. "How high is the water, mama? Two feet high and rising..." He introduced his 72-year-old father and his kid brother, Tommy. He sang "I Still Miss Someone" and "A Boy Named Sue" and he sang with the Statler Brothers and the Carter Family, minus, unfortunately, his wife, June, who's expecting another child. He sang about the Alamo and he sang about Ira Hayes and he sang prison songs and he sang "Wreck of the Old 97" and he sang "Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?"

: He sang and sang and sang and he sang so well that even if he had stayed on the revolving stage another two hours it wouldn't have been enough. "The cities were looking for something and I think they found it in country music," Johnny had said at his press conference. "I think they found it in the realism and the truth." Certainly New York has found it in Johnny Cash.

: _____________________________________________________________________

: NEW LINER NOTES

: JOHNNY CASH LIVE AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN 1969

: By Holly George-Warren

: "THE ROUGH-CUT KING OF COUNTRY MUSIC" That's what Life magazine called Johnny Cash on its June 21, 1969, cover featuring the Man in Black poised with his guitar, a smoking locomotive behind him. In the last year of the twentieth century's most tumultuous decade, the Arkansas-born singer-songwriter ruled the C&W charts. A pair of Cash hits - "Daddy Sang Bass" at Number One, followed by "A Boy Named Sue" - were the top two country songs of 1969, and his second live album recorded at a prison, Johnny Cash At San Quentin, stayed at Number One for five months. (At Folsom Prison spent four weeks at Number One the previous year.) In 1969, Cash placed an unprecedented seven albums onto Billboard's Country & Western album chart.

: Fourteen years after his first pop hit on Sun Records - 1955’s primal "I Walk the Line" - Cash also had recaptured the imagination of the public at large. "Boy Named Sue" had crossed over to land at Number Two on the pop chart, and the down-homey Johnny Cash Show, which had begun as a summer replacement TV program, had just been renewed by ABC for its 1970 season. (Cash had stood up to television execs who wanted the show to be filmed on a soundstage, insisting that if he couldn’t do it at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, which had been home to the Grand Ole Opry, then he wouldn’t do the show at all. It remained at the Ryman.)

: It's no wonder the audience at his record-breaking December 5, 1969, Madison Square Garden concert represented a cross-section of America, as described so colorfully by Post critic Al Aronowitz in his rave review. It took a man as courageous, iconoclastic, outspoken, and talented as salt-of-the-earth Johnny Cash to win over a nation divided by war - the one being fought in Southeast Asia and the one waged at home over social, sexual, and lifestyle upheavals brought forth by the burgeoning counterculture. His booming, trademark greeting, "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash" communicated a warmth and camaraderie to long hairs, short hairs, even no hairs - like Shel Silverstein, composer of "Sue" sitting front row center that night at the Garden.

: Six months earlier, Life had chosen Cash for its cover because the Arkansas native had sold over a million copies of "Sue" since its release in the spring. Earlier that year, "Daddy Sang Bass" had also hit Number One on the C&W chart, which was especially gratifying since it was written by Cash's longtime friend, Sun labelmate, and fellow rockabilly architect Carl Perkins, who now toured with Cash's revue (and is spotlighted here performing his signature "Blue Suede Shoes"). "Daddy Sang Bass" also featured Cash's vivacious wife June Carter and her family members - on record and, usually, on tour. Legendary Mother Maybelle Carter, along with June and her sisters, Anita and Helen, had been traveling with Cash for nearly a decade, but June had taken time off near the end of ’69 since the Cashs' son, John Carter Cash, was due in March.

: Perhaps the quality that most endeared Cash to the Garden audience that December night (which comes across on this powerful live recording), as well as the American mainstream, was - and is - his realness. Rather than a pose, Cash's down-to-earth demeanor and sociopolitical concerns are the real deal. A cinema verite documentary, Johnny Cash! The Man and His Music, filmed over several months in 1968 and 1969, depicted Cash on the road, gigging at a prison (doing "Folsom Prison Blues") and on an Indian reservation (performing a moving "The Ballad Of Ira Hayes"), in the studio with his band, the Tennessee Three (drummer W.S. Holland, bassist Marshall Grant, and guitarist Bob Wootton, who replaced the late Luther Perkins), and cutting a song with his pal Bob Dylan. (Some of the Dylan-Cash collaborations would end up on Dylan's pastoral Nashville Skyline, for which Cash would pen liner notes.)

: The film also documents Cash's support of struggling songwriters, as he listens in Oregon to a hillbilly picker doing a number comparing his wife to a biscuit, and backstage another night Cash encourages a Dylan wannabe from Saskatoon. At Madison Square Garden, as we can hear, Cash makes a point of crediting his late nephew as the fourteen-year-old author of the folky "Sing a Traveling Song" and journalist Christopher Wren as the composer of "Jesus Was a Carpenter," along with his announcement of Silverstein's presence. The documentary film also found Cash and company back in his boyhood hometown of Dyess, Arkansas (the locale for "Big River," "Five Feet High and Rising," and "Pickin' Time"), walking through the empty house his family once lived in and shaking hands with former neighbors and the guy who ran the local gas station. It sounds as if these events were still fresh on Cash’s mind as he described his youthful stomping grounds from the Garden stage.

: In the 1970s, Cash’s impact on the American psyche would continue to reverberate, as he campaigned for Native American rights and prison reform. That decade's most controversial and highly publicized inmate, Gary Gilmore, whose death wish coincided with the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976, spoke on the phone with Cash, who sent him an autographed copy of his memoir, Man in Black (which, following his execution, Gilmore left to his mother, also a Cash fan). On the opposite end of the spectrum, Cash became a confidante of President Jimmy Carter that same year - a close relationship the two have maintained to this day.

: More than a quarter of a century later, a new generation of fans - many of whom were not yet born in 1969 - have joined in the adulation of the seventy-year-old singer-songwriter and, thanks to this recording, can hear the Man in Black onstage. Just as Johnny Cash broke down barriers between people in the 1960s, he reaches an incredibly diverse audience in the first decade of the twenty-first century, as proven by the eclectic group of young artists participating in recent Cash tributes on television and on CD.

: Perhaps at his peak in 1969 - playing a repertoire ranging from rockabilly to country to gospel to folk to blues - the then-thirty-seven-year-old Cash's enthralling performance illustrates something he told me a few years ago: "When I'm in that studio or on that stage, [a fire] is coming out of me," Cash said in 1997. "That fire is just as bright and hot today as when I was twenty-three."

: Rest assured, Mr. Cash, your music will continue to burn for all of us for many years to come.

: _____________________________________________________________________

: Promoting country shows in New York City was virtually unheard of in December of 1969, much less at Madison Square Garden. However, Johnny Cash had played a memorable concert at Carnegie Hall in October of 1968, so it seemed fitting to take this opportunity to promote Johnny's show at Madison Square Garden as the climax of our first year of working with the Johnny Cash group, which included arranging the famous San Quentin Prison concert the previous February.

: According to the official box office reciepts, the Madison Square Garden concert played to an advance sellout capacity of 19,342 people.

: The show was performed in the round on a stage that rotated, thus giving a much more intimate feeling to Johnny and his audience. During sound check the afternoon of the show, Johnny, Carl Perkins, The Statler Brothers and the Carter Family found the acoustics in the middle of the Garden with no audience to absorb some of the sound feedback quite unnerving. Fortunately, once the show began, these concerns disappeared as attested by this album.

: Johnny remarked as he left the stage that "it was almost like performing for friends in my living room." It seemed like the audience concurred.

: It is a rare occasion when such a memorable event happens to be recorded for future enjoyment. This was one of those historic evenings. It was quite a contrast for the Cash show, which had performed in Mobile, Alabama three nights earlier.

: Enjoy this milestone in the Johnny Cash worldwide musical odyssey that goes on and on.

: Lou Robin and Allen Tinkley

: Art