The only other wide departure of music for Cash throughout the majority of his career is a Spanish style - Mariachi or just slow south of the border drawl songs such as Ring of Fire, Matador, and Rosanna's Going Wild. It's clear that in Cash's music, passion equals that hot Latin blood.
Perhaps that's too limiting. I hear a Cash voice that carries me along through some of his detours into musical hinterland. And to me that's a style all by itself. And I hear the Spanish, too, as something distinct.
This particular American Songbook does include, oddly, "Delia's Gone," describing in surprising detail the stabbing and shooting of Delia. It's a great song. I heard Guns and Roses' "Used To Love Her" first, but one is sung with more humor and the other is Johnny Cash:
If I hadn't shot poor Delia I'd have had her for a wife. Delia's gone one more round Delia's gone. First time I shot her, shot her in the side. Hard to watch her suffer but with the second shot she died.
Humor is all over the next song, "In the Jailhouse Now," however.
I had a friend named Bill Camel, used to rob, steal and gamble. And on the side he'd beg so he mopped up .. .. I met his old gal Sadie, she said, 'Have you seen Bill lately?' I said, I don't believe that he's about. She went down to the jail. She went down to take him his mail then she whispered, 'Sheriff, please don't let him out.'
Here with this collection of songs, though, America seems a melancholy place, with the likes of such ballads as "Down In the Valley*", "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry", "Goodbye Lil' Darlin", "Born to Lose", "Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairie", "Old Shep" and "Walking the Blues." I'm not too sure that reflects Cash's America either, but it does all set a mood of reflection.
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