Johnny Cash is 70 and his voice is getting a little shaky, but his spirit is strong and his musical reach is perhaps wider than any other major performer in popular music. Morning Edition has interviewed Cash the last two mornings, playing excerpts from his new CD, The Man Comes Around:

Johnny Cash's musical journey through the heart of America began 50 years ago. And though the Man in Black has turned gray — he celebrated his 70th birthday this year and has been in ill health — the country legend is still going strong musically.

A new CD, The Man Comes Around, finds Cash singing his own songs as well as those of other artists ranging from the Beatles to Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails). It's Cash's fourth record with hop/metal producer Rick Rubin, with whom Cash began to collaborate in 1994.

"If the songs are really great, if the writer is good, if the song is really there, if I like it, if I feel like I can do it and make it my song and enjoy it myself, then it's going to be mine," Cash tells Morning Edition host Bob Edwards in an interview at the cabin he uses for a recording studio on his property in Tennessee.

Cash recalls the first songs he did for Sam Phillips' Sun Records in the 1950s, backed by Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant — two mechanics he met in Memphis.

"We started going to each other's house at night and playing music just for the fun of it. And at one point, we were invited to play at a church... And it felt good, so we said, 'Let's do some more shows.'" They would play at movie theaters and other locales around Memphis and the mid-South, Cash says.

He also explains the band's distinctive rhythm that came to be known as his signature sound — a train moving down the line. It was the combination of Perkins laying the heel of his hand on the strings on his Fender Telecaster and Grant pounding his upright slap bass with "the snare drum side effect," Cash says.

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