(Credit: Alamy)
Tue 6 January 2026 21:30, UK
By the end of his life, Johnny Cash had quickly started to become the wise sage of country music.
He wasn’t in it to make massive hits like he used to do, but his final run of albums was also proof that he hadn’t lost his touch with what the new kids were doing. He was as ready to roll as any other industry giant, but people forgot about how ominous that voice can sound if given the right sense of direction.
If ‘The Man in Black’ was actually going to start sounding like himself again, he was going to need more than a little bit of a makeover. The 1980s were not exactly the kindest to him on every single record, and even if the Highwaymen led to him making the kind of supergroup for the ages, it’s not like it was going to wash the taste of ‘The Chicken in Black’ out of everyone’s mouths on a whim. So when Rick Rubin called him, it couldn’t have been at a better time for a reboot.
Cash was still that same Gothic songwriter he had always been, but it was going to take him a while before he settled into that persona all over again. After all, that was the wild version of Cash that turned up on At Folsom Prison, but Rubin didn’t want to recycle the past. He saw Cash as a survivor of the music industry, and with one song after another, he was slowly beginning to peel back the layers and see the version of the country legend that most people had only read about.
So by the time American Recordings came out, the new ‘Man in Black’ was out in full force. Whereas the final sprint towards the end of his career featured him playing songs by U2 and Soundgarden, the first instalment in the American series is a much more sombre affair. A lot of it only needs to be played on an acoustic guitar to get its point across, but when listening to a track like ‘Delia’s Gone’, the emotionless delivery of his vocal makes the murder ballad all the more terrifying.
And it’s not like the creepy factor was lost on Cash, saying, “The way I see this album, it’s like showing the worst, evil side of me. Then maybe a little of the good side, whatever that is. It’s showing the evil that the mind goes through from ‘hard to watch her suffer, but with the second shot she died’ in ‘Delia’s Gone’ all the way to redemption.” Then again, it’s not like Cash doesn’t make the dark side sound captivating as hell.
Some of the tunes might be hard to listen to coming from someone who has seen the other side of the music world, but Cash’s mystique is there from the minute he starts picking his guitar. This is the same guy who shot a man in Reno to watch him die, and with that extra gravel in his voice, he practically sounds like he’s still on the run and doing whatever he can to get the upper hand on his demons.
But that underdog is still there even in the darkest moments. There’s almost a tinge of humour in some of the tunes, but if Cash looked like a scoundrel partway through this album, he comes out on the other side looking like the kind of person who has learned from their mistakes and is willing to atone for them in whatever way he knows how.
Because that’s what all great Johnny Cash music has always been about. His characters are malformed in many respects and have trouble dealing with their struggles, but they aren’t bad people because of it. They’re simply on the wrong side of the tracks and are bargaining with a higher power about whether or not they’ll be able to finally rest on that one day that they stop running.
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