REVIEW: Johnny Cash: The Legend Disc 4 of 4 - Family and Friends - Page 3

U2 and Cash should rarely, if ever, be mentioned in the same sentence. But they have occasion to be here. The lackluster "The Wanderer," with U2 shouldn't have been on this album.

Synths don't work with Mr. Cash. All through the song I kept on thinking - you know if they took the synthesizers away this might be a really good tune, like Cash's acoustic cover of "One" was good. And still, "The Wanderer" was probably the best thing on Zooropa.

This hiccup is quickly forgotten. With the final songs on the rest of the album, the heart-pain builds terribly.

"September When It Comes" is first, really a goodbye between father and daughter. But then "Tears in the Holston River" comes, about the deaths of "mother Maybelle Carter" and Sara Carter as well as 1976's "Far Side Banks Of Jordan" with June and Johnny talking about who would die first and what would happen next.

JUNE: If it proves to be his will that I am first to cross
and somehow I've a feeling it will be
When it comes your time to travel
likewise, don't feel lost
for I will be the first one that you'll see."

The entirety of "It Takes One To Know Me" (previously unreleased) completes the feeling that we have been accidentally eavesdropping, listening in on a very personal family conversation.

Listen closer to these songs and them all.

This here's Johnny.

(NOTE: I don't have the booklet that comes with the final set. I do have the words to the essay from Patrick Carr, co-author of Cash: The Autobiography which does the job of describing the early life of pain and how that ran through much of Cash's later, most introspective music.)

Article Author: Temple Stark

A graphic designing wordsmith, with a decade-plus career in community journalism behind me. Take a mean photo, have a new camera, and have been riding the wave of Twitter for more than a year.

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