Miami Herald:
Posted on Fri, Jul. 07, 2006email thisprint this
ALBUM REVIEWS
Cash's adieu: grief, vulnerability are painfully
clearhcohen@MiamiHerald.com
• FOLK
JOHNNY CASH
American V: A Hundred Highways
American/Lost Highway
*** ½
arena 50 years ago, and a train song, Like the 309, his final composition recorded shortly before his September 2003 death, serves as his exit.
Take me to the depot / Put me to bed / . . .Then load my box / On the 309.
Cash's American V: A Hundred Highways is no more or no less death-obsessed than any of the previous four Rick Rubin-helmed albums that brought Cash well-deserved late-career accolades. If American V takes on a greater resonance than the others, well, singing about death and then following through thrusts this disc into a whole other context.
Cash began recording these 12 songs immediately after the American IV sessions in late 2002 in the last eight months of his life. (Enough remains for a forthcoming American VI, Rubin says, robbing this one ever so slightly of its significance).
While laying tracks, his wife, June Carter Cash, died in May 2003, adding poignancy and clearly influencing the choice of material.
Hear the hurt on Hank and Audrey Williams' mournful On the Evening Train as Cash sings, I pray that God will give me courage / To carry on til we meet again / It's hard to know she's gone forever / They're carrying her home on the evening train.
Cash told Rubin, who produces with his customary economy and class, that he must get into the studio and record for as long as he was able. For Cash, his artistic expression was his life and his life force flows through each and every cut here.
Some days were good, his baritone weathered but comparably strong on tracks like Rod McKuen's sweetly melodic Love's Been Good to Me and the traditional folk foot-stomper God's Gonna Cut You Down.
Other times, on Larry Gatlin's pleading spiritual Help Me and Gordon Lightfoot's '70s love ballad If You Could Read My Mind he was clearly deteriorating, his voice a broken husk with nary enough power to blow dust off the microphone. Lord help me walk another mile / Just one more mile are the first words you hear on the CD. It's difficult not to choke up along with Cash when he reaches the line in Lightfoot's song about the ''movie queen'' who brings ''all the good things out in me'' -- easy to read as a reference to June -- and his voice breaks into a sob on I never thought I could act this way / And I've got to say that I just don't get it.
Cash, the stentorian Man in Black, never has appeared so vulnerable. It's incredibly moving hearing this man stare down death with grace, pathos, acceptance and a discernible hint of humor.
Pod Picks: Like the 309, If You Could Read My Mind, Love's Been Good to Me.
HOWARD COHEN