Track Listing

1. Ring Of Fire
2. I Walk The Line
3. Thing Called Love
4. Sunday Morning Coming Down
5. Folsom Prison Blues
6. Home Of The Blues
7. Guess Things Happen That Way
8. The Ways Of A Woman In Love
9. The Ballad Of Ira Hayes
10. Tennessee Flat Top Box
11. I Got Stripes
12. Get Rhythm
13. Cry, Cry, Cry
14. Hey Porter
15. Ballad Of A Teenage Queen - Johnny Cash, Rosanne Cash, The Everly Brothers
16. Five Feet High And Rising
17. Long Black Veil
18. I Still Miss Someone
19. Blue Train
20. Peace In The Valley
21. The Night Hank Williams Came To Town - Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings
22. Family Bible

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1414 in Music
• Released on: 1998-04-06
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 59 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Every home should have a Johnny Cash compilation. Cash is a genuine titan of popular music, whose finest work should be as venerated as anything by Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, David Bowie or Brian Wilson, and this collection does as good a job of beginning to explain why as any. The virtue of Cash's music is its simplicity. His brutally reductive take on country, set to his distinctive boom-chicka-boom backbeat, directs all of the listener's attention to his supernaturally world-weary voice (even as a teenager, Cash sounded about a thousand years old). This collection is a judicious mix of covers (Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry", Bob Dylan's "It Ain't Me Babe" among them) and original Cash standards. That the producers of this record have a genuine empathy with their subject is confirmed by their inclusion of a live version of the triumphantly nihilist "Folsom Prison Blues" (once identified by Ice-T, no less, as a progenitor of gangsta rap) taped at one of Cash's famous prison concerts . The cheers that greet the line "I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die" are the eeriest confirmation of credibility by an audience upon a performer ever recorded. --Andrew Mueller

Customer Reviews

Rerecorded hell!
This is a re-record from 1998-ish. I own it - I was on holiday and in desperate need of some Johnny when I bought it. Unfortunately this is rubbish. Spend your money elsewhere. There are much better albums out there with the original recordings!

Not the real thing
Most, if not all, of the four reviews already on this page, and the Amazon review itself, are mislocated or confuse this album (Spectrum 554 383-2) with another similar one (notice how the reviewers refer to tracks that are not, in fact, in this listing!). This particular album is not the original recordings, but one of those studio remakes from decades later, probably 1998 so far as can be told from the cover notes. Johnny sounds tired (how many times must he have sung 'Ring of Fire' before he came to make this?).

Of course, you get digital quality with a remake, but I'd much rather have the raw and passionate originals. Caveat emptor.

Blue collar hero
This single CD contains the best of Johnny Cash prior to his resurgence in the late 90s in collaboration with producer Rick Rubin and is difficult to fault with regards to content. All of the absolutely essential classics are included such a I Walk The Line, Ring Of Fire and a duet of Jackson with his enduring soulmate and second wife June Carter.

Cash was one of the few artists who was successfully considered a "man of the people" throughout his career. Tellingly for such a blue-collar hero, his two most famous and critically acclaimed albums were recorded live in American prisons and this compilation features Folsom Prison Blues from the At Folsom Prison LP and the funny A Boy Name Sue from At San Quentin.

The Cash sound stays similar throughout this Best Of with Johnny's deep vocals and fast country-ish acoustic supported by sparing rock'n'roll influenced lead guitar licks, simple root note bass and tight snare-heavy drumming. Female backing vocals and other instruments, such as the brass on Ring Of Fire, are used on occasions to embellish the arrangements with the superb train-like harmonica on Orange Blossom Special being particularly well played and effective.

Having said all this, I'm not a particularly massive fan of Johnny Cash's music though it shows something of the almost universal esteem with which he's held that I have gone firmly on the defensive here. Nevertheless, it's still good to have one JC LP with all the classics and for this purposes, The Best Of Johnny Cash does a very good job indeed.